House of Health visit this morning. On the treadmill like all the rest of the gym rats moving towards health nirvana. It was a bright and frigid drive down and back. Clear and cold with a beautiful sky.Lunch with a client. Lots to talk about from holiday card successes to a new, zine inspired approach to the Annual Report looking original and inexpensive. I think we are going back into a design cycle that things are measured against things looking "expensive" (ie lots of color, coated paper, multiple varnishes, high production which, to you who know, often costs the same or less if you are clever) but need to communicate affordable (and now green can figure into this piece too!). This was rampant in the mid to late eighties in particular--so I feel smug that I have this experience from "way back".

Lots of junkie television last night--with drawing. I need to find some reference of flying birds to begin to sample some images.I need to pull the gardening catalogs filled with pictures of flowers and grasses. I need to think parts and pieces as Chad suggested, two parts making three...thinking complexity, thinking diversity in the images and content. Fuse them in photoshop. I think this Sunday studyhall will be coloring and tinting. Seeing where it goes. Balancing 80/20 color, line, spirit and density. Client valentine went to PSPrint today.

Started a group on Facebook for Hartford.New experience. Easy to use. Very effective. Love the twitter/tweeter feature/app on Facebook and the fluidity that you can effect change in both social sites. Learning how each work is very interesting. The more I use them, the more valid this Web 2.0 for numbskulls becomes. Maybe no "direct" successes, but lots of building a brand, promoting an idea/viewpoint, or a message. I think after 6 mos, I might really be able to talk about this.

Just got a book on Mendez (a follower of Posada). More to read.

Cool and sunny here. K and A back from their respective track meets with no one coming in last--but late (around 9 p.m.) so they were dog tired, ate a ton and fell in a heap. Lots of amusing talk about the races, the strategies and thinking around these events and of course, when relevant, the bus trip home. A has a meet on Saturday but no K. So, I am thinking K and I will go up to Montezuma National Bird Sanctuary for a walk and photo party. I think this is perfect for us--and A has little to no interest in this sort of fruity stuff. Golf, girls and grub. That's the program for him.

The wine labels progress. I think we will have them wrapped up today. This whole color thing arose yesterday with my client--the fact that monitors and printers do not render the colors accurately (particularly when using PMS (Pantone Matching System) --Pantone colors which are custom mixed and not a blend of CMYK resulting in pure color. CMYK tends to go greyer (which in some cases is great) and is a lot less predictable than PMS colors). But the communication of color hovers as a trouble zone with this digital media--and I think this is why this European group we are working with insists of lab color albeit this is a zone of abstraction independent of monitors or any method of output. It is pure in the numbers--but you still get into this same some of what is right and correct. This problem is not just mine--and I would hope that the big Adobe Machine will get their arms around this as it is a continual bother for us. We have UPC codes, correct copy and have done the back and forth on color and crop. Looks pretty good.

House of Health was great again. The steam engine people were there, blowing steam and huffing and puffing--and all the rest of us were zombie like on our treadmills waiting for the kernel of corn to drop down when we are done. The inlet was beautiful. It is fun to be higher than the ducks when they fly and watch them drop down, down, down, legs down, down and land expectedly into the water. Fish were jumping. Magnolias are opening. Cherry trees in their odd, unnatural pinky purple moment and the glorious white blossomed trees. It is spring albeit we had frost on the grass.

More off the list. Have some touchy emails to write, so gotta go. This little post got my writing heart rate into the training zone, so I can be tactful with the touchiness, or at least I hope.

Later>>