Los Angeles, California

Vancouver, Providence, Stockholm, Adelaide, New York…

My girlfriend Ev and I received a large box filled with wine-making paraphernalia from her parents for Christmas (admittedly I had enthused about the brilliant home-made dandelion wine I’d encountered last summer at friend Stefanie’s place in Banff, made by her Park Interpreter roommate Laurie Schwartz from prolific back-yard gleanings)… so, naturally, wine-making and wine labels are now on my radar.

Although I’ve encountered some beautiful labels over the years (some were included in the Communication Arts magazine feature I wrote re: design in Australia a few years back), I’ve never really designed any (other than informal labellings for libations given out at Circle from time to time). Serendipitously, a variety of wine label references have crossed my desk over the past week… and shown above are a few that caught my fancy. (Thanks to Gerald Brandt, Mirko Humbert, and Matt Warburton for the links.)

Images (from top): Garagiste Wines (a clever name for “guys who make wine in their garages”) by Matt Warburton; Whatchamacallit for Spit Decisions by Brandever; Dirty Laundry, also by Brandever; B Frank by Talia Cohen; Esule by Mash; Oriel Wines by Julia Hoffmann; Sav (made of birch sap) by Stockholm Design Lab.

[Apologies to anyone who tried to access this website over the weekend—my host Media Temple has been battling to end 48 hours(!) of  interrupted service… quite unusual, as we’ve found them to be quite reliable over the past years.]

Je m’excuse.

This crossed my desk today and I found it to be oh-so-clever…  I felt obliged to look up René Magritte’s self-portrait entitled ‘The Son of Man’ here, of which the Belgian surrealist stated: “At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”

Berlin, Germany

In the “a picture’s worth a thousand words” department, Niemann’s your man…

New York, New York

Check out the diverse oevre of prolific Korean ex-pat creator Ji Lee here.

(Thanks for the link, Gediminas.)

Long Island City, New York

…as seen through the eyes of Luba Lukova. More of her strikingly effective work here…

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language. Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie abandoned and forgotten.

You can do your part. Help save the words! If not for yourself, then for generations to come. Now, you may ask, “What have future generations done for us lately?” Well, not much. But one day they’ll be grateful. You never know, they may even have a word to say about you…

The above is from Save the Words—if you’re a lover of neglected words, check it out here (where you can adopt a word, spread the word, etc.). Thanks to David Coates for the link.

Along a similar vein (protecting endangered words), below is one of a series of greeting cards for What? Clay Art & Curios that we developed last year (“Giglet” was first used by Will Shakespeare to describe a giddy, frolicsome girl—a word worth saving). More word rescue efforts are underway…

From Fontshop Belgium…

Paris, France

Sometimes you just don’t need captions. René Maltête (1930-2000) was a French “illustrative photographer,” poet, non-conformist, and pacifist who learned his craft in the école de la rue and practiced with a penchant for humor and a keen understanding of “the human condition.”

(Thanks to Guy Schockaert for introducing René to me).