Art for Cats auction

My friend Kathy Osborn convinced her celebrity illustrator and cartoonist friends to donate art for the homeless cats of New York City. Well, it ended and raked in about $6,500. Meeeow.

Nice David Garland song

Diorama from David Garland on Vimeo.

Just who is David Garland?

Fun with the Public Domain

Like chocolate and untainted peanut butter, those goofballs over at Chronicle Books have put two great tastes into one delicious treat. Or trick. They must have been eating a lot of brains lately because they’re coming out with a new Jane Austen novel that can also penetrate the never-dead zombie market. And those who would like to see more of either can now get more of both. Even Ms. Austen’s reanimated corpse can’t sue since her work is in the public domain. Argh!

Go see Waltz with Bashir

When I saw a trailer for this, I assumed that it was just a documentary that borrowed the visual style of Richard Linklater-directed movies like Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, both which I liked a lot. I’m happy to report that I was wrong. Writer/director/producer Ari Folman brought together of team of very talented people to make this unique, poetic treatise on the futility of war as recounted by ordinary soldiers. Even though the movie was filmed traditionally first, no rotoscoping was used—just the drawings of some fantastic artists, including the fabulous Hanuka boys and lead artist David Polonsky, who masterfully handled art director duties. 

I knew little of the Sabra and Shatila massacre until now. This had an impact on my heart, brain, and appreciation for the most creative documentarians this side of Errol Morris.

It’s a ROFLThing. You wouldn’t understand.

Registration is open for January 24th and I can’t go! I’ll be South for the Winter but you shouldn’t miss the people behind You Suck at Photoshop, Improv Everywhere, Internet Famous, Revision3, Found magazine, and much more. Check it out: ROFLThing NYC Schedule

Big Spaceship at the Apple Soho store

(cropped photos from aigany.org)

Big Spaceship CEO Mike Lebowitz and Minister of Technology Josh Hirsh did a great job discussing their business process and creative approach. It was refreshing that they strive for innovation and qualitative success in an industry so often touting its strengths of analytics and measurable ROI. Big Spaceship holds more FWAs than any other firm and was the first American agency inducted into the FWA’s Hall of Fame. 

More recently, Firstborn and BigSpaceship kept themselves busy by playing foosball and the like, and the losing team had to surrender their site for a day. Read about it over at AdAge.

CS4 at InDesign Users Group Meeting

I attended an Adobe InDesign Users Group meeting at FIT (They'll be switching over to SVA’s new theater space for the next meeting in February and they’ll be called the Adobe Creative Suite Users Group) and saw a fantastic demonstration of CS4’s new and improved capabilities. InDesign files exported to interactive Flash files, Photoshop layouts exported to Fireworks and then to CSS web pages, and a much more simple yet robust interface for Flash are some of the highlights. Though you missed it, there are hundreds of free online tutorials covering the same ground on Adobe TV. I highly recommend the upgrade. Oh, and text in Flash is now searchable with Google and Yahoo.

The Two Kinds of Decay book cover

Henry Sene Yee at Picador asked me to do the paperback version of this memoir by a woman who had a rare nerve disease, which made it impossible for her to move her limbs. The title refers to these two kinds of decay; “Mine and everyone else’s.”

Alternate versions