This was the second year I got to work on my alma mater’s annual student fashion show, Runway. This year was even more rewarding as Block Club hosted two Buffalo State Communication Design students, Cody and Laura, who came to the office and worked with us to design a poster, the event program and a lookbook showcasing the fashion students’ collections.

They did an awesome job developing a concept for this year’s theme, City Bits / City Bytes, using deconstructed concentric circles in bold colors in contrast to the stark white, statuesque photos Luke Copping shot for us of two dresses from last year’s Cotton Inc. challenge. Great work guys!

Runway is next Saturday, April 27. Ticket information here.

- Julie

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Color Pallet

I am a designer and illustrator. I have a folder on my desk top that I throw images into that I find interesting or relevant to projects I am working on. I use these images to gather inspiration from. Whether it’s a color, layout or style they all go into this folder.

This is an image I threw in there when I was working on a project for the upcoming issue of Block Club magazine issue 31 Quality / Quantity. I drew inspiration for my color pallet from this image for one of my illustrations. You’ll have to wait and see, the issue hits the streets next week.

-Tim

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Well, it’s January. Which means it’s that time of year where everyone starts hating on winter. Suuuuure! Just use winter for its bounty of Christmas cheer and then kick it to the curb. Well, I for one am an unabashed friend of late winter. Even though I always suffer a severe case of the post-Christmas woes, as the weeks pass, I regain my appreciation for the crisp stillness of January and February. As a kid, I had plenty of woods behind my house and this was my favorite time of year to explore: frozen patches of ground peeking through old snow, nature stripped down to its branches, everything always so quiet. Here’s a color palette for you, Winter, in all your dreariness. Haters gonna hate!top photo: Ewelina Rybczyńskabottom photo: Tom Kondrat - Julie

Well, it’s January. Which means it’s that time of year where everyone starts hating on winter. Suuuuure! Just use winter for its bounty of Christmas cheer and then kick it to the curb.

Well, I for one am an unabashed friend of late winter. Even though I always suffer a severe case of the post-Christmas woes, as the weeks pass, I regain my appreciation for the crisp stillness of January and February. As a kid, I had plenty of woods behind my house and this was my favorite time of year to explore: frozen patches of ground peeking through old snow, nature stripped down to its branches, everything always so quiet.

Here’s a color palette for you, Winter, in all your dreariness. Haters gonna hate!

top photo: Ewelina Rybczyńska
bottom photo: Tom Kondrat

- Julie

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French photographer Laurent Chehere, once known for his award-winning commercial ad work for heavyweights like Audi and Nike, left advertising after a change of heart. Hoping to pursue more personal passions with his work, he travelled the world, documenting it in stops across Asia, South America, and everywhere in between. Along the way, “Flying Houses” was born, a whimsical collection of buildings removed from both their backdrop and grounding. It’s a fantastical effort of isolating the uniqueness of these buildings that may, more often than not, get lost in the shuffle of a brighter skyline or tidier facade.

See more of Chehere’s work here. 

- Maggie

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A wrinkle in time: Legs Media presents a short and simple history of the GIF, that well-loved, lurching, socially awkward host to the internet’s never ending sticky-floored basement party (which may arguably have peaked with the Dancing Baby craze of ‘96 but, bless its heart, fist pumps tirelessly on into the night).  

- Maggie

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I am beginning to work on a project for a client and there is some color branding that needs to be done. This is a small sampling of some of the inspirational color choices I have been sorting through.  The above image is pulled from some blog I am sure, months, if not years ago that I’ve stuffed away into one of my color folders and have been dying to pull colors from.  Fingers crossed. -Tim

I am beginning to work on a project for a client and there is some color branding that needs to be done. This is a small sampling of some of the inspirational color choices I have been sorting through. 

The above image is pulled from some blog I am sure, months, if not years ago that I’ve stuffed away into one of my color folders and have been dying to pull colors from. 

Fingers crossed.

-Tim

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Atomic: Full of Love, Full of Wonder, by artist Nike Savvas. A dense mesh of suspended bouncy balls, the 2005 installation created a particle field of color which waved and swayed in the wake of a nearby fan at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. Savvas’s art seems an amplified and celebratory form of the very fabric of the visual world surrounding us, and it’s beyond cool to see it created in this larger-than-life form.

- Maggie

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I was putting together some color palettes for the Fall Issue of the magazine last week, which is one of my favorite parts of the design process. I love color so much, especially when shown side by side like this. Like when you go into clothing stores with piles of the same shirt available in 10 different colors…I LOVE THAT!

Here is Dear Hancock’s ingenious wrapping paper, patterned with their own color swatches for their line of greeting cards, invitations and paper goods. A pretty fantastic idea, and a pretty one at that.

-Ben

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