Sorry I’ve been out of commission and hard to reach for the past few days. I picked up some kind of nasty virus that kicked my ass this past weekend. My head felt like exploding, I couldn’t eat a bite in 3 days, and…um…let’s say I had a unlimited riding pass on the porcelain bus. One-way.

Have you ever been so sick and miserable that suicide actually enters your mind as an option?  Come-on…you’ve been very lucky if you haven’t. It was about the time I got up for the 2nd time one night for a bathroom call and on the journey from my bed to the bathroom I suddenly blacked out and found myself crawling on the floor in a cold sweat. Yuuuup, these are the times I suddenly feel a lot of empathy for people with real hardcore illnesses.

Anyway, things are slowly turning around…I can eat little bits of food here and there and I at least today my mind feels a little more cognizant. I’m going to try catch up with emails and what work I can so please forgive me if I’m a little backlogged in responding to you.

Happy Birthday my little guy. You’ve been the most amazing thing that has happened in my life. Hope you enjoyed this 1st year of your wondrous life and may the world offer you every opportunity you can imagine in your lifetime. Love – Dad

My wife has a fascination with pillows. Despite how many pillows we have on our bed and sofas, she’s always looking at getting more for some reason. I’m ok with that I suppose. If she see’s something that could add a little character and color in our living spaces, I can live with that.

She has this quirky little habit of playing with pillow corners…which I would normally find pretty weird but I can’t say anything because I have a habit of peeling tissue paper into tiny bits. I figure if she can live with the tissue bits, I can live with the pillow corner rubbing.

Unfortunately most of our pillow options end up just coming from places like Pier 1 — which for some bizarre reason they have pillow styles these days that looks like they were grabbed out of some old haunted mansion.

This site I stumbled across today looks has some very nice pillows. Looks like it’s a couple of French designers who took it upon themselves to create all these funky pillow cases. Hmmm…I wouldn’t mind some of these. I hope the shipping charges from France don’t end up costing more than the cases themselves.

I’m not the only one out there that collects beautiful work out there for our own inspiration. Here I landed on the work of Shaz Madani. In this case it was a campaign for Arctic Paper…using paper materials while expressing environmental thinking. Again with the pop-outs and cut-outs. (Hmm…I must find a project where my client will let me cut-out things like this!)

Anyway, it’s inspirational work. Stumbled across this work on another French graphic designer’s blog at Graphic-Exchange. Great finds there too!

I donated to Haiti the other day. I mean, it was really “nothing”, about as much as the cost of a big lunch I’m embarrassed to say. But I was struck with a tweet from someone that said something like, “Don’t make the mistake of wanting to do so much that you end up doing nothing”. So I pulled out the cell phone and donated to the Red Cross.

You know, despite all the horrible devastation over there…the silver lining of encouragement I see is that the entire world has helped in some form or fashion. So this world isn’t always as fucked up as it seems?

I like the fact that there’s this whole ability to donate easily by text message. It removes almost any excuse left not to donate…it was easy & safe. (text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross by the way if you don’t already know.)

Just a little way to tie this post into design…I was looking at the WhiteHouse website this morning just to find more info on Haiti. I’m pleasantly encouraged to see that our government’s website looks pretty good. On the surface it’s a very clean and stark website. But look long enough you begin to notice all the flourish and detail that was put into the site here and there. Backend code looks clean too…clean CSS. Thumbs up to whomever did this work!  Niiiiiiiice! What a sweet project it must have been to have gotten the White House as a client.

I find this sleep suit utterly ridiculous and hilarious…if in any way you think you can get a restful nap sleeping in public in this thing, I wish you the best. Yet I’m drawn to it like a moth to a light. I think I want one of these if only for a funny Halloween costume or someday I might use it on stage to enact my best Lady Gaga impersonation. (via Blogitecture)

2010 has turned out to be pretty normal so far. Nothing particularly noticeable about the turn of the decade so far aside from the fact that it’s actually “2010″. I distinctly recall one time when I was in 3rd grade once and the teacher had asked us to try think about what we’d be when we grew up. I can’t quite remember what profession I aspired to be at the time (sure wasn’t “designer”), but I DO recall thinking how neat it would be to write down “2000″ as the year. “Would I ever make it? WOW!”

Now here we are a decade past Y2k. It’ll be odd thinking that my boy will grow up one day and think how ancient his mom and dad are because we were born in a completely different century. /sigh

Life is in a pretty decent holding pattern right now. We have our stresses and concerns regarding everything from business to family finances just like any other new family, but I’m always cautious to remind myself that everyone else has got their own challenges to tackle so that’s just the way things will be for a while. BUT everyone’s healthy & happy so I’ve got about the best situation I can ask for right now.

Let’s see….quick snapshot:

• My brother and his wife coming to visit soon!
• Kingston reaching his first birthday!
• My fishtank looks like a disaster right now when the filter died last month in a power outtage. I’d describe it looking like something out of the show “Dirty Jobs”
• Trying to plan for a trip to Hong Kong in a few months. Can a 1.5 year old handle the flight? Are we finally going to experience what it’s like being the “irritating parents with the crying baby” on the flight?
• Possible expansion of Lowe Studio services to Australia.  Australia?!  Yup, I have tons of family there actually and I’ve heard there’s some opportunity to bring some of my work Down Under. I guess I can’t make any more “WTF Mate” or “Put another shrimp on the barbie” jokes anymore with the possibility of offending anyone there.

There you have it. Still alive. Still kicking. I’m ready for this 2010 year. Bring it!

San Francisco’s People. Canon 5DmkII 24p from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

I was chatting with a good friend yesterday about how much fun I’ve had with my camera over the past year when we started discussing how all these DSLRs are now coming packed with video shooting capabilities.

Quite a few people had dismissed this as a gimmick, but I’ve been encountering more and more video professionals who are using DSLRs as viable tools for doing professional work. The ability to have a relatively small & low-cost method for filming video with HD and a wide range of lenses has kinda opened up the world of filmmaking to just about anyone.

It’s kind of made me want to try it myself. Alas, I bought my 50D which has no video shooting ability but it’ll be a matter of time before I’ll trade-up for a better body.

Case-in-point, this artist Phillip Bloom, shot the beautiful video above with a Canon DSLR and a 50mm lens. Sure, that’s about $4500 worth of equipment, but for a digital still camera to be able to shoot videos like this is pretty awesome!  (I want!)

I don’t know if I could have done a better job, or kept a straight face for that matter, if I were commissioned to design an instructional sign for Swedish “pee-power” toilets like the one above. Makes you think if you had to design a sign to show a person pooping and peeing in a simple way, how would you do it without being too complicated or even offensive?

It IS kind of an interesting concept although given the state of the typical men’s bathrooms here in the U.S., I doubt we’d ever manage to use a toilet like this properly. We can’t even hit the urinals correctly sometimes…yeeeck! (via Gizmodo via TreeHugger)

I stumbled across this photographer’s website this morning while checking around for daily inspiration. His name is Jason Lee Parry. (via Tobacco and Leather) Caveat emptor on the video and website, there’s some nudity so it’s definitely NSFW. As always, I’ve had an interest of getting more into photography in recent years, albeit the only progress I’ve made so far in all this time is taking a few thousand shots of my toddler and some outdoor scenic shots.

God I’d love to do some model editorial shots like this although I’ve yet to have the lucky opportunity to have a half-naked model jump around in feathery outfits in a hidden foresty retreat. I tried asking my wife to try model for me a few times although the extent of her modeling efforts has been nothing more then a tilt of her head. She’s watched almost every season of Top Model and yet the head tilt is all she’s mastered?

Anyway, check out the site there’s some beautiful work there and I always love watching photographers do their thing. OK OK, I like watching the models too but we’ll save that discussion for another day.