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Swashes, italics, letterpressed invitations, wax seals. This project required a balance of modern and “classic” typographic style. We think the results are quite pleasing.

Since this was our (my and my fiancée’s) wedding, I decided to take care of all the design and printing myself. This was much easier said than done. When you’re your own client, things tend to take twice as long as you had hoped. But, we stayed under budget and came out with a wedding invitation we’ll remember forever.

The invitations were printed by Lunar Caustic Press on Natural White Strathmore 130lb cover bristol in black ink.

We used Burgues Script and Adobe Caslon Pro and opted to go with just an outer envelope, invitation, and reply postcard to save on paper. We tried to go for recycled paper, but found it pricey and hard to find!

After all was said and done, we finished it all off with a wax seal of the letter “J,” for Jackson.

With special thanks to Joe Clark for the design guidance on this project.

We created Monotone with Automattic, the company behind Wordpress.com. The challenge: create a theme that changed photo-blogging up a bit and brought back some of the nostalgia from the early photo-blogging days.

The end result is Monotone, a simple but dynamic theme for wordpress. It makes each photoblog, and furthermore, each entry, unique by taking the attached image and sampling colors from the layout to create a one of a kind color palette for the page.

We really loved being able to work with such a smart group of individuals and continue to work with Automattic on some other top-secret projects.

We’ve been just enamored by the response this theme has gotten with responses like the following:

I really am enjoying my photos all over again, and looking at the world with fresh bright eyes, thanks to you!

Much obliged,
Carrie Cahill Mulligan

Monotone is great. Thank you. My photos have finally found a theme that does them justice (in my opinion).

– Khürt

Beautiful photo and theme. Great work.

– juiced

Really nice! Makes me want to start a photo-blog. I was searching for new incentives to take my camera for walks, and here it is. World, watch out, the shutter bug is coming back, hehe…

– Simone

The Open & Closed Project is a new research project aimed to improve quality, by setting standards for accessible media.

They’re going to create, develop, and test, captioning standards; as well as train pactitioners in the area of standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing.

We helped them create a “microsite.” It made an immediate and long standing impression with the visitors, by using bold design (that engages, and also hints at the correlation between bad captioning and questionable design).

We got the chance to work with Gawker, yet again, after, getting them to go table-less (that’s geek speak) years ago.

Our aim was to help move Gawker to some cleaner markup and a design foundation that was more oriented with traditional graphic design methodologies.

We feel the change was huge, yet may visually feel just slightly different. Gawker had strict rules about what they wanted to change with the specific layout, so we bargained with them and helped deliver some fresh CSS & HTML to help (truly) re-align the site.

Ryan is a wunderkind, now a regular shooter for Vogue and Vanity fair, at the ripe old age of 25.

Designing a simple site that made it easy for him to update was the challenge. It was a very inspiring and interesting process working with Ryan. Learning how he views his photo shoots helped influence the way we designed the site; albums like story books, with horizontal navigation.

We ended up customizing PhotoStack to work just the way he needed it to. And now, Ryan and his assistants can update the site in just a few clicks, instead of a few days. This saved Ryan lots of time, not to mention hundreds of dollars in fees he was paying his former webmaster to update the site.