it's 4:45 in the afternoon, also known as when i'm a waste of space

so let's take this opportunity to talk about something really awesome that i made.

keen insight: ikea both sucks so much and is so great at the exact same time. i recently moved to los angeles (more on that another time) and i tried really hard to avoid ikea. because i'm a grown-up now, with a salary, and i should buy my things from west elm and pottery barn.

but then i started browsing ikea hack sites on pinterest. i won't bother posting any here because there are so many and i don't want to take attention away from the one i'm going to show you that i made.

first i bought this dresser (except in white...somehow i can't find a picture of a white one online). in case you're wondering, it's the three-drawer hemnes:

before i even got it home, i went to target. fun fact, target now sells wallpaper. and paint! i don't care how long they've been doing this, i just figured it out so it only just became important. there are so many great wallpapers. i'm not sure how i settled on this one...i think it's because i already have a lot of chevrons in my room decor and didn't want to overdo it. this one has the same angles but mixes it up a bit, plus the color is lovely:

i also bought a set of new knobs, because i'm no longer on a graduate student stipend so i can do things like that.

with the help of some wine, bollywood music, and my new roommate, the dresser became assembled. BUT: before i put the knobs in, i covered the face of each drawer with this wallpaper (pro tip: it's removable and repositionable. that was really important). it's like adhering any other vinyl...you have to be careful of air bubbles and all those things. but overall it's remarkably simple.

then, i used a little awl to poke holes in the wallpaper where the knobs should be (not hard, since the dresser already had space for knobs so it was just a matter of finding them through the paper). instead of using the ikea knobs, i used my own, and VOILA:

i'm so proud. i thought about putting the wallpaper on the top too, but took the coco chanel approach and decided that would be overboard. i have a lot of the wallpaper left over, so i'm excited to see what else i can use it for...i'm thinking so far about using it to line the shelves in my bathroom...and then see where it goes from there!

lettering for life

i don't know how it started, but somewhere along the way, i got really into fonts. it was probably around three years ago when i started hanging out with design-oriented kids that i figured out that other people were really into fonts, beyond a universally accepted hatred of comic sans. my interest in lettering has taken two roads: computer-based typefaces and fonts, and hand-drawn lettering. in this post, i'll talk about the former - in a soon-to-be-written second post, i'll delve into lettering of the hand-drawn variety.

my favorite fonts seem to fall into a couple categories. i understand that serifs are easier to read in blocks of texts, but overall i prefer sans serifs, either very light or very bold. i like well-placed, creative, and non-gratuitous flourishes. here are some examples of beautiful fonts:

this is avenir. i like using this one for simple posters. also my resume uses this font.

this is brandon. i don't love the weathering on this one, but i do like how bold and simple it is. 

this is carolyna pro. i love the interplay between line widths, and also it's just really pretty to look at:

lastly, this is true north. a really sweet and clean cursive that's not too overwrought:

being really into fonts is fun but can get really expensive. i love getting my font newsletters and reading blogs, but balk at the prices of downloading the actual products of my desire. if you want to and can invest in nice fonts, myfonts.com is a good resource. but if that's not in your budget, there are websites out there that allow you to download some great fonts for free. a lot of them are not necessarily in my taste (i won't say they're bad, necessarily, just something i wouldn't be caught dead using). but there are some gems in there.

i'm going to skip 1001freefonts.com because it may have some good things but the user interface is just unworkable.

i do like these sites though...

Font Squirrel because if i'm turning to a website for help with aesthetics, the website itself better be pretty - which font squirrel is.

da font is not as pretty as font squirrel, but they do have a lot of fonts that i like.

lastly, this blog has compiled a list of 100 great fonts for the design-inclined.

i'm sure there are a lot of other good font sites out there, so if you have a favorite, please let me know! in the meantime, go forth and type beautifully...