Took this picture last weekend at Carmel Mission Basilica Church located in central Carmel-by-the-Sea. An absolutely breathtaking place — a must if you haven’t visited it yet!

Hidden Springs Maple needed help with their product labels. They already had the artwork — done by an amazing Bay Area artist Matt Weems of Weems Illustration — and needed labels that complimented Matt’s art. The end result — fresh and unique maple bottles that make you wanna have a taste.

Kennicott Capital Management, LLC is an investment and wealth management firm located in San Francisco, California. We designed their capabilities brochure in a bold square format to compliment their logo (which we gave a nice little overhaul). Looking good!

The New York Times, Science published the Stonefish photograph we took in their article on nature’s most unpleasant-looking creatures. The article talks about how we, humans, see animals and what makes us decide whether an animal looks beautiful or ugly to our eye. Our red little monster below sure deserves a high rank in the ugly animal beauty contest!

Hidden Springs Maple is a family-owned and operated Vermont company that has been making syrup for over 50 years. They produce 100% pure, Vermont maple syrup of the highest quality. We designed the site with the focal point on their wonderful product. Take a look!

Very beautiful display, enjoyed it a lot. And even though the evening was a bit foggy, it didn’t ruin the show — if anything, it made it dreamy. We had to park on 6th and Virginia and walk to the Marina, but it was well worth it. There were a LOT of people walking on University to see the fireworks, walking together with all was a very neat experience.

Hiiibrand 2010 is an international logo design competition organized by New Graphic, one of the biggest and influential Chinese design publications. Competition is open to design professionals from all over the world and anyone is welcome to submit their best designs. Our work was nominated in April 2010 and we’ve been in the lead since due to all the amazing support we’ve received from our clients, family, and friends. Thank you all so much for submitting your votes; our success wouldn’t be possible without all your help. Please keep voting for us; just click on the little “thumb” icon in the right bottom corner under the logo. You can vote once every 24 hours and there is no need to register. See you on the finish line in October!

Here is our first contestant in the “idiotics” category — our all time favorite Looza. Since 1952, this Belgian fruit juice manufacturer called l’Etablissement du Comté de Looz has been producing great fruit juices and drinks known for their excellent flavor and high quality. In 1966 they introduced a tropical fruit juice line (from imported concentrates) and begun distributing outside the Belgian borders under the shorter name — Looza. Too bad, that to an english ear Looza sounds an awful close to “looser”. But don’t be so harsh on these folks: the products they make are really good despite their funny name.

P.S. If you think you found any similarities to you, your business, product or project, or anything else that seems relative, please don’t take it personally. We don’t mean any offense whatsoever. We all could use a good laugh every now and then. Bottom line is that we love our clients, no matter what!

Took this picture last Sunday. Mendocino National Forest, Northern California.

In the creative world of design, you see a lot of interesting things. And one day we realized we’ve seen too many funny, ridiculous, and sometimes plain crazy comments, stories, designs, you name it! We knew the time had come for us to share this brilliant collection of absurdities with the rest of you.

If you find any similarities please don’t take it personally. We don’t mean any offense whatsoever. We all could use a good laugh every now and then. Bottom line is that we love our clients, no matter what! And there is just too many hilarious things out there to keep it all to ourselves. Plus, this is a great outlet for us to blow off some steam — you certainly don’t want to hire designers who are grumpy!

So, here we are. Please welcome a new section in our blog we lovingly called: “Idiotics”.

Logo design for Hidden Springs Maple LLC, a company that produces 100% natural pure Vermont maple syrup. The challenge: come up with a logo that has all three words from the company’s name integrated in. The solution: folded leaf for “hidden”, stream (water or syrup) for “springs”, and sugar maple tree leaf for “maple”.

Flyer for Baskerville, a project management and consulting company from San Francisco, CA.

I just attended my first RoR meetup yesterday where Sarah Allen gave an awesome presentation on teaching programming languages via Test Driven Development. It’s a fundamental shift in how to approach learning a new language, and one I am adopting to learn Ruby. But even more importantly, it’s changed the way I will do development from now on.

Prior to deployment, the typical development process ends with testing. TDD does the opposite; it essentially puts testing up front making it more like a highly focused part of planning. You setup all of your tests first (ostensibly you’re doing this in a modular approach), ensure they all fail, then implement only the code needed to make each test pass, and no more. Doing it this way makes sure you have valid working tests but it’ll also keep your code lean. While more work upfront, TDD improves reliability and makes maintenance/updates far easier.

No, it’s not a new curse word… it’s a blackberry ssh client… and it’s way cool. I’ve been tooling around in our server all morning. Here’s a pic of me using my favorite editor, VIM, to modify one of the files on the server:

If you’ve got a bb, you gotta get this app. It’s from software developer Marc Paradise, and you can get it here. Kudos Marc! Great app!