Special stuff on this one ladies and lumbergents! While on our cross country trip this summer we visited Morgan’s Nana’s cabin in the wonderful Fishtail Montana. We made loads of new friends and had awesome adventures. While prowling around on the cabin property I checked out the garage… It was a virtual treasure trove of awesome looking tools. With hungry eyes I snatched em up to immortalize them on the blog. I conferred with Nan and some of these tools belonged to her father, Bopo (dating them back to nearly 1940!). Look at how sturdy all the hatchets are. Check the awesome leafy embellishments on the saws. Behold the magnificent patina nearly 70 years has put on the tools. Get this sucker quick for yer’ desktop. By special request: room for your icons on the right! (You are welcome Mr. Rockwood)

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Hello, long lost friends! David and I have been having a GRAND time seeing the sights in Montana and Seattle…here are the first few days in a nutshell.

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The lumberfolk here at Hatchet Design LLC have decided to take their shop on the road and sow their wild oats on the great plains, tall mountains, and frigid Pacific Oceans of this fair country. We have embarked on a two and a half week excursion into the heartland and out to the opposite coast of our fine shop, working, seeing sights, and experiencing new things to keep us fresh. With an itinerary spanning the entire North American Continent we are sure to encounter many new things and cool ideas. We will post photos and inspiration from the journey here on our blog. STAY TUNED

Here is a little sneak peek at some fresh roasted branding from your very own Lumber-people at hatchet design. Website Launch is happening very soon along with some more collateral coming down the pipe at light speed! Keep your eyes peeled on the horizon for more…

In an attempt to create some friendly competition between those in Orlando’s creative community, Hatchet Design LLC and Raphsodic Cooperative Company are hosting Central Florida’s First Annual Designer Showdown! If you haven’t already been to Raphsodic, you are in for a treat (no pun intended…OK…you’re right. Totally intended). They are pretty dang rad, and vegan friendly to boot! They state in their vision “We will make “community” our cause, and seek to cultivate it,” and they are definitely a bakery of their word. Read the rest of this entry »

Ahhhhh fresh air.

It was so nice to go to North Carolina and take a little break from the usual. Its funny how my perspective has changed of the place I’ve been going to since I was very young. Since getting into the program in college, I see everything through design goggles. Driving through the mountains makes me wonder where the art of the hand-painted sign has gone? I wonder why we’ve lost the creativity that is required of living a country lifestyle. With all of the flashy neon and sell out advertising, it is nice to go to a place where there is no flash required and loyalty is a priority. It is less about having the newest, fanciest product and more about the relationship and experience of actually getting a product that will do the job just fine. Could I get a good greasy breakfast sandwich in Orlando? Yes. Could I go to a local breakfast joint and watch customers interact with such intimacy? No. Not in these here parts. The difference between here and there is the service, the history, the community, and the people. The simplicity I used to know of the country has now become a complex mecca of design and psychology.

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Last week, I had the privilege of creating some signage for the 2010 Fishtail Family Fun Day parade in Fishtail, Montana. The turn around time was pretty ridiculous (created Thursday night, printed Friday morning, picked up by the Unc on his way into town, and paraded around on Saturday!), but it was definitely worth it. Apparently, in part because of my Aunt’s insane marketing skills, the design will be painted all over the town. Whether it is or not doesn’t quite matter to me, I’m just glad I could be part of Fishtail Fun Day from 2,350 miles away. The sign was proudly displayed on the front of the (legally blind) 82 year old Grand Marshall’s four wheeler and carted down Main Street (in the photo above). Classic.

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So anyone who has watched any sporting event with me in recent months knows a rather disturbing fact/fetish of mine. I am in love with… luxury car leasing screens! When a good Mercedes or Lexus leasing lock-up appears on screen, I jump up and yell something dorky like:

“Look at that grid, suckers!”

-or-

“Well kern my letters those Germans can sure make a handsome leasing screen!”

Yeesh… It’s really embarrassing. I scoured the web for examples for a good half hour and got nothing (I guess you need a camera, big TV, and great reflexes to catch one of these beauties in the wild.)

Now that my confessional is out, I used this sordid love affair as inspiration for a hatchet desktop. It was a really fun exercise and I hope to do more in the future. For now though you can plaster my self-indulgent lock-up on your computer screen and save up your pennies for a Hatchet brand Hatchback (obviously). Props to Mr. Neubau for the car.

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This just keeps getting better. I just read article two, and it was just as amazing as the first one. This article was written by Amy Smith, an instructor and founder of D-Lab (Development through dialogue, design, and dissemination) at MIT, who writes about the Fuel from the Fields project. This project aims to find a solution to the need for healthy, renewable fuel that plagues the nearly “2.5 billion people using wood, charcoal, or dung for their cooking and heating needs.” Smith highlights the fact that “the leading cause of death in children between the ages of one and five is not malnutrition, diarrhea, or malaria, but respiratory illness caused in large part by breathing the smoke from indoor cooking fires.” Shocking, isn’t it?

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My wonderful Nana discovered I had a list of books/music I wanted on my Amazon.com Wish List, and she bought me a bunch of it for Christmas. One book didn’t come until a couple of weeks ago, and that was the Design for the Other 90% book I wanted. This book came out of an exhibition by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of the same name (check it out here). The exhibition brought together designers and engineers from around the world designing for the “5.8 billion people, or 90%, [who] have little or no access to most of the products and services many of us take for granted…”
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