Hey, if you see these two tricksters at a party tonight, don't let them convince you to give them the special drinks!
December 2006 Archives
Wishing our friends and family a very special Christmas. Santa obviously wants me to do more work at night from home rather than going back to the office—he brought me a new "work enabling device" otherwise known as MacBook Pro. "Taking work home" is a part of life when you own a business. Problem has been that what I need to do my older G3 powerbook just couldn't keep up, so I found myself heading back to the office a lot at night. Not exactly fun to always be leaving Krissy and Lo alone at home and not exactly fun to wait 10 minutes for Photoshop to finish a task on a high res image. The G3 doesn't owe us a thing, it's been well used and abused for four years and will become our house web and email machine. So, here it is, the first blog post on the new machine. I've got a lot to get used to on this thing. Apple really made a lot of tremendous improvements over the G3. another piece of Apple's incredible design and engineering. And yes, we do own apple stock. And yes, Apple today is nothing like the Apple of yesteryear. Steve Jobs and his team has really rocked out a nice product.
Although Carroll's and The Cranberry Bog are long since closed, we got a bit of exposure in the Asbury Park Press about the place. Quite a few years ago we began making signs for the Reynolds Family at the restaurant. When the restaurants abruptly closed all kinds of rumors were flying. We were recently visited by another client, whose company has purchased the property and is in the process of converting the landmark into retail shops. The Asbury Park Press article had a couple of nice shots of our Carved Gold Leaf Restaurant sign and our digitally printed real estate coming soon sign with an architectural rendering of the building.
When you order a carved sign from us, it passes through a tremendous number of steps in it's journey from a hunk of raw material to a beautiful finished sign. Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing the steps of the process with our blog readers, using the carved house number holiday gift signs as an example.
This shot shows the raw material on the computerized router being cut to shape. For the vast majority of our carved signs, we cut out the shape and paint the panel *before* we do the carving. Sounds counterintuitive now but you'll understand why a bit later. It's white on top because we have pre-applied a coat of high build exterior primer to the entire sheet. This helps establish a uniform foundation to build on for subsequent paint coats.
Here's a Job Anthony and I went out to install yesterday at the Museum of New Jersey Maritime History in Beach Haven. It required roof access on the elevation facing the bay with our typical winter west winds. Yesterday wasn't as bad as monday when we went to do the job–that day it was so windy I had to hold on to the deck above to keep from being blown off. It was a bit colder yesterday, but the winds were only 15 knots, not the 25 we had on Monday! Hey-at least the wind was blowing in the right direction to help hold the pattern up against the wall. The job turned out great—you're looking at 23 karat gold leaf letters "pin mounted" to the wall. I'm really excited too as we're getting ready to start the interior museum graphics, displays and lettering as well. We really enjoy creating museum, interpretive and exhibit graphics—maybe it's my science background. The marriage of information, data and beautifully executed graphics and displays gets me going! Hey, how many people can say they've read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information?
I think all signmakers install Christmas lights this way. Big boys get to "play" with their toys and the little boys get to see what Daddy gets to do all day. Now of course, all I hear is "Daddy, can we go to Typestries in Manahawkin and get the white bucket truck?" For the record for the hecklers the two of us DO NOT exceed the bucket weight limit. It's close, though!
Logan really enjoys coming in and checking out the machines. Here he's showing off a print that is to be applied to a cut out Christmas Tree. The tree sits in the lobby of Sea Oaks. banquet center as a welcome sign and sponsor recognition sign for the LBI Rotary club holiday auction. We made the tree a few years ago, and simply make a new print with the current sponsors each year. By the way, that's Molson in the shot (not Keys) - she's getting so big! Stop in before she's not a puppy anymore!
