Happy 4th of July weekend, fellow readers!  Hope you all have a wonderfully fun and safe one.  Blow some stuff up.

There is some sort of salty, seagull-sounding, 1910′s nautical feeling that I think might be contained inside an old Player’s Navy Cut tin on our shelf in the living room.

John Player’s graphics department was on a roll for years- there is something really great about almost all Player’s packaging and ephemera.  There is a gorgeous nicotine stained porcelain Player’s Navy Cut sign at my favorite bar that has been there for decades- the thing must be really nailed to the wall.

The mascot depicted in almost all Player’s Navy Cut packaging is named Hero, and his face constantly changes through the years of packaging, but no matter what he looks like I think he belongs in Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film “City of Lost Children”.

I have to check in on Agent Gallery’s site every few weeks, whoever runs that place has a good eye. 1952 Toledo hanging scale.

Nixie tubes are the the coolest way to display a character electronically. Ipad, pod, neon, CRT tube, LCD display, plasma, none of it comes close to the Nixie tube.  I can’t really tell you why they are so cool, but I can show you.  Buy one here and here, or a kit here. Here is the wiki article.

Our new baby is up and running!  We finally got to test her out a few nights ago (and by test I mean a quick 10 min run-through), and now we’re both really excited to start really using our little lady.  We’ll do a more extensive post later on, but until then, a little teaser..

Lady Letterpress

the first thing we ever printed! (though scanned in, it doesn’t look all that exciting)

the design used on boxes for sending work out

I clipped this out of a poster published in 1877 protesting the disputed election results. This was a tiny part of the poster, nice I think.

Well, the Canadians should know a thing or two about axes, and it shows here.

I Love Dust is a British design team that does illustration, type, and especially really nice packaging design.

via thedieline.com

I realize that these images look pretty grainy, but click on them to zoom. Nice little drawings documenting a one room school house, documented in 1973. Not to be overly cynical but somehow I picture a Walmart parking lot here today.

Found on the LOC

Nice louver detail.

I pretty much only trust myself to use our “won’t-break-when-you-drop-them” plates from various thrift stores, so I would probably just hang these black & white plates by Emily Forgot on my studio wall.

If you draw or write, I highly recommend Noodler’s Ink.  Available here…

I’ve really been meaning to go see this at the Museum of Arts and Design.  It showcases artists who are all inspired by paper, and use it in many ways as their medium.  Slash runs through April 4th, 2010.

Ariana Boussard-Reifel

Chris Kenny

Mia Pearlman

Nava Lubelski

(detail below)

I feel like wine bottle labels are one place where companies (especially the lesser known ones) are a little more open when it comes to packaging design.  I admit,  sometimes when I’m buying a bottle of wine I like to choose the one with the coolest label, best illustration, or nicest type.  For a non-connoisseur of wine like me, sometimes that’s really what determines whether I buy it or not.. *as wine lovers everywhere cringe*

Anyway, when I saw this wine bottle designed by Greg Bennett for Siquis, I instantly fell in love with its simplicity, as well as its concept.  Once the recipient rotates the bottle to fill their glass, the glass on the label also becomes half full.  To top things off (pun intended, haha), the label was letterpressed and a tiny die-cut was used for the full glass.   Nice.

via thedieline

The quantity of inexpensive (as in under $10), quality vintage drawing tool sets continuously available on ebay is amazing to me.  I am sure that there is some collector buying them up, which is understandable, they are gorgeous- however, they are more beautiful in use.

So next time you think of going to your art store to buy a relatively crappy staedtler, or please-dont-tell-me-its-all-plastic compass, stop, buy one of these beautiful sets and put it back to work. They will last, most of them are made of pure nickel, so they are likely to be here in a millennia.  Here is mine: