Full of tourists during the summer months, it clears in winter leaving space for snow, mist, and emptiness. Locals carry on with daily life in town, whilst the walks along the sea promenade are eerily beautiful and quiet.
It is always one of our favourite places in the world to spend a few days, and we always think of Mangalia with special fondness.
We do love objects, especially assembled as gifts.
And one lazy Sunday, the Polaroid SX-70 was keen to do some close-ups. Results below, with some of our beloved personal artefacts… gathered from sunny places, empty beaches, hidden magic stores.
Enjoy, and do get inspired!
Thailand. The humid and hot land, with smiling people driving in infernal traffic. A country with houses that spill their guts out in the street. Food stalls everywhere, delicious. Back streets with rats, big lizards, monkeys and tropical forests on islands. Tourists, odd pairs of old European men holding hands with young Thai women. A mix of amazing and baffling that might be the thing for some, or create irritation for others.
Iceland. Just so that there is no suspense. A “hot” touristic place, up to the point where locals are starting to moan that their local pub is now full of happy snappy tourists.
We’ve been there twice, both times with a couple of friends. Once to experience the music scene in the capital, and once to hit the road and do the full tour of the island.
It stroke me from the first time I’ve been there how good machinery ruins look on that magnificent island. Like in no other place. You can find them on the side of the road, in the backyards of remote farms, and at the end of a long empty road of some farm land, where black sand begins.
Some of them are really famous now, tourist attractions by all means, some of them are just sitting discarded by a family who has no need of them anymore. I assume it must be the fact that they are few people there, so far from each other especially in the villages, that it makes no point to transport them at a scrap yard. It looks like most farms or houses have their own machines’ cemetery.
I guess that for our mind, pre-filled with sci-fi movies imagery, it is the closest we will be to a post-apocalyptic scene outside a built set.
Put together in a series they also tell a nice story of the dots you tick as you circle the island, offering a rusty paint like snippets of a great land. They also capture all means of transport used by man, but also strange inner machinery cores unidentifiable for the common eye. Impossible film blends perfectly with every scene, capturing the right mood, or even adding its own fantastic layering. You just need to treat it nicely in the harsh conditions of Iceland. A warm pocket will do in most cases though.
Iceland is a bit like a miniature Earth itself, and is chilling in its majesty and in the fact that it can make you feel like one of the last people remaining on the planet.
Would go to visit again any time, any season. There is no shortage of things to see. And meanwhile, who knows, some more discarded objects will gain some beautiful patina.
This year we went to Cuba, just before a highly anticipated invasion of the small island by the friendly neighbors from the States. A country like no other, we thought it only makes sense to shoot our memories and the city-scapes seen with a Red Konica Pop, a great fun camera, easy to use and which produces excellent results, in both colour and black and white. Be aware though, Cubans didn’t reach yet the stage of stocking photo films again. The joy of memory sticks and digital images is quite the hype there.
You can find the camera for sale on our website and in our Etsy shop. Camera is in great working condition and has just the right amount of Cuban dust on it to make it perfect.
We’ve decided to enlist a bit of help from Etsy, and we’ve created a decoy store on there.
Our main digandgift website will remain the main inspirational source for any gifts you might want or dream of.
And to add to the recently posted items on Etsy, here you go…some gift ideas. Do contact us for further details on items that are not listed.
More to come… 
When we asked talented Mr Krysztoff Dorion (more of his work here) to build our logo, little did we know that it will be rooted in one of the ideas that changed graphic design.
That idea was of found typography, and the most direct influence on this is the Alphabet with Tools (1977), by Mervyn Kurlansky (a still active graphic designer in education – you can visit his website here), who takes everyday objects found in homes and workshops and transforms them into the letters of the Western alphabet. But the idea is even older, as it can be seen in A. de Balmes’ Grammatica hebraea, 1523:
or even more absurd in Stefan Sagmeister ‘s Having Guts Always Works Out For Me, 2007:
and finally simple enough in Jeffrey Tribe’s Hooks Alphabet, 2008:
True to the fact that logos “converge into a cohesive meditation on the fundamental mechanism of graphic design — to draw a narrative with a point of view, and then construct that narrative through the design process and experience” (100 ideas that changed graphic design), Krysztoff built the logo using “tools” that can be found on our website, or that are inspired by our website. A classic watch, a roll of film from a camera, fountain pen or a balance, all can be found in gifts such as Gentleman’s box of goodies, Write and moustache, Time to travel kit or the red Konica Pop. And if not to be found in our gifts on the website, they are part of the attire of our dandy customers: umbrellas to be used as walking sticks, a tie, and why not, even a trombone. Just imagine… you own private party entertaining guests from the lead of your brass band.
It must be true that graphic designers see letters in all the shapes around us…
Being kids at the beginning of the 90’s, we caught glimpses of Twin Peaks when it was in its major and fascinating glory. We caught glimpses of scary images between our parents fingers, because we used to take their hand to cover or eyes when things got chillier. And we were left with a longing feeling for a mysterious and wonderful place, that we couldn’t fully comprehend at that time.
And it seems that the power of Twin Peaks was strong on many other people’s mind, that during all this 24 or 25 years since it ended, it keeps our imagination working.
Several pages on facebook like Welcome to Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks Art, Twin Peaks Lovers, or Twin Peaks Festival, plus a brilliant page dedicated entirely to the show, and even full of animated little characters from the series, Welcome to Twin Peaks, are all keeping the flame alive, the famous “fire walk with me” catch phrase. And then it came something everybody dreamt of for decades…the show will be back in 2016, all directed by David Lynch, and written my Mark Frost. How cool is that, to catch the series at the beginning when you were a kid, and revise it + see the new one when you are fully grown adult? Pretty amazing.
And to celebrate this legacy from the 90’s, we’ve put together some pictures of amazing things people were creating during the years, just to fill in the gap left by the unexpected ending after 2 series. Most of the photos are from Welcome to Twin Peaks, we give them all credits.
The awesome t shirt, coffee scented:
The jazz reinterpretation of the hypnotic soundtrack, with a cool cover design, by Bookhouse band:
The wooden mini scene of Jimmy Scott singing Sycamore trees in the movie Twin Peaks – Fire walk with me:
Two of the most beloved characters, Audrey and Dale Cooper, always flirting:
The 90’s game that never was:
The girls of Twin Peaks as 50’s pin ups:
The tape…the Dale Cooper tape, talking to Diane. A rare artefact:
The Polaroid:
The graphic poster, full of symbolism:
The Welcome to Twin Peaks project, incorporating the vinyl with the soundtrack in real life scenery:
And a reinterpretation of the main musical theme, on cello:
There is a land far away from Europe, but also far away back in time, when things used to be slower and people were fascinated by TV as the only in house entertainment and connection with outside world. We are swamped today with all kind of screens with internet connection, and the TV in the old sense, when it had a few channels to choose from, seems already somehow antiquated.
Simone Lueck, with her series Cuba TV brings back a long forgotten charm, the one of the main apparatus of the house. The images are saturated in colours, the houses of the people are poor but welcoming, and retro seems to be the word of the day when we think of Cuba. Castro and baseball, cigars and Oldsmobile, rum and Hemingway.
Read the full story of Simone’s TV journey here and here.
We are putting the gloves on, and going to Havana in style, towards a fascinating past.
