i wanted to share a project that kind of combines all the things i love: design, small business, female entrepreneurship, the dc creative community, and well, just pretty things in general.

appointed is an american-made brand of beautifully designed desktop goods.

from them: "we believe a beautiful work environment fosters creativity, productivity and overall well-being. and we believe that each new notebook represents untapped potential and endless possibility. our goal is to add beauty to the workday and to outfit workspaces everywhere with tools that energize and inspire."

i've written here before about how important i think it is to bring design and beauty into everyday spaces that are typically beige and boring. so, i love the idea of having polished, thoughtfully designed office products that can go in and out of all the spaces of life - from the 9-5 stuff to the creative stuff to the to-do lists and the big dream brainstorming. if it's something you're interacting with multiple times a day it should be beautifully designed!

pretty right?

added bonus? appointed was started by dc-based graphic designer and creative powerhouse suann song. i've been following suann for years and she's consistently made beautiful things and supported dc small business.

they launched on kickstarter a couple of days ago so go and get em!

as they say on their kickstarter, "beautiful tools to inspire beautiful work." indeed!

one of the beautiful things about twitter is that every now and then as you *scrollscrollscroll* something will make you pause and think or smile. even if it's fleeting, every now and then a tweet creates an opportunity for insight or connection or levity in your day. but it's fleeting!

enter onehundredforty. this is an awesome "art experiment" that merges art and design and technology. the way it works is that you select a tweet and they design and print a poster based on your tweet. "designs are made up of several different components, and a set of rules determines how these components are to be combined, including a grid system which adapts to the length of any tweet. if you’re not pleased with the result, you can simply click refresh and see a new design for your tweet." there are 50 original artworks to chose from.

i love this line from their description of the project "we saw twitter as an interesting way to bridge the digital world with the analog. to preserve something that at the moment is just being lost among the 500,000,000 new tweets produced each day."

one of the things that really resonated with me about this project is the idea of bringing the online offline. i've talk about this before, but with the massive amount of content and sharing that happens online i think we need more people and more brands thinking about how to bridge the online and offline, how to connect online sharing with physical experiences.

cool, right? get yourself over to their kickstarter.

via miss moss