• As a follow-up to my review of Vidfest, I met up with Ben Burden Smith, the producer of Tony Hawk and the Boom Boom Sabotage after its world premiere screening and got his take on what is was like working with the Hawk, the local pros, and the challenges of capturing all of the action for 3D. The interview has been posted on the Industrial Brand Blog.
• Also, it seems that the Industrial Brand Blog has won another award. Well, two in fact from Portfolios.com. We received a Bronze …

Douglas Coupland doesn’t want to end the Book Club meeting on a positive note. They always end upbeat he explains. For once, he wants things to end darkly. “Doomed. We are all doomed.” He throws this out there as his final words. “Quit your job. There is no hope.”
It is this topic of life’s darker edges that seemed to continue to be addressed over the course of the two hour discussion tonight that was being recorded for an upcoming episode of North By Northwest, hosted by Sheryl MacKay and Georgia …

“For many, including myself, the voice at the start of “The Trees” belongs to Kafka’s letters themselves, speaking directly to the reader: “we are like tree trunks in the snow.” Picture a field after a recent snowfall.”
A beautiful article by Rob Giampietro on the relationship of Zen Buddhism, Franz Kafka and typography over at the newly redesigned Design Observer.

I’ve made a few changes to the site over the past week, flipping the layout of the homepage so that the nav now sits to the right; combining the primary and secondary navigation into one column in the writing section; and giving the portfolio pages a vertical structuring that is more consistent to the other pages (not to mention solving a really annoying menu structure).
I’m still in the process of debugging but if you notice anything peculiar please send it my way. Otherwise, positive feedback is always welcome. …

While down on Granville Island at Vidfest last week, we stumbled upon The Fourth Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition (BIMPE) on display at the Federation Gallery. The exhibit is exactly what its title suggests: an eclectic range of small scale etchings, woodprints, linocuts, mezzotints, metal engravings, and digital prints. Very inspiring. Not only that, the prices for the prints are equally miniature in comparison to other artwork in this city. If you are on the Island before June 25th, be sure to check it out.

For the next couple of days (June 15 – 16), Ben and I are covering Vidfest for the TAXI Design Network out of Singapore. Our review will be posted on their site later next week but in the meantime, for images and a few infrequent postings check us out at Industrial Brand Creative.

There was a true rock n roll buzz flowing through the bar of the Yale Hotel last night, as though one might expect Bono or Neil Young to step onto the small hallowed stage and play a solo set. Tickets to the event had been hard to come by. If you listened close enough, you could catch tales of backdoor dealings and namedropping to gain access. The only other way had been to write an online 200 word essay on why you deserved an invitation to this most heinous meeting …

The Field-Tested Books project is our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person’s experience with both. The writing you’ll find here is grounded in that idea. You won’t find any book reviews here. You’ll find reviews of experience.
My experience: Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha on a train between Madrid and Barcelona. Check it out here.

A documentary on the artistic subculture that emerged in the early 1990′s influenced by skateboading, grafitti, pop culture and the D.I.Y. aesthetic.