Every year Urban Outfitters gives away a free music compilation.

This year it is called “LSTN#4″ and contains 21 free tracks.

Check it out

Indie filmmaker gets ALS. Begins to document his life as he becomes a character of his own work.

http://www.transfatty.com

http://www.patrickobrienfoundation.org

There’s a lesson here – several.

An ornament stuffed with cake sprinkles | photo by Alan Sailer

I stumbled across this photo gallery on Flickr of photographer Alan Sailer, who appears to favor shots of various objects captured mid-explosion after hit with a bullet. First of all, just the technical skill and timing required to achieve such shots is amazing. But the real fascination for me is how the different materials react – fruit splits open with a weird symmetry, ornaments shatter, and jello looks like a colored wave from one of those old Juicy Fruit commercials.

View the gallery here.

Last week President Obama introduced two economic recovery program logos: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and The Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (Tiger).

So what do you think about these logos?

Photo by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre | http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/

TIME magazine recently posted this collection of photos by photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre of Detroit’s economic cityscape. The photos are incredibly haunting and beautiful, and some look like the the relics you’d find if you were living 100 years in the future, post-apocalypse style.

View the slideshow

Are you on the fence as to whether or not social media can help build your brand?

Check out mashable.com’s 5 Twitter tactics for building a stellar brand.

Twitter is growing at an exponential rate. Besides news organizations using Twitter, now the police department has tapped into it to communicate quickly with the public. Check out CNNs latest article on the Police and Twitter.

©2009 Scott Leisler

We were commissioned by a gentleman to illustrate a scene from a movie that still stands as an icon of the 80’s  – Roadhouse, starring Patrick Swayze. We had a great time doing it and look forward to more work like this in the future.

One way of combining a good dose of creative thinking and technology is to provide something useful to your audience. Nike Plus did a good job of this with their running shoes. They created a cool online application that runners could download data from their shoes to track their mileage, pace, and calories burned. Runners can also map future goals and progress online. This is just one example of how companies are moving towards spending marketing dollars wisely to create something user centered verses simply waving their flag.

Since its deput, runners have logged 100 million miles worldwide and the company’s global running-shoe sales are up from $8 billion (fiscal year ending May 2006) to $9.7 billion (fiscal year ending May 2008), a 21% increase. Proof positive that when creative, strategy and technology are appropriately combined, it can pay big dividends.

Design Sponge Online

As a creative I love “Before and Afters.” I love seeing the old logo compared to the new, the old web site compared to the reinvented version, and I especially love seeing environments before and after. I know quite a few people that watch HGTV just to watch the last 5 minutes of each show to see the big reveal – sometimes good and sometimes bad. One site I have become a fan of is Design Sponge. Check out a few of their user submitted Before and Afters.