Czech Cemetery Type

I've been sifting through my archives, hoping to get inspired to draw something decorational, and I recently unearthed these photos of some remarkable type and lettering specimens discovered in a cemetery during my study abroad semester in Prague. Enjoy!

Stay tuned for more long lost gems from my travels...

Note: If you've never been locked INSIDE a cemetery, in another country, after dark, I can tell you from experience that it's ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING. I'm so happy to be alive!

Bestway

On a recent trip to Charlotte, I stopped in Greensboro to check out the Bestway grocery and do some "light" beer shopping. I'd seen photos of the store, so I knew the exterior left a bit to be desired. The interior, at first glance, wasn't much better and looked like it hadn't changed in decades. Try to picture a location from Super 8, minus Coach Taylor and that adorable child actor. To my great surprise, however, Bestway turned out to have one of the most top-notch craft beer selections I've encountered. Chock full of rare and limited release sour beers, I quickly abandoned my first impression and thoroughly enjoyed the shopping experience.

Needless to say, I was feeling pretty content at this point and not sure how the experience could improve when... OH MY GOD MEAT SIGNS. A little bit redneck? Shingles on the interior? Now there's the nostalgia I was promised!

So now we know where the sours are hiding. Overall, lots of fun surprises and a nice way to spend a Sunday off. Thanks, Bestway.

Happy Hour for Poor People: No. 1

The fact that I have enough so-called "recipes" to feel confident launching a regular column called "Happy Hour for Poor People" might imply questionable things. But if you'll just take a moment to try any of these fabulous concoctions, I think you'll quickly decide to join me on the dark side. Plus, creating the cocktails requires virtually no skills, so if you're already on the B-Team, this will be a natural, seamless transition for you!

First up: Vanilla Vodka and Orange Soda

Okay, so at the time this photo was taken, I may have been less poor, hence the intimidating name brands. Do not fret, though! Generic brands work just as well and are far easier on the ol' wallet. Bottoms up!

Tasty Store Photos

Brett Arthur (also one half of Brett and Jessica) recently joined us over at Tasty Beverage Co. to photograph the interior of the store. Here are just a few of the shots, but be sure to take a look at the full slideshow on the Tasty project page. Always a pleasure, Brett!

Our good (and brave) friend Adam Peele printed and installed all of the signage and interior graphics. That giant Tasty logo was created with a stencil and painted by hand.

Interesting fact: The shelf labels are called danglers, and no, I am not the only person who's had a chuckle about this. Dingle dangle!

Sauce 3.0

Hi there! Jaime here. I'm very excited and proud to announce that after two months of work (and distractions), the new Ketchup and Mustard website is up and running! The old site was written from scratch in HTML, and while I was satisfied with the design, I wanted to:

a) Add new projects without updating every page in the project's parent section,
b) Incorporate a blog into the navigation so the blog and portfolio could share the same page structure and styling, and
c) Add sorting functionality so users could view work by type of project.

Here's what the old site looked like:

And here's the new version and the tools I used to get there:

I used Squarespace as a CMS with custom CSS in a theme I built from the Developer theme. Squarespace made it easy to develop a site structure that included a combination HTML pages and dynamic content for the three different types of sections in the site. The portfolio pages are actually "Journal Index" pages of "Journals," which are similar to blogs. The individual Projects are comparable to single journal entries.

I also used Typekit so the Museo Sans Rounded typeface I use in the Ketchup and Mustard identity could also be present throughout the site.

Finally, I enlisted the help of the jQuery Cycle Plugin to create the slideshows on the project pages. I'm a total novice at JavaScript and jQuery, and after days of painful research, I found this plugin to be, by far, the easiest to use, with the most options for customizing the slideshows. It also allowed me to create multiple slideshows on a single page, which was a feature necessary for showing work with more than one component and multiple images for each component.

So thanks to all of the services that made this site update possible. If anyone has an interest, I'd be glad to share any of my tricks in a more focused blog post. Thanks for staying tuned!