Jill and I have the opportunity to work once again with the very talented Jolby on a piece for their upcoming show with Ashley Forrette, entitled Sea Legs, opening in Portland this month. We’ve begun work on a large scale felt two headed sea serpent coiled around an anchor. The piece, when finished, will be approximately 4′x3′ with lots of lovely texturing and layering and will represent the largest plush piece we’ve done to date.

This is the second show that we have done with Jolby, and both have been fantastic experiences. They’re really good about giving us a rough idea of what they’re looking for and rough color choices and then letting us jump in and do what we do.

The show will be held at Together Gallery here in PDX and opens on February 25 and runs for about a month. If you have a chance, come on out and support some great local talent.

Throughout the course of a designer’s career there are always a series of projects that are taken on to fulfill their own vision of what design should be. These projects live outside the normal studio-client workflow-out of the purview of any “outsider” input. The results of these personal ventures remain free of commercial influence, further the design dialogue and satisfy the need for the creative voice.

I recently set out on this path to personal creation in the form of the online design publication, SweetMachiMachi. SMx2, as it has come to be called around our studio, has been a long time in coming, but until last month remained nothing more than a series of notes in my personal design/idea journal (a book that could be the subject of an entire post on its own).

I’ve spent several years writing and editing for publications (design and otherwise), and while each publication I’ve worked for has provided a great experience, I’ve always been subject to editorial discretion when it came to subject matter and content that I’ve been allowed to cover. Many of my ideas on how a publication should be run and what it should cover have had to remain mine.

With the creation of SMx2 that gets to change. The editorial vision of the publication becomes a micro-cosm of my views (and by default future contributors’ views) of the design world. It is my hope that this publication can adequately represent the diversity, beauty and talent that the modern design profession has to offer and a resource for other designers and non-designers who are looking for a bit of inspiration.

Throughout the course of this publication’s life there will be many changes to format and structure I’m sure, but it will always strive to remain true to the idea of exposing the world to new designers, artists and studios and the work the create.

I firmly subscribe to the thought of designer as publisher/entrepreneur and take stock in the fact that creatives have the responsibility to create and contribute outside of the typical studio/client framework. SweetMachiMachi is just one small contribution, but hopefully through its posts it will provide a subtext into the larger, more diverse world of design.

After a strenuous and long battle with Wordpress and its glitch which left the admin screens completely unstyled and useless, I’ve migrated webclique to a new host and a new Wordpress installation. The process was arduous and painful as I could not get the new host to actually import the sql database. In the end, I ended up simply exporting all of my posts and comments and then re-importing them into the new WP install. Hopefully I will never need to move to another host, or I might just start over.

There are still a few issues with the migration-namely the loss of my widget-based toolbar, but that should be relatively easy to fix over the next day or so. Other than that, though, the basic export and import feature worked like a charm. Now back to work. Whew!