Left for the airport at around 4am which in hindsight was a touch too early. Surprisingly there were three flights from various carriers all leaving at the same time for Salt Lake City. Since I couldn't request seats on my flight, I had to go to the gate to receive my assignment. Seat 44F, the last row on the plane, by a window. I usually prefer the aisle seat but having the window to lean on helped me get a few hours of shuteye until my bladder rudely interrupted my slumber. I hate disturbing the other passengers in my row so I usually end up holding it in until I can't stand it anymore.

My window seat allowed me to keep an eye on the luggage handlers. Surprisingly the New York handlers were pretty gentle with our bags, more so than the ones at SLC. Having a semi-heavy bag is great since it prevents them from throwing your bag around. I'm not going to have the luxury on spying on the handlers on my return flight since I requested aisle seats on both flights, having a connection (in Phoenix) also worries me since I've experienced misplaced bags on one too many occasions.

For the latter half of the flight I just looked out the window the entire time observing the midwest landscape and land use. Half an hour from touching down I saw a plane flying parallel to us which I thought odd. Interestingly enough the plane also landed at the exact same time on a parallel runway. Of all the flights I've taken, this was the first instance of a parallel flight and landing that I observed. I didn't even know they allowed this to occur...

After getting in at around 10:30am, we had some problems finding the shuttle for Fox Car Rental. We went with the most ghetto agency since they had the cheapest rates. But that also meant no kiosk at the airport. We had to go to the parking garage and find the orange sign they hung up on a column. Ended up with a PT Cruiser which is tiny but we didn't want to bump up to the next class since it would have doubled the rental rate. We did have to ask them for another PT Cruiser though after seeing the bald tires on the first car.

With plenty of daylight left we decided to drive around SLC before heading into the mountains. Our first stop was LeniTech, a boardshop in the northeast section of SLC owned by one of Jonyean's friends. We purchased some lift tickets there and I finally purchased a copy of DC Mountain Lab 1. My favorite snowboarding movie, figured I should support and grab a copy even though it's a few seasons old.

Our next stop was Canyon Sports for Solitude lift tickets since LeniTech didn't carry them. They also hooked us up with a card for a free entree at Red Rock so we headed over there to grab a late lunch. Over lunch we settled on hitting up BackCountry.com's warehouse and Walmart before heading to Park City.

BackCountry's warehouse was HUGE! And in the spirit of their web business, their retail shop was tiny. Instead of having products on the floor, they had a couple of Mac Minis located on a bar where you browsed their e-commerce store and either placed orders on the web or copied down item numbers on a slip of paper. You then walked to the other end of the shop where there was a window to the adjacent warehouse, there you hand over your slip to pick up your order. Check the photos, put up Sierra's website while I was there =D.

Walmart as expected was ridiculously CHEAP. A gallon of milk for $2? nutty. We bought enough food for the week for about five people and it only ended up costing us around $190. Sick. Anyway, Happy New Year's Eve! Here's to a more optimistic 2009...

Whenever I get to the portion of a design where I start setting the attributes for the copy, I'm always fiddling around with the font type, font sizes and line height. Well... as much as you can via CSS anyway.

Somehow I always end up with either 12px/16px or 14px/18px. Last night while going through another round of fiddling, I decided to see what the experts had to say about the line-height property and stumbled upon an easy 'set it and forget it' property. Just set the line-height to 140% for sans-serif fonts and 145% for serif fonts. So easy, even a caveman can do it. Thanks Charlie, your biggest fan.

Seasonal Short from Trevor Van Meter on Vimeo.

It's a travesty that I haven't seen Trevor Van Meter's work until this AWESOME season short that reminds me of Stitch (from Lilo and Stitch) a bit. Click on over to browse his portfolio, love his style. Hope you like it too, happy holidays!

Also just found out today that Vimeo is owned by IAC. Where have I been?

On Christmas Day I was watching CNBC (of all channels to watch on a day the U.S. markets are closed) which had a decent lineup of specials. One of them was a profile titled, Made in China, People's Republic of Profits. The most interesting part of the show? Their coverage of Yum! Brand's Chinese fast food chain... that made its debut in China. Called Dong Fang Ji Bai 东方既白 (East Dawning). It's nothing like the Panda Express stuff that comes to mind. It's similar to the Japanese fast food chains like Yoshinoya. Would love to try it out if and when I go to China again. I know the rich have adopted golfing, but how about skiing? Let's put some more money into those slopes!

In addition to finishing up some identity work for Qi, I went through my Google Reader to try to get the unread count down to a more manageable level. Some of the interesting things I came across were blog posts looking into the various logos for movie production companies (never occured to me just how great most of the movie studio logos were), automotive companies (will Jake and I ever get AutoDestination off the ground?) and tech companies (which was the least interesting).

Did you know that Columbia is the female personification of America? Or that the MGM was given the Lion mascot because its studio publicist graduated from Columbia University? Interesting stuff! Not useful, but interesting...

Last but not least, a quick look at 100 branding agencies' logos.

(credit: Elmo)

I've been on a roll recently with these typography related posts. With my lack of training and trepidation in this area, I've largely ignored reading up on it and implementing text-heavy designs until recently. I don't know what will replace the Web2.0 look, but I find myself increasingly fascinated with text-heavy sites that forgo the usage of images in its design. Though it'll still be a number of years until the CSS3 standard is nailed down and adopted (hopefully without much deviation) by the various browsers, enterprising developers and designers have introduced a number of workarounds. If you want to start getting crazy with typography, check out this guest post by Juul Coolen on WebDesignerWall, Fonts and the Web.

In case you didn't notice, the screenshot above shows some of Vista's awful ClearType anti-aliasing. It's apparently a known issue that Jon Tan recently touched on in his blog. So... much... to read and digest.

I've been having some issues with a small piece of typography for a site I've been working on this past week. During my search for a solution, I came across this succinct video on what exactly typography is. Still don't have a solution to my problem but I just felt like sharing this video in the mean time. It's under 2 minutes and well worth your time.

Really good design strips away all the unnecessary features or in this case, packaging. Kyle Gati must chew a lot of gum and I wonder how long it took him to come up with this brilliant lean way of presenting packages of chewing gum without the irritating plastic wrap that keeps the individual packages from falling out. 'nuff said. (via: Core77)