I illustrated or photographed each piece and was in desperate need of a great looking old wheel for the calendar’s cover. Down the street from where I lived in Santa Monica there it was, in a shop window. A strange shop it was as it was never open to the public and no one really knew what exactly was being sold. I caught an old man opening a side door and that’s how I met Parke Meek. A remarkable man who worked with Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles and Ray Eames, and who let a young Mr. Geyrhalter shoot his props for that calendar and shared his stories with me that fine day.

Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times announced that the little shop, Jadis, will be open today at 11:00 AM to the public to sell its vast inventory of curiosities, which were mainly rented by studios as props. In true fashion it was not yet open by 11:45 AM when I swang by to see if I could purchase that wheel as a memory of Parke Meek, who passed away in January at age 86. Thanks to the LAT write up, people lined up around the block. So instead of being in line, I opted to share this article about a great man, and some shots of my 2000 calendar with you:

Link to the Los Angeles Times Article

Pictures of the shop

Thanks to past GD-Intern Marco for the heads-up. More images and thoughts can be found here.

(11.17 Addition: Just had to add this series of ‘dog lamps’ I found today to the mix.)

As of this season’s style, I have a feeling that I will be more impressed by the new John Varvatos collection, which we have the pleasure of rolling out via their (Geyrhalter Designed) web site within a week.

A simple and smart way to wake up, and stay up. The alarm stops ringing, only once the user puts the three shapes into their right places. In case you have an early call, or a plane to catch, you might want to hide them all over the room. Found via Austrian lifestyle magazine ‘Rondo’, one can start waking up in color via this site.

A quite intriguing invention by an artist from Berlin: ‘The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.’

Lots of great guerilla campaigns could be created on a very low budget, lots of political events could be scrutinized and press conferences could have devastating results. Thank you Hans for the inspiration.

I am taken by the creativity that went into the juxtaposition. It’s the beauty of life that you can get surprised by beautiful new ideas being born every day. ‘Everything has already been done before,’ I often hear people say in the design world. Well, I think the glass is rather half full then half empty, but that’s just my personal belief and I keep being stunned by new ideas every day.

Marco shared this ‘wall painted animation’ by MUTO with me. A day later I have received the link from an old friend, so before everybody has already seen it, I wanted to share this insane graffiti 2.0 piece with you (OK, not sure if Graffiti 2.0 has been a term sofar…).

Domino Magazine, ‘the guide to living with style’, did something quite interesting in their current issue. An ad insert features sticker flags (think post it-flags) with different categories on it. It engages the readers to utilize their content as a shopping inspiration while leveraging their advertisers’ buys. On top of that it promotes their online registry and web site in general once the flag is removed. Quite a lot of marketing tasks fullfilled on one single page. And above all, it transforms a passive experience into an extremely engaging active experience. Bravo.