We love us some movies and of course movie posters. We went ahead and made our own top 20 list to share with you wonderful folks. All the kids are doing it. We got the images from Graphic Exchange and IMP awards. We are sure there are some we missed or just didn’t see at all but these are the ones we like so far. There is a definite theme of simple and clean throughout. Maybe that’s just where our heads are at. Read more »

So I am getting married to the lovely and beautiful  Hillary Townsend Of course we are doing the invites and all related paper goods oursleves. Frankly, what self respecting obsessive compulsive designer would let someone else do their invites. I just wrapped up the Save the Dates and am sending them to get printed shortly. They were a lot of fun to work on and looking at wedding blogs was actually far more interesting than expected. There are a lot of great designers working on wedding related products these days. Especially in the realm of letterpress. We are keeping these inexpensive and going digital but will probably print letterpress for the actual invites.Everything was handrawn other than some of the typography. It was then scanned, vectorized and colored to create what you see above. We hope you like them. Enjoy.

We just wrapped a cool new site for the brilliant animated film by Shane Acker ‘9′. It was a lot of fun working on it and really came out pretty nice. We don’t want to play spoiler to our friends at Focus Features so we are going to hold off on posting screenshots until after the site launch. We’ll post in the ‘Featured Work’ section once it’s up and running.

I originally found this on Oh So Beautiful Paper but just came across the link again. Incredible creations cut from a simple piece of white A4 paper. I can’t even begin to imagine the time and thought that is goes into these.

Michelle over at Crowded Teeth has a bunch of really cool work. She is a designer/illustrator out of LA working for an apparel/accesories company. She has a ton of cool little characters and illustrations. She does an amazing job with her color palettes and her work is really very fun overall. It looks like she has a line of her products started as well. She also did a ‘one drawing a day’ for a year project for her blog. That has gotten our little hamsters going for some sort of similar project. We say keep up the good work to Michelle.

Check out this vintage logo stream on Flickr. There is some pretty cool stuff in the collections. It makes want to rethink my logo. Get inspired and get to work. Did I just say “get inspired”? You are welcome to slap me through the intertubes.

Sadly, an old favorite design blog of ours is shuttering it’s windows and locking up all of the doors. You can read more about it here. The site, created by design couple extraordainare Armin Vit and Byrony Gomez-Palacio, was started in 2003 as home for critical thinking for the traditional designer. Over the years we have enjoyed taking part in the monthly ‘Word Its’, a couple of which made into the super fun ‘The Word It Book‘. We also had a great time contributing to their poster contest a couple years back that was judged by Art Chantry, Ellen Lupton and James Victore. You can seeone of our submissions here. I recall poster numero uno was a hot topic leading to some interwebs style yelling. Oh youth. Word it has found it’s own home over here. They also have a couple of other enjoyable sites like Brand New, Quipsologies and The Design Encyclopedia. All-in-all those kids at Under Consideration have done a great job and we at Ziegenhagen Studio thank and salute them.

I just bought ‘The Design Entrepreneur‘ by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico. It was unsurprisingly well designed and came in a super cool die-cut hard case. The design of the site and book were by Landers | Miller. There quite a few interesting case studies with designers like Maria Kalman, James Victore and Stefan Bucher. I won’t go into some in-depth review. The folks over at Core 77 have one here. I will however note a small complaint. As beautiful and star studded as it was I found myself being a bit disappointed. I was really expecting something I could learn from. Maybe specific production tasks, how some of the artists found vendors, etc. But in reality, it was a lot little comments about ‘drive’ and anecdotes about how the designers got started. I am still glad I bought for it’s overall great design but as a tool for the design entrepreneurs out there it fell a little short.  You can buy it yourself over yonder.

No no no! Not that kind of baby. We can hear our moms calling now. We have a new site up. Yup, the one you’re looking at right now. It’s still a bit gooey and needs some work but after very busy year working with great clients like Focus Features and Shu Uemura we finally have something up. We’ll continue writing copy, fixing bugs, adding forms and tweaking the design but for now here you go. The very betaish version. If you see typos or anything that is generally stupid let us know.

Thanks,

Mike Ziegenhagen