Websites I Like, and Why

For me, the content is king, original content that actually has a bit of thought put into it is what gets me coming back and looking forward to it. Some sites I check out of habit, but there are some I eagerly click to if I see there is a new post or its been recently updated. I am going to leave off sites like Honeyee and Inqmnd however at keep the list down, while blog popularity is growing, the amount of good sites with good content doesn’t seem to be growing at the same rate, and in contrast I’ve noticed the content and writing actually sliding in general. But here’s some that are on point.

Valet: Mens fashion, style, lifestyle. At first I was thrown off by the layout but they’ve updated it and the content is really good. They do a nice job with ‘The Mix’ and the daily layouts are fresh and pack in great info.

Dejour: Kyle recently switched his layout as well to make it easier to publish new stuff as it comes. His posts are insightful, opinionated and you don’t seem them on any other blogs (until after he writes them).

Scoute: Although it’s only updated once a month, Scoute produces some great, compact pieces, very clean layouts, and insight into a men’s market that has never existed like it does today.

Mens.Style: Their resources are endless, their execution is really good. The are consistently updated the Upgrader and the blog with mostly good items, and they give interesting opinions and write ups.

A Continuous Lean: A great mix of posts from Michael keep it interesting. The “Fall Guy” series was awesome, along with the “From the desk of…” Michael has great taste in classic items from watches to Porter book straps.

In Marcus Troy’s Bag

Fellow blog grinder and entrepreneur, Marcus Troy is next up on the bag feature. The entries are definitely interesting to check out, some funny items, some really dope I wish I had in my bag, Marcus is packing a mask and gloves to bust slugs fortunately for us, it’s still One Love. Mr. Troy kept the descriptions pretty minimal but there are some items worth paying attention to - chargers and balaclava.

Books, MacBook, Canon camera, Magnum condoms, Apple and Canon chargers, iPhone, headphones, gloves, jacket just in case you never know, M-65 Nike Tech pack, passport and passport holder, iPod touch, Mont Blanc pen.

In Jake Davis’ Bag

No introduction, your taste makers taste maker, this stuff stuff is all in Jake’s bag.

Every man should own three “manbags”… (That’s what they are gentlemen so let’s not kid ourselves by calling them anything else.) One for the office, one for the country, and one for the beach…That’s it. Now office can really mean several different environments.  This is your place of work bag and since most people work in some sort of metropolis we can call this your city bag… Here’s mine…
J. Press Navy Stripe Tote. It’s simple, clean, and classic. My girl bought this for me a few seasons back before I met Mark McNairy. Mark is right up there with style leaders in NYC. I try to keep up. This bag helps.
Moleskine Pocket Storyboard Notebook. “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” - Ernest Hemingway
Minnetonka Double Bottom Slippers With Buffalo Plaid Lining. My father would wear these around our home in upstate New York. Now I wear them in the edit… Whatever makes you comfortable, right?
R By 45RPM Hand Indigo-Dyed Gauze Bandana. My good friend Brendon Babenzien turned me onto wearing bandanas around the neck similar to a tie but less formal feeling. The gauze cotton from 45rpm gets softer with age and wear. For the rest of the in-depth description of Jake’s contents Read more

DO Lectures

My mom is going to like this post, I know it. I came across this website which has a set of lectures or talks called the DO Lectures. It’s a variety of people who do interesting things and are really passionate about it. Basically they DO things, do them well and do them interestingly. The idea of the lectures and website is to showcase some of this people who have gone out and done things, and try to inspire people to do their own things. Whether its business, technology, arts or beekeeping, there are a number of speakers that are worth listening to. Tim Ferriss is one of the speakers, he’s the author of the ‘4 Hour work week’ and has accomplished some incredible things in his life while overcoming a few physical and mental disabilities. He’s one of the most positive, driven and interesting people out there. I know about as much as anybody that there are do-ers and there are the rest of the people who talk about doing. As a doer, I’ve noticed I have met more and more people who are making it happen for themselves and it seems to be a common topic having worked with people who talk about it. Maybe one of these lectures will help you do.

Friendly Fire

Sweet Thing: Best toilet paper ever, even if it is 8.95 a roll. (Patina)

Reading: Ed Templeton’s latest book Deformer is out now, get it at Amazon

Advertising: Despite their Political INcorrectness, as a hip-hop fan I’ll never get tired of the St. Ide’s ads. (The Aesthetic Poet)

Blog: You probably already know that Vancouver is Awesome, well now so is the rest of Canada. (CanadaisAwesome)

Photography: Marc Jabobs is the lastest Terry Richardson victim. Spongebob is hard as fuck. (Supertouch)

Baseline Magazine

Some of you might be familiar with Baseline Magazine but I actually hadn’t heard of it before I found it in a magazine shop last weekend. The layout, stock weight, and use of type is really nice. The type part probably has to do with being a magazine all about type, designing with type, it’s history, news, and focusing on nice use of letters. The philosophy is described as ’stemming from a firm belief that design and layout should spring from, and be in balance with, the contents. The design is approached with intellectual vigour. The format and flexible grid structure allow both for the vigorous display of rich graphic material and the appropriate detailing in text-led pages.’ Whether you are into learning more about type, or just reading an interesting, well designed magazine, I’d recommend picking up a copy of Baseline. Check out the articles Vivo in Typo and Control Print in the new issue.

Acne Paper

I picked up a copy of the fall 08 edition of Acne Paper at Illustrated Example last week and finally had a chance last night to flip through and have a good look at each page. The twice annual publication is beautiful. The over sized pages, perfectly printed photos and clean Scandinavian design is very evident. There are some interesting pieces on actors, photographers, and designers. I find work like this amazing. I mean it’s not a high publicized piece of design, yet it is done incredibly well. I can imagine all of the work and hours that go into it, but how many people will ever really even see it, read it, or appreciate the quality? I find magazine like this to be great sources for inspiration for articles, layouts, or concepts. I’d recommend checking out the work if you come across it, take your time and appreciate it.

Stockist or Stocklist

I have to admit I’m a little confused at what the right term is, stockist or stocklist. Does it depend on whether I’m referring to the brands in a store or the stores that carry a brand? It sounds odd to me to call a store a ’stockist’ and I don’t think I have ever heard a boutique referred to as one, although I’ve read it. I think it should just be stocklist. It reads well, makes sense to me, and isn’t confusing. It’s the list of stores that stock the brand or it’s the list of brands the store stocks. Isn’t that easy? Are you a stockist or do you have a stocklist? Then there are stores that don’t even show the list of what they stock, do they deserve to be called a stockist?

T Magazine Travel Fall 2008

There are many comforts I miss about living in North America, especially the New York Times Weekend Edition. While, living in Europe as its own perks – unfortunately NYT is not available where I live. While I have my pick of British papers with their respective weekend editions (the Guardian & Financial Times), they just do not compete with NYT in my opinion. First off, I would love to see T Magazine in print, but its online lay out is superb and will make due while I am abroad. This weekend saw the launch of Fall Travel 2008, which is quite extensive. Highlights include – a small piece with Hirofumi Kurion Co-Founder of United Arrows in Japan, an old growth photo shoot not far from h(y)r headquarters in Olympic National Park – Washington State, and a style map for Zurich (which I hope to hit up next week with added stops at VMC and Filippa K).

The Future of Media

Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin Magazine had some insightful insight on the current state of media and the way print and web publications have developed. He also finds himself ready to make some predictions on the future of media. Here’s an interesting quote from the piece which you can read here.

“The future of media will boil down to, and pivot on the axis of, one thing: imagination — how creative we are in exploiting technology and, equally important, with content. The future will not be a war between new media and traditional media, but between obsolescence and vision. In that sense, it will be far more apocalyptic and transformative than just a bunch of old-line companies going away.

That does not mean that print has nothing to worry about. It has, quite literally, everything to worry about: from the expense of its materials, workforce and delivery, to loss of revenues and the erosion of its dominance as a source of information. But the print medium can fix that set of problems. “Can” is the operative word.”

Honeyee Culture

Do you like magazines, music, and film? I do, so I’m kind of excited they added a new section to the Hnyee.Store with the website revamp. The honeyee culture section sells the Honeyee Mag’s, mixtapes, albums, other magazines, and movies. Of course following in tradition Honeyee style, everything is really dope. I don’t know if I just have similar tastes to Hiroshi and his fam, or if he is somehow making me like everything on his website. While that is still to be determined, I will hope that he doesn’t have brain control on me, and I do actually like all of these products. I am missing the last two editions of Honeyee Mag (vol. 5 & 6) so if anybody can help me out I’d really appreciate it. It’s quite amazing the amount of work that goes into the Honeyee site, running the store, the news, the blogs, all designed quite well. I recently checked the Alexa ranking on Honeyee unsurprisingly to find it ranked quite high, although I was surprised its readers were from Japan 90% of the time. Yes I know a lot of it is in Japanese, but I thought a lot of people would still check out the site, just maybe not copy and paste the articles into translators like me…

Monocle Shop-in-Shop @ D.S.M

Monocle is a dope magazine. I don’t care what the haters say. It’s beautifully designed magazine that pulls in a great variety of information on business, fashion, design, and international endeavours of all sorts. Whether you like pictures, nice print books, or expensive things, you have to like something about Monocle. Now they have taken it to the next level by opening up a Shop-in-Shop at the Dover Street Market in London. The shop has all of their back stock issues, along with a collection of their new collaboration products. To top the list is a collection of four bags by Head Porter. The olive green tote, boston, and weekender are accompanied by a new short hauler in black by the Japanese baggage vets who did a great job. Also in the shop is the ‘Scent One’ which was the collaboration scent with Comme des Garcons, so you can bet the shop is probably smelling pretty good as well. For those of us in North America, apparently Nomad has the Porter collection in store as well.

Sneeze Mag, vol. 2

Remember we told you about Sneeze Magazine? Well we did, and it’s back. The interesting feature of the newspaper-style magazine is that they handle their own distribution, not by calling people they need to sell it. But they actually set up their own news stand boxes in different cities. They are now out with the 2nd issue of Sneeze. With an interesting article on Padmore and Barnes, along with a lot more. The photos are really nice, the layouts are good, the content is solid, the concept is fresh. Go find one and read it. Sneeze is growing quickly as well, its encouraging to see a nice piece of print work making it happen right now. I don’t know if the LA location is up and running, but there are boxes in Vancouver and New York where you can pick up your copies, so keep your eye out. You can also buy them online here.

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Nobody Wants Magazines Anymore

This is unfortunate, I know. I’ve grown up with a huge respect for printed work. From before our first issue online released, I wanted h(y)r collective to translate into a printed format, but can it work? WWD just did a fairly extensive report on the sales of magazines in the past year. Although we have seen a few publications shut their doors and heard rumors about declining sales, until now there wasn’t a lot of hard proof. Magazine sales have gone down nearly 50%. That is a huge number. Apparently a lot of editors are attempting to push their subscriptions harder, and that includes online. I even thought about the possibility of online paid subscriptions, for about 12 seconds. With the endless amount of internet resources and the increasing speed, it’s not hard to see why printed publications are seeing hard times. Blogs and online magazines are growing weekly and monthly by the thousands. Vogue and GQ were among some of the magazines looked at that reported noticeable drops. The internet really is the way of the magazine future. You can find much more niche sites and get more depth information on the products/people/events you actually care about. I really hope that printed magazines are always around because I do love them. I hope this hard market will just push magazines to create better pages, do better features, and make a better overall product, rather than fill the pages with hideous ads that pay the bills as we’ve already seen some take this path. It will be interesting to see which wins out in the long run.

Radio Silence: Visual History of American Hardcore Music

Radio Silence: a Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music is a new book released about Hardcore music, documenting it in a visual fashion. “Radio Silence documents the ignored space between the Ramones and Nirvana through the words and images of the pre-Internet era where this community built on do-it-yourself ethics thrived. Authors Nathan Nedorostek and Anthony Pappalardo have cataloged private collections of unseen images, personal letters, original artwork, and various ephemera from the hardcore scene circa 1978-1993. Unseen photos lay next to hand-made t-shirts and original artwork brought to life by the words of their creators and fans. Radio Silence includes over 500 images of unseen photographs, illustrations, rare records, t-shirts, and fanzines presented in a manner that abandons the aesthetic clich’es normally employed to depict the genre and lets the subject matter speak for itself. Contributions by Jeff Nelson, Dave Smalley, Walter Schreifels, Cynthia Connolly, Pat Dubar, Gus Peña, Rusty Moore, and Gavin Ogelsby with an essay by Mark Owens.” This book looks like a great read, or better yet a great look. Info: Grotesk