Okay graphic design students – it's time to get your ass in gear and win the adoration of your peers and design-lovers far and wide. Plans at Mississippi State are heating up for the 3rd annual AIGA Student Invitational File Save As… Soirée and they want you to enter. Students from anywhere are eligible and you get unlimited entries for a paltry $15. That's right – for the price of two Starbucks you could be well on the road to global design superstardom.

Plus you get your work in front of heavy-hitting industry judges like pattern designer and Also Design co-founder Julia Rothman, and award-winning illustrator, comic book artist, and self-described “typographic thing-maker” (and Carmel Hagen lust-object) Ray Fenwick.

The deadline to enter is February 8th, so there's not time like right now. No, really. Right now – turn off Project Runway and enter already.

Smacker Journals, If’n Books limited-run note-jotters (so named for their size, apparently perfect for hitting people), are designed by artists and bound by a bookbinder. The artists, currently, are Alec Thibodeau, Jen Corace, Sarah Neuburger, and Ray Fenwick (who, if you are keeping track, I am still in love with). The bookbinder, always, is Deb Dormody, a professional bookmaker by trade whose albums, organizers and journals are sold all over the US and on Etsy, and whose bindings are as prettily homemade as a 1950’s Jell-O mold. The journals themselves are hand-printed in batches of one hundred in Rhode Island, where Deb’s deft fingers (and her proximity to Canada, ie, Mr. Fenwick) ensure a finished product that’s crafty, classy, and just DIY enough to find favor with hipsters and anti-hipsters alike. Get your assault on here.

Ray Fenwick is at SQFT Gallery in Nashville. This is good news for me, because I love him, and that makes him one step further from his home in Canada and one step closer to Colorado. I can’t pretend that it’s that awesome — I’m still going to need a front door appearance and an entire comic strip dedicated to me to be really happy — but anything that gets that talented guy over state lines is worth mentioning. Also worth mentioning: A few of Ray’s artworks, composed on vintage book covers in ink and gouache, are up for sale on the SQFT site. I’m running out of good reasons why I don’t need this blog-hating one (a joke, obviously…right, Ray?), so if someone would please get over there and snatch it up, it would make it far easier for me to be fiscally responsible.

It’s tough to categorize Ray Fenwick, a young and hugely promising cartoonist, illustrator, typographer out of Canada. When forced to choose a definition for himself, he jokingly prefers to give something like, “One Who Draws on a Regular Basis, Whether For Purpose of Sharing or Merely For Self-Gratification.” Personally, I prefer to just leave words out of it and let my eyes sort out exactly what it is that Mr. Fenwick spends his time doing, because he’s pretty darn good at everything. His illustrations and musings are honest and sweetly sarcastic, and I’m super buzzed about his typography which is powerful, creative, AND fuctional (a trait sadly lacking in font design these days). While he’s spent a little over a year on his Hall of Best Knowledge comic strip (which ran exclusively in “The Coast,” Halifax’s weekly paper) he recently retired the strip to focus on his new job of managing a soon-to-be letterpress. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Ray is also incredibly funny; the online magazine LAB has a hilarious interview with him up right now. Check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.