Pop-Up Placemats

Impress your designer friends and clients at dinner! These clever PopMat Paper Placemats are made by Publique Living and available here at Charles & Marie. They offer two 100% recycled paper choices, White Sand or Natural Kraft and are available in 3 different designs (2 shown here). There is an area on each mat to personalize with your guests name - such as on the back of the chair, for example - so that they double their use as also a place setting card. I just love the way they look.

Pandora

Spend a lot of time scrolling through your iTunes deciding what you want to listen too? Bored of the songs you've been listening to for the past three months? For all of us indecisive music lovers there is finally a solution. Pandora, free radio, takes any song or artist that you type in and turns it into a radio station that uses your input as inspiration. Give any song that comes up a thumbs up or down and it will modify the selection of music that it is playing just for you. Combine your "stations" in a quick mix to listen to get a larger variation in the music you are listening to. Not only will you be able to hear the artists you love, but you will also be introduced to new artists that you are bound to like. Check it out at Pandora.com.

Recycled Jewelry

Mana Bernandes, Brazilian jewelry designer, is one of the artists included in the Touch exhibition in New York City. The MANA Collection features plastic bottles, hairpins, phone-cards, and other found materials that are re-purposed with the help of young women in Rio De Janeiro. Check out these gorgeous pieces at the Touch exhibition site or the MANA portfolio site.

Everyday

Check out this site. This graphic designer/artist - Christopher David Ryan – posts an original piece of his artwork every single day. You've got to admire his seemingly never-ending pool of creativity.

In My Spare Time ....

... I started a MeetUp and you are all invited to join. ("In My Spare Time" is actually an oxymoron since those who know me know that I have no such thing as spare time ...).

I started this walking group to give me an excuse to spend more time outdoors, exercise, find some new and interesting places in Connecticut I've never been to or knew about and hang out with friends - old and some new ones I hope to make. This - I hope - will be a source of inspiration for me.

Here's my MeetUp Home Page link. Needs a snazzy logo so I'm accepting suggestions/submissions.

While doing some recent on interesting places in Connecticut for future MeetUp events, I recalled this story I had heard on NPR a few weeks back. It was an interview with co-authors of "Connecticut Curiosities", "quirky characters, roadside oddities & other offbeat stuff". Fascinating. Check out the book. The older I become, the more I realize that there are all these places and facts and wacky stories about my home state of Connecticut. I am going to really enjoy reading this book and making family excursions to check out some of these curiosities for myself.

"Say Cheese!"

World Pinhole Camera Day was April 27th (sorry, we missed it). However, if you have time to kill, you can still visit this site to download and put together your very own pinhole camera! (Sample above is just one of several funky designs). For inspiration, check out this pinhole photography gallery.

If you do have time and you do take some pinhole snapshots, please, give us shout and we'll post them on the site (yes, rebekka, I'm talking to you)!

Dorset Cereals

Were in and out of food stores every day, but if I have a few extra minutes, sometimes I'll stroll the aisles and really take a good look around.

This packaging for Dorset Cereals (just one of a series) really caught my eye. It's designed by a British company called Big Fish. Interestingly, they credited themselves on the bottom of the box. They must've known it was good.

*One thing you can't see from the picture is the silver foil-stamped text for "dorset cereal." The box also has a really great matte cardboard texture. At $5.99 a box, this stuff better taste good.

TIME 100 Cover

Time invited five of the world's best graphic designers to submit cover concepts for the TIME 100 issue: Chip Kidd (who had two designs as finalists), Neville Brody, James Victore and Euro RSCG of New York City. The chosen cover - designed by Euro RSCG; Executive Creative Director: Hal Wolverton. Creatives: Ben Thoma, Katie Anne Naylon, Patrik Bolocek - is a mosaic pattern of all 100 top influential persons of the year making an image of a face. This solution is trendy, but still it departs from the typical approach of just the winner's image. Take a look at all five entries here.

Which cover would you have voted for and why?

My vote would have been for this design by Chip Kidd. I love his irony and humor. Just brilliant! (The copy in the center reads: "One hundred people who have a completely different perspective on the world. The TIME 100."). Click here or on the image below to link to Chip's Blog for his thoughts on being a finalist.