this is the girl who made my absolutely amazing wedding dress. she too is absolutely amazing.

now it’s my turn to make something fabulous for her: a portfolio site. what’s up now is a placeholder while hans and i are off galavanting about the eastern mediterranean. i’ll post again when the real bit goes live.

in perfect juxtaposition to the artwork of my previous post, i bring you the new packaging of mcdonald’s.

with the redesign, boxer creative was hoping to “change the way the world feels about eating mcdonald’s food”. sorry guys, until there’s soy protein on the menu, there’s no changing the way this vegetarian sees the chain.

good is everywhere. from their bi-monthly magazine to their weekly starbucks good sheets, they take the often overwhelming and make it accessible through good design.

my favourite new good creation: the three-trillion-dollar war: its cost in ten steps.

so i have the itch. and you’ve been warned of the greatness to come.

take michelangelo, for example. the man did plenty of paintings and sculptures that were not in any way site specific; works that could hang on any museum’s or collector’s wall. but he also covered the ceilings of the sistine chapel with biblical frescos that were both specific to and influenced by the site. though finished long before site specificity would officially join the list of “isms”, this piece is undeniably site specific.

jump ahead several centuries, to the mid 1970s. artists coin the phrase “site specific”, and the phrase becomes a part of every art students’ critique vocabulary. after all, isn’t it part of the creator’s responsibility to consider audience, scale and medium? and what determines these variables more than site?

jump ahead another several decades. another site joins the list of potentials - the virtual site. but, despite common perception, the virtual site is not one site, one medium, one audience. virtual mediums are not like museums, and what works on the internet church’s ceiling won’t work on the iphone’s light screen won’t work on the desktop’s cave wall. so let’s stop treating applications as site-universal and start designing them like the media-specific creations they are.

how do you eat your jelly bellies?

so what if zune only has a four percent market share. so what if the zune software only works with windows. so what if i have an iphone, an ipod nano and a macbook air instead of their microsoft counterparts. this is way cool, and i work with the people who make it happen.

of course designing the perfect wallet-sized representation of yourself wouldn’t be a challenge without the constraints imposed by the printing companies. so before jumping too far into a design with pop-up book style effects, it’s best to get your bearings on what popular printing companies are willing to do.

if you’re looking for the highest quality of printing with the most vibrant colours and the blackest blacks, i’d recommend modern postcard. they’re pricy, but worth the cost when seeking photographic quality in printing. they also print showcards, so they’re an obvious top pick for artists seeking additional printed materials.

also a high quality printing company, 4by6 does postcards and business cards in a limited variety of sizes and finishes. they also have a rounded corner option and are commonly used by artists.

vistaprint is incredibly popular, affordable, and does a great deal of quality printing. there are, however, a good many horror stories from those who’ve done business with the company. vista tends to be spam-happy, and the quality of the printing is noticeably less than that of modern postcard and 4by6.

competing with vistaprint is the slightly more expensive and slightly better quality moo.com. moo even offers convenient photo uploading from your etsy, facebook and flickr accounts.

if you’re looking for less quality and more convenience, companies like 48hourprint and overnight prints do a decent job on printing standard business cards quickly and affordably.

beyond those companies, there are countless printers in local markets worth looking into. and, if you’re feeling uber-ambitious, search for traditional printers using letterpresses. sure they’re pricy, but the original product is worth it.