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Beer Menu’s I make monthly for Dave’s on St Clair. I love having the freedom to go in any direction with these. I always try to match the styles of the season or find a theme that suits the month. 

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This is a cocktail menu I made for my local bar, Dave’s on St Clair. When brainstorming how to sell more spirits and cocktails, we opted out of writing a new cocktail list with our own recipes. Instead, we promoted existing classics in a retro style. 

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Rising day Moon lit by setting winter Sun.

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BNJMN is a robot designed to find a canvas and paint an image. Although the process may seem more mathematical than emotional, can it still be considered art?

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From Eight Arms Cellars.

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Illustration for The ABC of Cocktails by Ruth Mccrea

Ruth creates cheerful imagery with the use of soft curved lines, simple colour schemes, and contrast. 

See more of Ruth Mccreas illustrations from The ABC of Cocktails and other classic and other vintage book covers at My Vintage Book Collection. 

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Telling a Story Without Words (What's on Netflix)

There’s so many ways to tell a story. As long as the story is great, it doesn’t really matter how it’s conveyed. What matters is that it is communicated clearly. However, originality and creativity is memorable. Therefore, I believe telling a story in a…

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Habitat 67, by Moshe Safdie 

Built as a Pavilion for the 1967 Expo in Montreal, Habitat was designed to integrate the benefits of suburban space with urban economics and density. And, as you can see in the picture, it's very cool. 

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House in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The house number to the right of the door is printed in white on green and includes the street name. Every house has the same uniform sign in a similar place which simplifies navigating the city. 

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Glasses shop, Ljubljana, Slovenia

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Positive graffiti Lisbon, Portugal

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Coca Cola sign that fits into the historic city of Grenada, Spain.

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This awesome robot welcomed us to the Museum of Science and Technology in Barcelona. 

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Sick design

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Lessons in Search Engine Optimization from Visiting a Bazaar

Having just traveled through India I spent some time in a few bazaars. They are noisey, chaotic, and crowded. The marketers, or hawkers, are aggressive in their approach, hounding you to, 'take a look,' and claiming 'the best price!' even when you aren't interested in what they're selling. They just about strap shoes on your feet when you're really looking for a t-shirt. This is called a push strategy - Mad Men, industrial revolution era marketing. They have a product and they push and promote it AT the customer. You might also call it hustling. 

Modern customers, online customers in particular, don't get hustled. They have an idea of what they want and they search for it. This is why Search Engine Optimization is key. However, there are SEO "experts" who take deceptive approaches in optimizing a sites rank. Exaggerating key words and key phrases, comment spamming, and other dishonest methods might increase the sites rank but the customers who land there won't be interested in the messy content. This is just like sitting outside your store shouting phrases you think your customers want to hear in an attempt to draw them inside. 

Search Engine Optimization isn't about hustling and trickery. It's about honesty, relevance, and quality content. 

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Workflow

I'd like to think that people who read this blog are marketeers, design folks, or just plain old wacky creative types. If you are any of those you may find value in what I have recently discovered. I've been living in an apartment in a small town two hours from Barcelona. The apartment doesn't have wi-fi or any Internet access, so I have to visit the local cafe to connect to the world wide interweb. However, I still work from the apartment. I read and do research, write posts, and work on code and design. By splitting up my online and offline time, I have developed a much more productive work flow.

Before going to the cafe I make a list of things I need to do while connected to the internet which includes things like downloading articles I can read later, uploading finished posts, or finding specific things I'll need to work with (like a desktop server to work on WordPress offline). 

Because I am disconnected from the Internet most of the time I maximize the time I have on it. Knowing my time is limited, I go through my list of things to do without milling about on Facebook or Wired or Mashable. There is value in being connected and having access to information but when it's time to get down to business and build engaging websites or marketing plans it might be wise to disengage. 

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Fast Company published this article on the Healthcare Experience Design Conference. They outlined 5 key themes of the conference:

Get all stakeholders involved 

Design for failure 

Ride the motivation wave

Data + Design + Innovation = Better Healthcare

The patient of the future won't want today's care

Although this is all about healthcare it is an inspiring set of concepts to be applied to other fields.