the mehallo blog. beta.

Lyon’s Coffee Shop, San Bruno, CA 1962. Found via Googie Art.

I grew up around Googie Architecture. It was just there. Space age-looking buildings, funky decor and rocks in the walls. Lots of rocks. Flintstones-like, but where the Jetson’s were running the quarry.

The 24 hour Lyon’s in San Bruno (see above) was the high school hangout. Long weird nights. In college, those weird nights spread to the other Lyon’s in San Mateo, San Carlos and Daly City. Denny’s was the alternative.

The style’s roots can be traced back to Frank Lloyd Wright and Tallesin West. Architect John Lautner designed the first Googie structure in 1949 and it was panned by critics. The firm of Armet and Davis designed most of the rest. [Read more →]

Tags: cool finds, design, design history, fonts, thoughts, typography // 3 comments  . . .   

Snapped these while in Reno a few weeks back. Love 1950s vernacular typography, I’ve built an entire font family around this.

Drove the guy at the motel front desk crazy with my flash.

A really nice drug dealer tried to sell me his wares.

I’m not being sarcastic, he was really, really nice.

Took me a long moment before I realized what he was up to.

Tags: cool finds, design, design history, fonts, photography, thoughts, typography // 4 comments  . . .   

 
It’s the type that’s sexy.

If it were one of my fonts, that’d made it even sexier.

Make The Girl Dance is Campana & Perrin, aka Greg & Pierre. This is their MySpace page.

Found via Ashley Simko’s blog

Tags: cool finds, fonts, music, typography // Comments Off on Baby, baby, baby

‘Hauschka’s Morgenrot from Jeff Desom on Vimeo’

I love this short film. Details here.

Tags: cool finds, music, photography // 1 comment  . . .   

‘The rapid development of media technology and the more gradual pace of human evolution is the notion of context instability.’ –Brian Southwell

Or in short, we’re not built to handle everything that is thrown at us today. Even sentences like that one.

As someone who often works with complexity – and when needed, simplicity – I value the importance of putting both in their respective places. Here’s a link to a helpful article written by Leo Babauta.

The photo is of a cookie fortune my wife gave me. It’s been posted at the top of my computer monitor since we’d first met.

Tags: thoughts // 1 comment  . . .   

A few images from ttv : testify! and houndstooth heels, two of many contrasted photo sets posted on juxtapositioning.

Found via Twitter.com/morganirene

Tags: art, cool finds, photography // Comments Off on Dichotomy

New logo system and identity for the city of Gent in Belgium. What do you think? Article, critique and discussion at Brand New.

Tags: cool finds, design // Comments Off on New identity for Gent

My client, Normandie, is currently touring the known United States.

The band is a side project thunk up by 3 members of theSTART; as a result, the shows become a twofer (two bands in one).

In tow they have a bunch of my tour posters (seen above) as well as some special handmade START cds doodled by the band itself (see below).

Follow their advance across the continent by jumping over to vocalist Aimee Echo’s Twitter page. As of this writing, they seem to be somewhere in the original 13 colonies  . . .  And may have been replaced by pirates.

Tour dates for both bands can be found on their MySpace pages here and here.

Tags: cool finds, illustration, mehallo merchandise, music // Comments Off on Normandie, theStart on tour

If you’ve been following Eddie Izzard on Twitter, you’ll find he’s been really having fun with an iPhone, Google Maps and Twitpics.

And today, it looks like he’s in Cardiff.

Last week, amongst the pigs.

Ohhh, them ‘Crazy names of England’

Connectivity baby!

Tags: cool finds, thoughts // 2 comments  . . .   

‘Cities have distinct soundtracks and we wanted a nice way of showing that.’

Visit CitySounds.fm and click one one of the major cities to hear its soundtrack.

Created by David Kjelkerud and Henrik Berggren, music tracks arrive via SoundCloud. City images are grabbed via a search for city name tags on Flickr.

Found via Twitter.com/emilychang

Tags: cool finds, music // 3 comments  . . .   

Before

After

I love good information graphics. And bad information graphics make my eyes bleed.

Check out this redesign by Robert Palmer (and strong letter to Rep. John Boehner) of a recent visual attack on the Democratic Health Plan.

This is an excellent example as to why graphic designers (well trained graphic designers) can do a lot more than just push buttons on a computer. Or make a logo look nice. Good graphic design is about good communication – and can be world changing.

(That’s my soapbox for the day. Thank you for reading.)

Found via Twitter.com/angelaglenn

Tags: cool finds, design, education, illustration, thoughts // 7 comments  . . .