After 2 years of work, our graffiti book, Written on the City, is about to come out, and we’re psyched! We’re extra psyched because it just got an awesome review in Newsweek this week. Page 10 of the print version, or visit the online article and gallery. And when you’re, done, don’t forget to buy [...]

Yasmin Sethi has designed a super sexy chess set inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. In ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll, Alice falls through a mirror and on the other side of the mirror, she becomes a piece in a game of chess. Inspired by this, the chess pieces have [...]

So we were asked to design the name, logo, interior, website, and experience for a new restaurant here in San Francisco’s Mission District. Super fucking fun. It’s called Beretta, and they serve up gourmet pizzas and fancy-ass cocktails you won’t find anywhere else, except for maybe a Hemingway novel. We’re psyched they’re blowing up. Oh [...]

Check out this minimalist cabin built from off-the-shelf parts. It’s 140 square feet, and features a cleverly re-purposed garage door.Link. Found on notcot.org

We’re in New York City this week playing with a few clients and digging on the city. Last time we were here, this place kicked our asses pretty good. We worked too hard and played even harder and by the end our stay we were mere shells of our former selves. Ridiculously fun, but not [...]

If you haven’t figured it out by now, we hate corporate bullshit. We think it’s dehumanizing. It diminishes conversation and weakens communication. Both Axel and I are refugees from the brand/advertising worlds where that language runs rampant, so one of the first things we did when we started Language in Common was to make a [...]

For those of you who saw this a few years ago, watch it again. It’s still brilliant and creepy and good for you too.

“Fuck! I’m about to drop 100 dollars on J-date! And I’m really not very Jewish at all.” That’s what I heard when I walked into the studio this morning. I’m all for online dating, but this can’t go on. My creative partner is tired of being single. And hell, I’m tired of him being single. [...]

Here’s a good New Yorker article on a beautiful emerging sport called parkour, which is the art of moving fluidly over any terrain. Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever [...]

This is a picture I did not take of a prostitute in front of four men on a street corner at dawn, asking them a question with her hands out, to which the men replied in unison, like a choreographed dance troupe, by pulling the lining of their pockets inside-out to show they had no [...]

What a beautiful thing this is. Seriously, let’s all make a decision to do one thing each day for no other reason than to make others happy. Thanks to Chris Corrigan for the link.

Most of you know by now that I have a serious thing for robots. And The Robot. You know, the dance? Here, thank the robot gods, is the most amazing group robot I’ve ever seen. Watch the video here.

Most days, I wake up with an deep urge to do the hard work of changing myself and the world around me for the better. But some days, I wake up and all I want to do is ENJOY the world—just to have a day where I live as if everything is just as it [...]

Something happened today as we were experimenting with possible layout directions for the Written on the City book: I stopped looking, I stopped thinking, and I finally felt like progress got made. Designers are trained to look. Scratch that, they’re paid to look. So I’ll understand if you want to kick me in the crotch [...]

I’d been gearing up to write a post blasting Microsoft’s new Vista operating system—not that I’ve tested it out or anything—but mostly I was going to rant about the monolith that is Microsoft and how they’re always sort of behind when it comes to culture and by the way that “wow” commercial really sucks. But [...]

Often we run across astoundingly bad communications that somehow made it past the editors (if there were any) and out into the world. Some are confusing, some are too obvious, and some are just plain bad. From here on out, we’ll be intermittently posting photos of the offending communications and making suggestions for what they [...]

We’ve talked about fun as strategy here before. That’s because play is an essential developmental part of the human experience. It makes work easier and better. It’s how the world’s greatest ideas come into being. And it’s way more fun than working. Play can make you famous, it can make you rich, and it’ll certainly [...]

Yeah, you can call it ‘design thinking‘ if you want, but to my mind, that’s already played out. Yes, it’s true, the MFA is the new MBA, and the kind of thinking that creative types regularly employ to make pretty things is becoming more and more in demand. But still, it’s little more than a [...]