This is Breaking In, a blog by crowbar studios about design, business development, creativity, productivity, art, culture, and much more. Established 2008 in California.
I was in Hollywood a few weeks ago. It’s insane, but I love it. Cruising the strip at night I noticed the old architecture, post-art-deco remnants of the fun, decadent, mid-century showbiz scene. So here’s our little collection of other peoples memories. Perhaps we’ll follow in the footsteps of Saul Bass.
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We’ve been gearing up for the ASR trade show in September, soakin’ up all sorts of surfy culture and playing surf/skate/snow videos in the background while we work. We realized that we hadn’t yet seen Jeremy Gosch’s release from last summer, Bustin’ down the door. So Enjoy fer’ yer’ Tuesday:
Chronicling the rise of professional surfing in the early 70s. The film follows a group of young surfers from Australia and South Africa, including Shaun Tomson, Wayne ‘Rabbit’ Bartholomew, Ian Cairns, Mark Richards, Michael Tomson and Peter Townend, as they relocate to Hawaii encountering obstacles, turf wars and massive wipeouts along the way. Clashes with the locals, some of whom find the newcomers’ bravado to be insulting to Hawaiian culture, eventually culminate in death threats against the subjects of the film.
We couldn’t be there but we felt that this needed to be covered by Breaking In anyways. We’ve been meaning to get out to Paris to absorb some of the shows and do some industry networking. Next time gadget. Mondays are good for videos. Enjoy a little Paris decadence as you ease into your workweek.
We’ve compiled our favorite books; essential for design-oriented, creative business and superhuman success. In our opinion, these are the most influential and powerful books we know, some of which inspired us to start Crowbar Studios in the first place, and others which have guided our visual process over the years. Yes, they are all over the lot, but we’ll explain why. Here they are, not in any particular order, collect them all and absorb them deep into your brain:
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To our friends, associates, and distinguished guests:
The past six months have been good to us, very good. We have experienced successes that we never imagined possible, and we’re stoked. We took risks, and things paid off.
Right around holidays the economy was getting bad, CNN and Fox News ran around like chickens with their heads cut off warning of “The worst economic crisis since the great depression”. The media frenzy spread to general conversation of daily life, it got to the point where you couldn’t talk to any business contact without hearing some mention of, “the way the economy is right now, blah, blah, blah”. The sky was falling, the sky was falling, and for those who didn’t know any better, it did fall, on your head, and you got screwed, slaughtered.
If you got screwed in real estate, I’m sorry, I really am. Lots of people ended up getting screwed in real estate. In a MAJOR nutshell, people got greedy, took out loans they shouldn’t have and went into unwise and uneducated debts. Value is subjective in the world of real estate and the values went down. What can we learn from this? Debt is stupid. If something seems too good to be true then it is, tattoo that on your forehead so you see it every time you look in the mirror.
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GreenPress came to us needing a visual foundation. Rarely do we get to work on such environmentally conscious startups, so we seized the opportunity. Greenpress.com is a green blogging platform and a network of bloggers focused on green issues. Within months of their formal launch they had an immediate positive response from the public, and their user base quickly went from a small community to a vast network of people concerned about the earth. With rising numbers they contacted Crowbar Studios wanting a refined corporate identity including a logo, home page design, and visual brand development.
Digg It
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Hidden treasures found in libraries. This one is very old, I scanned these images so long ago I’m not even sure what the book was. The theme was something to the effect of ”A tribute to bourbon st.” I still haven’t been back to New Orleans since Katrina, but I feel I need to get down there and salvage some culture, and eat a po’boy.
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The early 90s were an exciting time. I can’t put my finger on exactly what the energy was, but it was just exciting for some reason. My perception of the 90s has a lot to do with things like MTV, Wayne’s World, and Fox television. In my opinion, Fox TV played a huge role in the cultural definition of the early 90s. Everything felt like late summer afternoon, that excitement you feel when dusk is approaching, an exciting day turning into an exciting night. Everything was southern California for some reason; Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, and Baywatch. The fun glam bands from the late 80s had turned into more dangerous sounding and dangerous looking hard rock bands like Guns n’ Roses and Metallica, or Pacific northwest grungy like Nirvana or Peal Jam. I wasn’t a graphic designer yet back then, I was a painter and a skater, so I didn’t notice things like fonts and typographic art direction.
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Luxor Price was an Illustrator. I once found a very old book he did hidden away at a library. It was an illustrated world atlas, it was eerily creepy, and I loved it. It’s been hard to find any information about Luxor Price’s life or any more of his work, so if anyone has anything to share, I’d love to see or hear it. I thought people should see this stuff, or maybe put it on t-shirts.
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We recently did did a tweet enquiring about your favorite typefaces. At crowbar studios, we are just a little bit too obsessed with type. If you missed the type tweet day, just add your favorites to the bottom in comment form. We’d like to thank all our good friends who sent back speedy @ replies, here they are:
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