Design: Whirled

Thanks to The Paper Mill Store for featuring my work on their Graphic Design Showcase. They chose to spotlight the Design Planner I designed for Trilogy Pools.

Love the enduring individuality of Betsey! As a college student and budding artwear designer, she was among my favorite, and most inspiring, designers. I still have some of the Alley Cat pieces I scored at the time. Her work was always fun, brave and energetic, and even though I’ve all but retired my sewing machine and migrated to graphic design, I’m still inspired.

Girl just wants to have fun, and I hope I’m having this much fun at 68, and beyond. Brava!

Betsey Johnson

http://www.colourlovers.com/fashion/blog/2010/08/16/betsey-johnsons-colorful-career

This is a house of cards I’ve created: website, Twitter, Facebook, and then there’s the work that needs to be done to keep things rolling. Where will it end? Working on my profile in the studio led me to update a number of portfolios and I wandered a bit afar. So far I encountered clowns.

Enough for today. Off to the next riveting project: Accounting. What a laugh.

Posted via email from toptomato’s posterous

Lillian Bassman lives a creative and artistic life on her own terms. Not chasing trends, or working for posterity. Does anyone live a life like this anymore? An inspiring story of a creative life well-lived.

Lillian Bassman, 92, at home in Manhattan. In recent years she has reconfigured fashion photographs that she discarded in the 1970s. (Damon Winter/The New York Times) More Photos »

Like most designers, I get caught up in getting the work out the door. In doing so, I rely on too many comfortable tricks and design approaches. Last night brought a fine, driving thunderstorm. Seemed a perfect time to head off into just-for-fun land. The result? A wild background for my Twitter page, and a commitment to carving out play time much more frequently. Here’s the riotous result: http://twitter.com/toptomato

So, what gets in the way of a regular dose of satisfying and inspiring fun? The minutiae of business. I love the web, and it allows me to work as I like, and helps my business to grow, but then there’s the flip side of it. Directories, blogs, articles, Twitter, my site, and on and on, all with their greedy little time-sucking hands reaching for a minute, or more likely and hour, here and there. Time to put play back on this list.

I’m well-represented by a plate spinner: I want to try about everything, and often at the same time.

The Platespinner