JOYENGINE: cause sharing is cool

We just wrapped up MileHi’s brand package, including identity, album art for their EP “Hits And Misses,” and a mini site to highlight the new album. Jeff and JJ were great to work with and really embraced our less is more approach. We’re excited to see where they go from here.

Here’s a quick description on the group.

“MileHi is an Electronic music group formed by Jeff Cormack and JJ Thomas in May of 2009.  Their sound has been described as psychedelic club pop, electrorock, and melodic electropop.  The first ep titled “Hits and Misses” was written and recorded in a 2 month period at their home studio in Colorado and then mixed and mastered at Coupe Studios for release in August of 2009.”

You can download their EP over at www.milehisound.com

Tomorrow night Joshua Hirsch, Big Spaceship’s Minister of Technology, will be speaking at the Denver Art Museum as part of AIGA Colorado speaker series.

The Denver Egotist recently interviewed Mr. Hirsch, jog over to their site for a sneak peek into Joshua’s brain patterns. I’m trying to make it out to hear the lecture, hoping to break bread or get a group hug going pre-show?!

Joshua Hirsch speaks tomorrow night : Wednesday, August 5, 2009, 6:00pm – 8:30pm : Denver Art Museum : Frederic C. Hamiliton Building, Sharpe Auditorium (more…)

Our ultra-crafty homies over at Denver’s Legwork Studio just wrapped up a hot new site for old school skate brand of infamous urethane shredding lore – Vision Street Wear.  The site boasts some super rad features including some real fresh video integration.  I gotta say, I particularly like the inclusion of the “Vision Crew.”  The Vision Crew is “made up of some of the newest, freshest, most creative thinkers and creators out there,” and includes another good friend and fellow Colorado artist/designer, Christopher Cox of Changethethought. Cruise the site, it’s inspirational and really well done.

I really hate to see this sort of thing, and I take no pleasure in singling anyone out. But prominent artists I admire very much seem to be getting sloppy and calling their hard work into question lately. Let this be a lesson to young artists that “homage” or “borrowing” (or whatever you call it once you’re caught) can and will be found out. It’s a small world after all.

Having worked in the t-shirt industry I can tell you that stealing is the norm there. Property is lifted and slapped on a new tee with a single click of the mouse. Ideas are taken, slightly changed, and repackaged in seconds. This mentality suits the cutthroat, anonymous, quick-turn t-shirt industry, but seems far more indefensible in the art realm. Artists work so hard to build their names and careers, it’s really unfortunate when we’re forced to put their accomplishments under scrutiny, or when others use their property to prop up their own lack of skill.

I considered not posting about this, but opening up dialogue on the subject is better than saying nothing. Tracers should be afraid of damage to their perhaps undeserved reputations as well. There needs to be more awareness of this growing problem, as google and livetrace continue to turn any asshole with a computer into an “artist”. Where’s the line? How do we change this mentality and educate people? Can anything even be done? I’d like to know.

The Fabric Lab & crew are repping full force this Friday at the Untitled #23 “Old School” event taking place on the 2nd Level of the Denver Art Museum in Duncan Pavilion. Style Wars is a fashion battle pairing local fashion designers against each other, battling it out to create a high fashion ready-to-wear piece in 25 minutes! Each designer is supplied with 1 model, 1 assistant, 1 rack of materials stocked with fabric, recycled garments, raw materials, and everyday objects.

There will also be a DJ battle (The Postman vs. DJ Wigdan Giddy) & “Old School’ inspired art show featuring new works from: Robbie Maestas, Zshanna Kristoff, Deadly Daisy, Chuckie Martinez, Adam Sikorski, Josh Wills, Markham Maes, Snowblinded, Andrew Hoffman, Emerson Collective, Mike Graves , Chris Nguyen & more!

PEEP THE GRANDE FLYER & OTHER JUICY DEETS RIGHT HERE!!!
Dust off them shell toes or lace up your Pumas, back spins and fingers waves are a must!

The Fabric Lab presents “Style Wars” at The Denver Art Museum Untitled #23 “Old School” : Friday, July 31 : 6–10 pm : 100 W 14th Avenue Pkwy. Denver, CO

Here is a little something I put together today while doing a type experiment for an upcoming SuperOrdinary project. The font isn’t entirely complete but I wanted to share the character set and see what you guys thought. I’ll be adding numerals and standard punctuation. For now, I have this much broken down into a solid fill, a two color and a halftone shaded version, all of which, will surely be available for download once the new Lifter Baron site goes live. Stay tuned for more info on this yet to be titled typeface as well as a date for its availability.

Found this pretty cool site called Vintage Velos…always a fan of the classico.

Just received my copy of Business Cards 3: Designs on Saying Hello by Michael Dorrian and Liz Farrelly. Check out the old school hotness of my graduating id system in all it’s glory!! You can buy the book here and check out previous versions here and here.

reuse reclaim recycle

this is tres birds workshop hierarchical approach to Architecture / Building

3330 Larimer was an unoccupied concrete industrial storage building when we started our manipulation of it this month. Primarily, we are opening up the structure to the Sun. We started by demolishing a 50ft x 12ft opening on the Larimer St. façade to gather solar heat in the winter and provide day lighting all year. Luckily for the future occupant there are views of the Rocky Mountains through this new opening. Next, we punctured the roof with ten 2ft diameter holes to allow day lighting on both floor levels. Why all the concrete cutting, roof puncturing, and effort for day light? We are doing it for the health of the humans that will work there. 93% of Americans daily life is indoors. Sunlight is different from artificial light. It possesses the full spectrum of colors within its rays which provides us with health.

Over the next month we will be insulating the building, installing high efficiency electric powered cooling and lighting, and making the interior bright white. This once dark / energy gluten will become light and nimble. Building operations in America account for 75% of our countries electricity use. That bothers me as a participant in making buildings. We will be making our own electricity on site to run the cooling, plug loads (computers/ tools/ task lighting) , and artificial lighting for the night owls. A rooftop 20Kwh solar photovoltaic system will run this 12000 sq ft building on Larimer St.

I think this project is a good example of how we Americans should be developing this country into the future. We need to take existing buildings that are empty and not working and insert day light, heating / cooling efficiency, and energy production on site.

Revitalize what we have.

I would like to end our sprawl into agricultural lands now and minimize our use of natural resources.

reuse

cypher13.com version 6.0 is complete thanks to a massive collaborative effort with our development partner, Quickleft.  Our new site is built atop the nevercloud™ platform (a scalable, modular, hosted, and high performance CMS) another Quickleft x cypher13 collaboration coming fast on the heels of tweeeeet.com.  While we’ll be continuing to load projects into the portfolio section of our site for another week or two, we feel we’ve hit a point where enough work has been integrated and enough bugs sorted, to go live.  There’s a few features still to come, but it’s time to get back to our clients, so… we’ll see what happens from here.  We’d love some feedback!!!

cypher13 has teamed up with Quick Left to develop a new modular hosted content management system, nevercloud™. The first major launch will be the new cypher13 site, which is being built entirely on the nevercloud™. Currently the David B. Smith Gallery site is running on a very early rendition and has been performing flawlessly.

The nevercloud™ will be released to the public, mainly to serve as a portfolio builder. But as mentioned, the system is modular, meaning we’ll be dropping new functionality in the form of modules that you’ll be able to access and plug seamlessly into your site. The public private beta is still a little way out, but you can stay abreast via the nevercloud™ site or by following @nevercloud on twitter.