On a recent trip to Seattle to visit our daughter and son-in-law, I was flipping through the local paper while sitting in a Capitol Hill coffee shop, when I happened upon an ad for one of my FAVORITE cartoonists of all time, Ellen Forney, author of one of my favorite comic collections of all time, “Monkey Food: the Complete Collection of ‘I Was Seven in ‘75’”.  Giddily, I fired off an email to see if she would be available to meet and show me her studio. As luck would have it, she lived nearby, and she agreed!

(Side note: I don’t typically stalk my favorite artists like this. Unless you count the time I called George Segal while on a trip to New Jersey in 1988, after discovering his studio was just 20 minutes from where my friend Diana and I were. He was nice enough to show us around and indulge our pretentious art student questions for a whole hour.)

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Hello everyone, and sorry for the long absence! I’ve been up to my ears for the past few months in website work, catalog work and family visits. (It’s still raining babies in our family. I’ve now got a new baby nephew, and a grandson on the way, bringing the baby total to 8 in just under 3 years. More on that later.)

I’m really excited about all the Wordpress-based websites we’ve been building lately, and I and wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about our process and show you some of the latest sites we’ve done.

All our sites are now built on Wordpress using Thesis. Wordpress is a powerful opensource blogging platform, and Thesis is a brilliantly flexible and SEO-friendly framework that helps you to customize your Wordpress-based site. I do all the design work, and the multi-talented Doyle Calvert does all the programming and behind-the-scenes magic. Between us, we have spent the past 8 months getting Wordppress/Thesis to do some pretty amazing things. Here’s a sampling:

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I am fascinated by anything related to neurological disorders, creativity and art, and especially how the two relate to each other. Creativity is such a deep, fickle and mysterious thing… it’s no surprise that it changes significantly when your brain does.

NewScientist has posted a fascinating story about a woman who suffered from a neurodegenerative condition called primary progressive aphasia that took her speech and eventually her life. Unaware at first that she was suffering from this disease, former chemistry professor Anne Adams found her creativity suddenly flourishing. Check out this visual painting she did of Bolero:

Visual representation of each note in Ravel's Bolero

In Unravelling Boléro, each of the vertical figures represents a bar of music, with its height corresponding to volume, and the colour representing the pitch of Adams’ favourite note within the bar. Like the music, the theme repeats and builds until a change of colour to orange and pink, representing the key change that precedes Boléro’s dramatic conclusion.  (excerpt)

Some patients with progressive aphasia develop a passion for art, a creative blurring of boundaries between the senses, and a fixation with repeating patterns. Adams became intrigued by her own disease, and after she lost her ability to speak, she found and presented to her neurologists a scientific article indicating that Ravel may have suffered from the very same disease!

On a similar note, check out this article about a lawyer suffering from a brain disorder who suddenly developed an all-consuming passion for art.

I just returned from an inspiring weekend at the NAMM show in Anaheim, California, one of the largest (and loudest) music shows in the country, with over 80,000 attendees from all over the world. I was invited by moderator Danny Rocks to speak to this diverse group of musicians, educators and business owners about ways to improve their websites.

My session, called "This Old Website: Why Your Site Needs a Makeover!" drew a good group of about 100 people, mostly small business owners and music educators. My friend Madeleine Crouch of Madeleine Crouch and Associates, an association management firm, offered up one of her new clients in need of help, and joined me on stage to discuss the problems and solutions.

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Our son is getting married in a few weeks to a wonderful young woman in D.C., and we spent this past weekend working on wedding gifts and favors for the guests that incorporate both their Irish and Hindu heritage. Our daughter thought of the idea of screenprinting an Irish and Hindu blessing on a piece of Irish linen. I thought it would be cool to create their own custom image of interlocking Irish love knots and the Ohm, the sacred Hindu symbol. Here’s what I came up with:

NOTE: THIS IMAGE IS COPYRIGHTED. MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT PERMISSION!

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I just found out about moo.com from Twitter, and boy, I am excited! Check this out: you can get your own custom set of 2-sided business cards, mini-cards (smaller than business cards), or a set of greeting cards, stickers, postcards or notecards… each one with a different piece of your own custom full-color art, for CHEAP!

The process for ordering is very slick. You can print your photos straight from your online photos at Flickr, Facebook, or several other places, or else you can upload them from your desktop. Your photos go on one side, with six lines of customizable text and a logo on the other. All you have to do is log on to Moo, enter your Flickr or Facebook information, and pick the photos you want to be printed. Nice.

They also offer a 100% recycled paper option.

I can think of a million ways to use these products. Like you see in this photo, real estate agents can print all their properties for sale. Companies can print cards with different featured products or services. Artists, photographers or agencies can use it to highlight different samples of their work. Check out moo.com and see what you think! I’ll post samples of the next project I do with Moo (I’ve already got something in mind…).

… he designs some cool funky bike racks for New York!

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Want to build some more brain synapses between your hemispheres, possibly reducing the damaging effects of Alzheimer’s and strokes? Try using your opposite hand!

You can actually teach yourself to write just as well with the opposite hand, believe it or not. It’s all a matter of forging new pathways in the brain, which is possible to do in a healthy brain of any age. (It could take months to perfect it, but it can be done.) I’m heavily right-handed, but have decided that for today– or as long as I can stand it– I’m moving my wacom pad over to the left side of my computer. It’s a very strange feeling trying to move the cursor. It makes me feel like i’m five years old, just learning to "draw" my alphabet. I can’t make a good circle, and can’t manage a straight line, because my left hand has no muscle memory for those kinds of fine movements.

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A couple of days ago, Google released a new open-source browser called Google Chrome. (The name "chrome" comes from the developer’s term for the graphics that go around the window of a browser). Their goal was to totally rethink the way people interact with the web, stripping the browser down to its barest essence with a minimum of tools and options. I am particularly fond of the "omnibar" as they call it: rather than having a separate address bar and search tool, it’s all combined into one. This will make my mother happy, who often types URLs in a search box and then wonders why it doesn’t take her to the website. (This will hopefully keep me from reverting to my annoyed adolescent voice: "Because you have to use the ADDRESS BAR, Mom! Duh!")

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You gotta love those Japanese. Check out these aprons, designed by a prison official and cut, sewn and assembled by inmates at Hakodate Juvenile Prison on the northern island of Hokkaido.

Featuring the Japanese character for "jail" inside the circle, with "PRISON" printed in English below, they’ve been a huge hit among the non-incarcerated fashion conscious, and are totally sold out on their website. It’s been so popular, in fact, that the prison is planning to register the logo with the patent office.

The prison is not allowed to hire more staff to meet the demand, and the inmates are forbidden to work overtime.

But like every other hot selling design out there, it’s only a matter of time until somebody rips off this design. Toss those bootleggers in jail, and there you go! Instant labor pool!