Disneyland Tiki Room Entrance 1963

Dis­ney­land Tiki Room Entrance 1963, orig­i­nally uploaded by Miehana.

While trolling on flickr I found this glo­ri­ous pic­ture of one of my favorite attrac­tions at Dis­ney­land, the Tiki Room. The pic­ture is orig­i­nally taken when it opened in 1963 and I find it very inter­est­ing to see the attrac­tions facade with out the lush veg­e­ta­tion that was grown by the amaz­ing Dis­ney land­scap­ing staff over the last 47 years.

ABC URL Game

I saw this great post on Brian Hoff’s site and I thought I’d play along. Here’s my ABC URL game. It’s a fun game and as Brian says,

The rules are sim­ple: Launch your favorite, most fre­quently used browser for surf­ing the web. Start by typ­ing, one let­ter at a time, the entire alpha­bet into the search bar to see what pops up first. Record the results.

a: Ama­zon

b: Blue­host — A great host­ing ser­vice, they host my site.

c: Comp­fight — For inspi­ra­tion and find­ing fun images.

d: Deke.com — I thought I’d skip my own site and pick #2, Dig­i­tal Imag­ing guru and mar­tini afi­cionado, Deke Mcclelland’s site, Any­one inter­ested in Pho­to­Shop should watch this excel­lent primer on the essen­tial approach to mask­ing. Not only is it infor­ma­tive, it’s hilarious.

e: Espn — Just to read the always enter­tain­ing Bill Sim­mons.

f: Face­book — No I don’t play Mob Wars, and no I won’t join your mob.

g: Google Reader — An unhealthy obses­sion, and my feed reader of choice.

h: How Mag­a­zine

i: Inter­net Movie Data Base — Mostly to set­tle argu­ments about who played Donatello in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles (Leif Tilden by the way)

j: Just Cre­ative Design

k: Kuler- You can see some of the palettes I cre­ated here

l: Lib­riVox - A great site of free pub­lic domain audio books read by ded­i­cated vol­un­teers. Cur­rently I’m lis­ten­ing to Mark Twain’s The Mys­te­ri­ous Stranger, I totally rec­om­mend the book.

m: morgue­File

n: Print Ser­vices North­west — An excel­lent Seat­tle based printer that I use a lot. Sue Lewis, the owner is great.

o: Good God: Faith for the Rest of US — A client’s blog I helped set up.

p: PhotoXpress.com — Great free stock images, an affil­i­ate site of  fotolia.com

q: Star Wars vs Saul Bass - I must not go to many “q” sites! A pretty funny Star Wars open­ing done in the style of Saul Bass.

r: Retro Cock­tail Hour on Kansas Pub­lic Radio — Swing­ing Lounge & Tiki Tunes.

s: Stock Exchange

t: This Amer­i­can Life — Rec­om­mended listening.

u: Uprinting.com — A great online printer.

v: Ver­ti­cal Response — An excel­lent e-newsletter man­ag­ing & mail­ing system.

w: Cracked.com- Some very funny stuff here.

x: Paul Malon’s Flickr Pho­to­stream — Won­der­ful col­lec­tion of mid-century Amer­i­can adver­tis­ing ephemera.

y: Youtube.com

z: Zazzle.com

Design Something Everyday: Retro Stephenie

Day 7 and still design­ing, though 2 days behind sched­ule in post­ing. Be that as it may, in honor of tonight’s pre­miere of Sur­vivor Heroes vs Vil­lains my design of the day is a lit­tle WPA inspired retro-esque poster in honor of one of my favorite play­ers, Stephe­nie LaGrossa. Star of two pre­vi­ous incar­na­tions of the show.

She was a con­tes­tant dur­ing sea­sons set in Guatemala and Palau. In Palau she was the last sur­viv­ing mem­ber of her ini­tal “tribe,” a first for Sur­vivor. On Sur­vivor: Guatemala she placed sec­ond and was robbed of vic­tory by a petty and annoy­ing jury. Hope­fully, as in my dig­i­tal doo­dle, Pal­las Athena will be her aegis and like she did for clever Odysseus, guide her to vic­tory. Sur­vivors ready…

Sur­vivors ready?

Tools: Adobe Illustrator

Links: Pal­las Athena Clip Art via Arthur’s Cli­part

Design Something Everyday: Day 6: Who Dat… with Zombies

Another non-timely post, I’ll have to get bet­ter at that. This one inspired some­what by two loves of mine, Amer­i­can Foot­ball and Zom­bies, though maybe not in that par­tic­u­lar order. I drew a sketch of a Zom­bie and played a bit in Illus­tra­tor and Pho­to­Shop to cre­ate the effect of an unstop­pable Zom­bie horde. Which reminded me of the Super Bowl, and more so of the entire “Who Dat?” mar­ket­ing and fan chants by the New Orleans Saints. Whose fan’s chant “Who dat, say they gonna beat them Saints?” Chang­ing it to the ter­ri­fy­ing world of masses of zom­bies steal­ing the chant for their own rav­en­ous ends amuses me. That being said it was a great Super Bowl if only it had zom­bies, it might have been truly epic…

Tools: Pen­cil, paper, ink and Scan­ner. Adobe Illus­tra­tor and PhotoShop.

Links:

• New Orleans Saints
• Super Bowl
• Who Dat?
• Zom­bies
• World War Z: An Oral His­tory of the Zom­bie War by Max Brooks, The best Zom­bie Book EVER!

Design Something Everyday: Day 5: Bali Hai

I’ve been work­ing on stuff every­day, but I haven’t been post­ing daily, so I’ve got a bunch of stuff to put up.

The first of these is a dig­i­tal doo­dle of a song from the won­der­ful 1949 Rogers and Ham­mer­stein play South Pacific, Bali Hai. I was inspired by the pro­duc­tion I saw last week­end at Seattle’s Fifth Avenue The­atre. Of course, I was famil­iar with the song and the play mostly through the 1958 film ver­sion, but see­ing it live was a thrill. Bali Hai is a myth­i­cal and mys­ti­cal island that rep­re­sents an unat­tain­able par­adise. That image of a hazy dou­ble vol­cano island has formed a core of the Tiki and Poly­ne­sian Pop mythos.

The song is a clas­sic in Amer­i­can Musi­cal the­ater, and for me the best part is very influ­en­tial in the world of Tiki and P0lynesian Pop Cul­ture. Below you can see the won­der­ful scene and lis­ten to the song Bali Hai from the 1958 film, do you hear it? It calls to you..

Tools: Adobe Illustrator

Links:

• Bali Hai: Myth­i­cal and mys­ti­cal island, if you lis­ten it will call to you…
• 5th Avenue Theatre
• Rogers & Hammerstein
• South Pacific (1958 film)
• Tales of the South Pacific, the 1946 Pulitzer Prize win­ning  book by James Mich­ener, source for the film and musi­cal productions.

Design Something Every Day: Day 4: Russell: Finder of Lost Idols

Day 4 brings me back to one of my favorite muses, Sur­vivor of course. Here’s a lit­tle sort of vin­tage styled poster high­light­ing the arch vil­lain from the TV fran­chise, Rus­sell Hantz, bet­ter known to fans as Evil Rus­sell. In the show he had a knack for find­ing idols, which would keep him from being kicked out of the game. That explains the tiki idol in the poster. Since he was con­sid­ered evil, the styl­ized flames seem appropriate.

Evil Rus­sell

Tools: Adobe Illus­tra­tor
Links: Rus­sell Got Screwed, a site defend­ing the honor of this often maligned cast away.

Design Something Every Day: Day 3: Purimitar

For Day three I tried to imag­ine if the Na’vi in the film Avatar had given up their Ani­mism in favor of Judaism and were shak­ing their grog­gers at Purim. This was actu­ally cre­ated for the upcom­ing Purim Car­ni­val at Tem­ple De Hirsch Sinai, but I thought it would fit here, since it is some­thing I designed today.

If the Na’vi cel­e­brated Purim

Tools: Adobe Pho­to­Shop
Sources: www.moviewallpaper.net, google image search

Design Something Everyday Day 2: Retro Rupert

Day two and here is  a retro styled poster for Rupert Bone­ham, a con­tes­tant on the CBS real­ity show Sur­vivor: Pearl Islands, Sur­vivor All Stars & the upcom­ing Sur­vivor Heroes vs Villains.

Tools: Adobe Illus­tra­tor, Pho­to­Shop, Wacom Tablet.

Link: Rupert’s Kids, Sur­vivor Con­tes­tant Rupert Boneham’s non-profit group to help at risk youth. A wor­thy cause.

Design Something Everyday Day 1: Volcano

I read the great post by Jad Lim­caco on Smash­ing Mag­a­zine called “Design Some­thing Every Day!” It is a very inspir­ing, if not daunt­ing idea, to design some­thing every day, but it is a call I would like to take up. I wanted to do it in Jan­u­ary, but some projects and a hint of fear kept me from attempt­ing this project.

Since today is my birth­day I thought this would be a good time to start the project, so begin­ning today, Feb­ru­ary 3rd I begin my year of daily design­ing. Wish me luck. So far the hard­est part is lim­it­ing myself to only 15–45 min on these designs. I just want to keep “plussing” the design. So here’s day one, the inte­rior of a volcano.

Design Some­thing Every Day: Day 1: Volcano

Tools: Adobe Illus­tra­tor, Col­ors: kuler.adobe.com
Source: Vol­cano infor­ma­tion: GeoBytes­GCSE