It’s 83 degrees in Boulder today — a temperature that’s been slow to surface in comparison to the instant heat of a year ago — and all of this direct sunlight has set me to thinking about summer reading. Since I’ve never really warmed to the “beach novel,” (read: 160 pages discussing the proper way to match your shoes to your boyfriend) I think I’m going to start with upnorth’s latest edition of their graphic design/art zine oneonenine. Issue three, titled “there’s no i in team” focuses, as the name suggests, on groups and teams, and features work by 123klan, iManifest, Little Friends of Printmaking, and a nice line-up of other great designers/artists (which of course includes Jeremyville; seriously, Jeremy, do you even sleep?). As per usual, work from Steve Green and Justin Thomas Kay (the boys behind upnorth) will also fill a few pages, and I can’t wait to see their latest type treatments, which make me swoon like a delicate maiden, pried from the jaws of a fire-breathing dragon.

Oneonenine is only available at a few locations across the U.S., so unless you’re lucky enough to live next to one of their six stockists, I recommend ordering direct from their site where issues run 13 bucks a pop, shipping included. Cheaper than a hardcover, no?

I love day-lab, purveyors of all indepedently-designed trinkets shiny, girly and sparkly…but I am totally stoked that now there’s a guy-focused counterpart, Night-Lab. Featuring all sorts of home accessories, tshirts and art — the kind that you used to be able to get at Urban Outfitters before every last bastard on earth found out about it and started shopping there — you can clearly tell by the inventory levels that it’s a new site, but judging by the success and growth of its sister site, they’ll be at that level in no time. I’m not thrown off by the “guy” focus, either — anyone who wants to gift me with the Half Time Clock will hear absolutely no complaints. At all.

Last week, to celebrate the launch of our spankin’ new Showcase feature, we teamed up with Spout for five weeks of giveaways to the highest-rated entries to the Showcase feature. For your chance to win a $100 gift certificate to spend on any of the merchandise over at Spout, upload a picture and a blurb about your new favorite thing, and whoever tallies the most thumbs-up by Sunday will win the moolah — and we won’t know if you recruit your officemates to vote for you. Because of an all-way tie this past week (remember, a thumbs-down cancels out a thumbs-up), there’ll be two certificates being given away this week. Good luck!

Amelia at Twee Shirts sent both Josh and I a pair of her t-shirts “I Stomach…” last week — Josh got the LA version; me, the NY — and I have to say that it’s the exact kind of tongue-in-cheek kind of humor that I treasure. As I was leaving on a caffeine run the other day, I noted never to wear it if I was in an anti-social mood, because the “I [graphic of a stomach] NY” print generated two fairly amusing conversations in a ten-minute time period: the first, with my roommate, who questioned why my shirt had a bladder on it. I kindly informed her that it was a stomach, and after thinking about it for a second, she burst out into a fit of laughter. The second interaction was with two guys on the street; it went a little something like this:

Guy #1: “Hey, baby. I Heart New York, too.”
Me: “Uhhhh.”
Guy #2: “You [expletive, expletive], that’s a stomach”
Me: “Uhhhh.”
Guy #1: “But why would you wear that?”
Guy #2: “Because let’s face it bro, sometimes living here [expletive] sucks, but you deal with it because most of the time it’s [expletive] awesome.”
Guy #1: “Oh. like, you stomach it.”
Me: “Yeah. That’s exactly right.”
Guy #2: “You really are [expletive, expletive]“
Just goes to show, honesty is always the awkward amusing best policy.

Rio de Janeiro’s Supercordas has been getting lots of buzz here in Brazil, and the hype is for good reason, as I can’t stop listening to this awesome five-member band. They call themselves a rock and roll group, but add a late-’60s psychedelia slant and you’ve got their unique brand of nostalgic rock, one that takes you to a time when having long hair and strumming a guitar next to a fire wouldn’t cause you to be the center of ridicule as it sometimes does now. It’s unabashedly country, but done a la-Beatles and a touch of Wilco, and also with plenty of jangly segments that do their darndest to push the good-time vibes. The group released its second album, Seres Verdes ao Redor, last year to critical claim in the country, but I’m rooting that they’ll break the big-in-Brazil barrier and catch on in other places, like CSS and Bonde do Role have done.

The rate at which graphic design evolves is something that never ceases to amaze me, but after playing around on John Ruppel’s interactive portfolio, I’m even more blown away than usual. Ruppel seems to gather a good deal of his inspiration from nature, translating things like micro-organic movements and the random structure of a snowflake to generate coded representations of reality, resulting in absolutely beautiful, interactive pieces that are strikingly resemblant to the real deal. Ruppel also works more classically for clients like Acura and TEQUILA\ (the award-winning online advertising agency), and you can tell that the power behind his work is largely derived from his passion for experimentation. I haven’t seen very many portfolios that demonstrate this sort of creative process, and while it’s obvious that he’s already very successful, I recommend keeping an eye out to see what he comes up with next — we sure will be.

It took me nearly two hours to get to Newark Airport from Midtown Manhattan on Friday evening. Had I not been flying with Silverjet, I would have missed my 7:30pm flight– after all I arrived at the check in desk at 7:18pm. If you’re thinking to yourself “are you kidding me?” I’m not, at all. SilverJet, the new business class-only flight to London from Newark advises customers to arrive 30 minutes before the flight — 45 if you have bags to check. They hand-carried my last checked bag onto the plane and with 12 minutes to spare, encouraged me to dip into their private lounge for a drink. I hadn’t even flown on the plane yet, and I was already in love with the whole terminal experience. Full review continues after the jump!

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When we got an email from an e-glue fan, my first impression of the product was that it was a kid-friendly glue stick. I was a little thrown (I thought glue WAS kid friendly; we all ate it, right?), but after conducting further research, I found that e-glue is, in actuality, a French vinyl sticker company. These stickers (which seem to function exactly like what you’d find at Pop Cling) are supposedly made “pour les enfants” (which of course means that they are perfect for Americans as well as french children) and come in a nice variety of shapes and creatures. E-glue boasts a rather large selection of vinyl, and one nice advantage to shopping with them is that you choose the color and the size of your chosen pieces, something that is still tough to find in the States. I’m going to try and convince my roommate to put one of these trees up in our living room, and if she says no, I might just order an XXL tyrannosaurus-rex out of spite. One small downside to the company is that the site is entirely in French, so if you don’t speak the language you may find it tough to navigate. On the other hand, I speak very little French — and used to eat sniff glue — but still managed to get along, so don’t be scared; just shoot them an e-mail if things get too confusing.