Old Honda Civic, originally uploaded by noeljackson.

An old honda civic in beautiful condition, found in Ferndale Michigan.

Note: This is an article written a few months back.

I don’t drink… Often. Of course, socially, it’s, to me, a necessary evil. Every six months or so, I’ll have a drink. (Then again, I haven’t had a drink in over a year…) Usually, to remind myself how disgusting it is. That is just my personal opinion. Some love their ale or spirits.

But, stumbling from city to city, to country, to town, you meet lots of people. And conversations are spoken that startle you.

Recently a friend of a friend recited to me the details of his first encounter with heroin - he swore he never did it again. He said, “it’s not that it’s bad, but that it’s so good… just utterly indescribable. I mean, just man, it’s not even possible to put into words.”

Another friend of mine swears by Ambien, and takes it every night before bed.

And, I see a pattern in the acquisition and use of drugs as something to cure what we call, “The Human Condition.” Anxiety, panic-attacks, fear. Some of us call it life.

The more I grow up, the more I notice that in some facet or another, everyone is trying to tame their human condition. Chocolate, sweets, hugs, sex, heroin, pot, electronics, vitamins, healthy food, running. We all, subconsciously, or not, are in a perpetual state of altering our state of consciousness.

I take my daily dose of vitamins, heart medication, and 150 oz. of water for the day, to alleviate my symptoms of dysautonomia. I feel better doing it.

This is all related to the recent death of a 102 year old scientist and experienced psychedelic user, Dr. Albert Hoffman: the inventor of LSD. He used it continuously until his death, at the ripe old age of 102.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Garrard 401 + Lignolab Plinth + SME 3012 + Denon 301R combo was 1 year in the making. It sounds so beautiful, you’d be amazed. Yes, it’s a record player. Call me antiquated.

Golden Ray photos of amazing mass migration - Telegraph [via Naz Hamid]

moxy, n. When someone has guts or balls, they have moxy.

With my wedding just a week and three days away, I decided to show off the hard work we put into our letterpressed wedding invitations. You can check out the writeup and pictures over here at eight6.

Swashes, italics, letterpressed invitations, wax seals. This project required a balance of modern and “classic” typographic style. We think the results are quite pleasing.

Since this was our (my and my fiancée’s) wedding, I decided to take care of all the design and printing myself. This was much easier said than done. When you’re your own client, things tend to take twice as long as you had hoped. But, we stayed under budget and came out with a wedding invitation we’ll remember forever.

The invitations were printed by Lunar Caustic Press on Natural White Strathmore 130lb cover bristol in black ink.

We used Burgues Script and Adobe Caslon Pro and opted to go with just an outer envelope, invitation, and reply postcard to save on paper. We tried to go for recycled paper, but found it pricey and hard to find!

After all was said and done, we finished it all off with a wax seal of the letter “J,” for Jackson.

With special thanks to Joe Clark for the design guidance on this project.

Some nice Helvetica usage. A poster for a movie coming out entitled “Blindness.”

“Charming Large Restored Carriage House” as found on craigslist

EMEFEF

Chlöe Sevigny, fashion icon (how do I become one of those again?), is in a newish UNI QLO campaign, that I just totally dig. It’s got a really fantastic satiric storyline going on. Deeply playful.

And, if you are into erotic art/artistic nudes, Inez & Vinoodh shot a really beautiful editorial of her a few years back (NSFW). I think she’s the perfect example of a “normal” girl being beautiful and soulful.

It’s good to see I’m not the only one feeling that most CSS frameworks are missing the point. SenCSS really is a nice starting point for getting a site’s CSS going - especially for those starting out with CSS, SenCSS would be a dream.

SenCSS was developed mostly for myself. I noticed that the stuff common to most of my designs and projects wasn’t the layout, and thus all layout CSS frameworks had very little use for me (I’d be writing exceptions all day, no thanks!). However, There was a lot to gain from a smarter CSS Reset, vertical rhythm and a set of often used styles. Basically I wanted something that i could drop it, start working on my layout and fine tune when the layout was finished.

Introducing SenCSS | KilianValkhof.com

McCain said what? [via gawker]

Another image editor for OS X is in town…

Designed from the ground up specifically for Mac users, Iris provides a powerful, intuitive, and easy-to-use solution for all your photo editing needs.

[via Todd Dominey]

2008 Design Trends from WebDesignerWall [via Matt]

Chris Prillio enthusiastically links us to “Secrets” a nice prefpane to get at hidden app settings.

• What does your garbage can of failed motivations look like?
• I hope Ze Frank writes a book some day.
• John Dyer growing every type of beard.

• [via Secret Experiment]

• 
• Design Is In The Details

• 
  Advanced Beauty from mate on Vimeo.

  I found this somewhere and can not remember where. I’m sorry.

• Timoni is a super talented designer. Watch out.
• I can not wait till Spore comes out, until then, checkout the Creature Creator!
• The Ampersand Masters Thesis
• The live Firefox 3 download counter.

[via Snowball's blog]

Which eventually led to you coming up with a technique that’s pretty much paved the way for all the D.J.’s and turntablists to come. What did you feel like the first time you were able to make it work? 
When I first did it, I called up Disco B and EZ Mike, and I was like, “Listen, I got something, I got something.” And when they came down, they were like “What the fuck is this?” And I was like, “Watch what I’m doing, ya’ll, please watch what I’m doing.” But they just could not grasp it. I went on to doing it in different parks. I figured if I was playing the hardest, best part of these different genres of music I would have people on the ceiling, but people were just like “What the fuck are you doing?” I went home and I cried, cried, cried, cried. Nobody got it! I tried to go to different clubs, get on for five or ten minutes, and I heard excuses like “My boss will fire me, I hear you ruin records, I can’t let you touch my stuff.” It was just ridicule after ridicule after ridicule. I was a geek for a long time. [Laughs.]

[via TMN]

TOMS makes life more comfortable through its ultra lightweight design and the company’s commitment to match every pair purchased with a donated pair to a child in need. There are no complicated formulas, it’s simple…you buy a pair of TOMS and the company gives a pair to a child on your behalf.

How excellent! Buy a cool pair of shoes and help put a pair on someone else’s feet. They’re a great deal too!

I’m ordering two pairs, cause I just can’t decide between all the rad patterns.

[via Dean (who does not blog)]