What's All This Then?

This site is edited by Coudal Partners, a design, advertising and interactive studio in Chicago, as an ongoing experiment in web publishing, design and commerce. [Next]

What's All This Then?

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Wednesday Edition

Poetry and voice mail, together at last.
Verse by Voice.

Coudal Partners

About This Site

Legends of the Fall

We made a filmed postcard from 93 feet above Northern, Wisconsin to announce our newest limited-release for Field Notes Brand, The Fire Spotter Edition. 3-Packs sold out in less than 48 hours but you can still get Fire Spotters as the first shipment in a Colors Subscription. There are just a few of those left for sale.

Who Owns The Fish

Hey Buddy, Is This Your Sander Vitreus?

Every year since 2004, we have done our part to encourage acrimony and hard feelings at family gatherings. Face it, you'll probably fight about something at your turkey dinner, it might as well be something important, like whether or not you're in the two percent of the world's population that Albert Einstein purportedly claimed could solve this puzzle. So... Who Owns The Fish?

A CP Film In Five Parts

Laboratory Conditions

RIP Ed Grothus who we met while we were in Los Alamos, New Mexico. We were looking for locations for one film project and on the way we discovered a lot more about the town and its people than we bargained for. So we made a different film and called it Laboratory Conditions. We have just reformatted it and are showing it in five episodes.

A Cautionary Tale

To Sweet Hereafter

Heed this well, young costumed beggars.

Stuff About Terrence Malick

There Wasn’t No
Harm In Him,
You’d Give Him a Flower, He’d Keep
It Forever

We've been talking about it for months and now we've finally done it. With the release of The Tree of Life and because there aren't many dedicated resources, we've created a new archive category about one of our heroes. Stuff About Terrence Malick is full of links and resources and we'd appreciate you writing us about anything you think belongs in there. (Use the contact link below.) It's a nice complement to our big Stuff About Stanley Kubrick collection. Logically, Bergman is next, but for now we'll leave that up to the excellent Face To Face.

Copy Goes Here A Film

Inaction Figures

For the proper effect, check the trailer first and then please take a few minutes (eleven actually) to watch our short feature film about words, pictures and bravery, Copy Goes Here.

An occasional series Face Time

Classic Display Faces That Deserve Props

Chauncey H. Griffith's Bodoni Poster Black was developed for Mergenthaler in 1929 and features strong verticals and shallow descenders. It's regularly employed for era-specific "Appearing Nightly at the Copacabana" lobby-card-ish announcements and by and large it's serviceable, if not particularly interesting. But, just in case you find yourself in need of a two skinny chicks whispering near the coke mirror, late 70's, Los Angeles sort of vibe, set it tight in all-caps with almost no line spacing. Suggested pairing: Univers Light Extra Condensed.

Free Vehicle ID System

I Brake For Quasi-Religious Symbols

We have word that two readers in New York City, who followed our guidelines for updating their vehicle identification systems, pulled up alongside each other at a traffic light and celebrated their common bond by honking and pointing. Excellent. More recently, John Heslop's vintage Toyota HiAce is looking badass in Wales. Our plot is beginning to take hold. Write for yours free today, but hurry, we only have tens of thousands left. BTW, who has a green Mini Cooper with the Fleet sticker in Chicago?

A Very Short Attention Span

Regrets, I Have a Few

Are you better suited for starting things than you are for finishing them? Yeah, us too.

In Fast Company, Good Company

Modern Americana

A lovely photo by Chris Mueller with prop styling by Elise McMahon for the "Modern Americana" section of Fast Company's just-released United States of Design issue, which is also available as an innovative iPad app. We're more than a little excited to have our Field Notes Brand products included in this curated collection of Made in the USA products. Thanks for that.

A Street in Logan Square

All Hallows’

It's often lost in the candy-coated, super-styled proceedings of the holiday, but Halloween is really all about departed souls and dealing with loss.

Not Quite so
Fresh Signals

"If someone comes in and asks for a recommendation and you ask for the name of a book that they liked and they can't think of one, the person is not really a reader. Recommend Nicholas Sparks." 25 things I learned from opening a bookstore. ms-02.06

Internet Meme posters. Via Laughing Squid. ms-02.06

Gorgeous contemporary home in Madrid. ms-02.06

Music vid of the moment: M. Ward's The First Time I Ran Away. ms-02.04

And the week is done, now that North Korea and A-Ha intersect. Oh internets, how I love thee so..... ms-02.03

Can't make any friends? SocialCobra.com will buy them for you. Are corporate social media executives writing these guys checks from their personal accounts to keep their jobs? bb-02.03

A visual representation of the constitutions of classic cocktails. ms-02.03

Jamie 37 and I are fans of DigitalRev and Kai's silly but insightful camera reviews. He's put out this great video about Street Photography Dos and Don'ts. bb-02.03

Apparently, only to be seen in Canada but it sure beats any Super Bowl commercial I've seen so far this year, BudweiserCanada's Flash Fans. For BB, MJ, and JC. ms-02.03

"One of the sublime moments of life..." McMillian mixing the King of Cocktails. jc-02.03

Friday Drink Links, bottoms up. jc-02.03

Thibault de Fournas and Christopher Wilson's lovely animated ode to the typeface, Futura Le Specimen Animé. Via The Casual Optimist. jc-02.03

You can tell a lot about a woman by her hands. mgs-02.03

John Pavlus for Fast Company on our Red-Blooded video. Thanks for that. jc-02.03

Field Notes in action, and in the workshop for HGTV's "Kitchen Cousins." jc-02.03

The Art of the Sentence series at Tin House unpacks famous literary lines. Most recently, Virginia Woolf. mgs-02.03

Stacking Green, a vertical garden. mgs-02.03

Rarely seen footage of The Clash at The Palladium in NYC from 1979. "A sublime slice of rock history." I'll say. #TOBTM jc-02.03

"Some agencies go paint-balling together, or quad biking, group bonding days... We invite everyone to come and dress up and get into character for a day." The Isobel Agency's Fantastic Christmas Cards. Bravo. jc-02.03

"...we've put together a gallery of the original packaging art to the G.I. Joe action figures... and sent Chris Sims and resident fashionista Bethany Fong into the trenches to see who has the most style!" G.I. Joe Fashion. Via Mefi. jc-02.03

Trailer for On The Ice. ms-02.03

"In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life. I do not think a young fellow should be too serious, he should be full of the Dickens some times to create a balance." A letter to 16 year-old Jackson Pollack from his pretty spectacular Dad. ms-02.03

An early entry into the Friday Drink Links, Das Beer Boot commercial. I really don't even know what to say about this... just watch it. mcj-02.02

Tineke Meirink finds hidden images in photos of everyday things. mgs-02.02

When you're your own client, and there's no one to step all over your ideas, what happens? Well for us anyhow, we wind up with a series of three promotional films that hardly ever mention the product, or only mention it tangentially. Fire Spotter, Northerly, Red-Blooded. Hmm, maybe we're onto something? jc-02.02

Relink. Everything and I mean everything that you ever wanted to know about International Heraldry and Heralds. jc-02.02

Teaser for the animated Le Meurtre by Cube Creative. Fascinating style. Via Yewknee. jc-02.02

"...'This is the prettiest manhole [I have] ever seen,' could lead to some dirty minded readers misconstruing the point." The Art of the Japanese Manhole. mgs-02.02

"Building an extreme sport from scratch is no easy task." The budding sport of wall trampoline. mgs-02.02

"'I think it's my most... skillful film,' Stanley Kubrick stated in his calm, equanimous voice, the day after screening the first assembly of A Clockwork Orange." Mike Kaplan tells the story of being there in 1971. jc-02.02

"Artists bring what schools need." Nick Radkin of the Teaching Artist Research Project on the future of education. There's a panel discussion on the 15th as well. mgs-02.02

Analog audio equipment made of paper. mgs-02.02

"Some of the ladies talked about going to the hairdresser," Mayor Pons said. "But the hairdresser won, too. And she said, 'I'm not working today.' So that ended that." Just about an entire town in Spain wins the lottery. ms-02.02

TED announces worldwide auditions in 14 countries on six continents, crowd-sourcing at least half of its 2013 program. mgs-02.02

24-packs of awesome temporary robot-heart tattoos in time for Valentines Day. For the 24 kids in your son's class, or the 24 ladies you'd like to... woo? mgs-02.02

Cool old trucks, especially this one. jc-02.02

Chalet Béranger in the French Alps, by architect Noé Duchaufour Lawrance. Sublime. jc-02.02

OK Go helps the kiddos learn about Primary Colors. ms-02.02

From photographer Alan Sailer, Explosions. ms-02.02

"I suspect that a consultant has convinced too many companies that it's best to have as few moving parts as possible and therefore the future will be all about unsatisfying pokes and swipes at lifeless stretches of glass." Touching the Void, by Tyler Brûlé. jc-02.02

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