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Quote of the Week:

Soft vs. Hard in the Entertainment/Design mega-complex

My old school chum Jason Apollo Voss has some interesting things to say on the value of good design and art in business today over on his blog.

a snippet:

It used to be that good art and good design were the exclusive purview of the wealthy. Now good design is everywhere and accessible by everyone. Look at the packaging on products, look at the shape of the toilet, look at the lamp options at Target, etc. The public loves what they love. And that comes courtesy of an artist. In short, art is everywhere.

Check it out.

Labels: art, b2b, b2c, craftsmanship, design

posted at 2:48 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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7.09.2009

Butter, coffee, and business

I wanted to let all you designer and branding people know about one of my fave places in Northwest Denver to have coffee: Generous Servings. Not only is the staff unfailingly friendly, and not only is the coffee great (especially the vietnamese iced), you can sit and drink your joe, and work, while watching people cook. There's a large lovely window looking into Generous Servings' classroom, where on any given day you can watch folks get ready for that evenings' class. In the morning the Happy Cakes people from next door put icing on their stock of cupcakes for the day, too. Frankly, the coffee shop part of the operation is a great sales pitch for their cooking classes...after watching everyone prep all this lovely food, who wouldn't want to start cooking, too?

Mary, half of the duo of sisters who run the place, has a blog on cooking and running a small business, and her post on making your own butter caught my eye. If you're a foodie, and like to experiment, check out her blog. And stop in for some coffee, too. It's a great example of a place that takes its craft seriously, and also seems to be full of people who are happy. A nice combination.

Some of her butter post follows below:


"Butter is my new favorite food. Not ingredient, food. Generous Servings now uses only homemade butter in all our cooking, which gives you another reason to have one of our croissants or scones--they are more homemade than almost anything you'll ever eat.

It is very fun to have a bowl full of ten pounds of butter, as you can see:



And it is very good for moisturizing one's hands. This is not to say that my butter recipe development has been without frustrations. There has been a lot of cream thrown out of the mixer onto the floor. One time the cream never turned into butter, although I mixed it for about an hour and a half (usually it takes 15 minutes). That evening our cleaners happened to be working in the kitchen, and they asked me several times what I was making. I kept saying that I was making butter, and they would look dubiously at the bowl full of cream, which never looked remotely like butter. The next time they came, I was making cultured butter, which requires me to sterilize all the implements I use, so I had an array of big pots of boiling water, alcohol swabs, thermometers, and spoons balanced precariously to prevent their bowls from touching the counter, and a whole area of the kitchen blocked off. Again, the cleaners asked what I was doing, and I said I was making butter. At this point, they think I'm delusional.

"

(Via The Cooking Doctor.)

Labels: craftsmanship, small business

posted at 10:02 AM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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5.17.2009

No pressure to get this COMPLETELY PERFECT

A bookbinder recently cataloged their work in re-binding a 1518 edition of Ovid. Unlike me, I imagine they don't allow coffee on their work-surfaces.

link via BoingBoing.

Labels: book, book cover design, craftsmanship

posted at 10:29 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments

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