Grape soda is my all-time favorite drink, but it’s not what I need when I wake up in the morning. And I’m not a coffee guy for reasons that are too gastro gross to go into here. I want tea upon waking. Lots of tea. And once I’ve had a couple of cups of green (the roasty variety, not the tastes-like-wet-lawn kind), I’m ready to move on to something darker and more difficult. That’s where Occulter comes in.

Occulter is the ongoing project of Derrick R. Cruz, art guy behind Black Sheep & Prodigal Sons. Its brick-and-mortar location is attached to An Choi, a Vietnamese restaurant on New York’s Lower East Side. There, you can thoughtfully consider purchasing a giant scrimshaw-adorned straight razor, a replica of a human jaw cast in silver or, less expensively, a rubber-sealed copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy. And luckily, for people living in cities where there’s not already a store full of excellently weird lifestyle accessories, Occulter is also an Internet destination. And they sell “Black Honey.” So I ordered some, along with a couple bags of their “Black Smoke” and “Sun-Withered White” tea. Finally, my friends would stop calling me a lesbian about my tea consumption (even the lesbians) and would bow to my heaviness and doom.

Now, in the wrong frame of mind, you might dismiss what arrived at my front door as simply smoky Lapsang Souchong, some dried white tea leaves and a very strong-flavored, deep purple buckwheat honey (although it is, admittedly, often known as “black honey” by bee nerds). But design matters, even with food. Would you eat a Pop Tart if it was called “Dry Square Crust Filled With A Stupidly Thin Ribbon of Fake Strawberries?” No. You want a happy talking toaster on the box and bright colors jumping into your face to make you think of real fruit ready to burst out when you tear it open. And I’m a huge fan of design that caters to my niche tastes, so when my tea needs showed up in a cloth sack with the Occulter label silkscreened on the outside, I was already halfway to happiness.

Then I looked inside the sack to find teas and honey covered with the Occulter logo sticker, Dymo-style morgue-black embossed labels and, mysteriously, an empty black plastic resealable pouch. I decided it was a body bag for the remains of deliciousness and I’m saving it for when all this stuff runs out. At that time I will conduct a midnight funeral downstairs in my building’s recycling bin.

Until that stormy evening, I’m drinking this great tea and this difficult honey (note: true to its suggestive name, it’s heavy stuff and if you use too much it’ll overpower even the burnt-offerings quality of the tea, so spoon it lightly) with drawn shades and some Wyndham Hill-meets-Gorgoroth mood music from Tomb Of…

It’s a grimly civilized way to start the day.

Brilliant graphic designer Mike Perry and his photographer girlfriend Anna Wolf, talking about art and facial hair for the non-profit organization Movember which fights cancer and shaving, two of society’s greatest ills.

Via Matt Rubin!

When Dan and I approached Jason Villegas about doing an interview, his website was in a sincerely sad state. Jason felt frustrated with the site and hadn’t had time to manually update it in months. The archaic design was distracting from the amazing work it was intended to promote, so I decided to try out the new website builder my bud Matt Rubin helped bring into the world. Using Virb, it only took a matter of minutes before we whipped up a truly handsome platform for Jason to share his artwork. Plus, now it’s super easy for him to go in and add new images whenever he needs to!

Virb is clean, flexible, and couldn’t be more intuitive. Like Tumblr and Vimeo, it has an uncluttered interface– but it also provides enough control to customize your site to your heart’s content. If you have some artwork of your own to share with the world (or know someone who does), I highly recommend checking out Virb. It’s almost 2011. Two thousand eleven! You deserve a real website.

Look at some screenshots of the back-end after the jump, and don’t forget to enter the Jason Villegas giveaway!! Only two days left to take home Lil’ Stink Eye!

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Dutch artist Helmut Smits is one of those people who probably has leagues of brilliant concepts scribbled in every notebook, novel and newspaper lying around his living room. Some people’s brains just work like that, always coming up with good ideas. It’s nice when they decide to make artwork, so we can see what’s going on inside their brains.

Smits’ strength lies not just in his concepts, though– it’s his sense of humor and ability to make clever social statements without veering into smug Adbusters heavy-handedness. Smits’ work reads like a well-composed invitation to play with your surroundings. RSVP below.

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I like to imagine that Fritz Lang, with his penchant for blown-up science textbook illustrations, and Leonardo da Vinci, with his designs for contraptions both whimsical and practical, would be totally stoked on the work of multimedia collagist Jacob Whibley. A quick survey of his artistic output reveals microscopic vistas of the still-beating hearts of impossible automata and altars for the worship of logic and ideas… or at least that’s what I see. Whibley’s work is like a blueprint for imagination, equal parts Rorschach test and mechanized mandala whose contemplation allows you access to hidden inner truths. Of course, this only raises more questions about the man behind the mysticism. He took the time to address a few of my queries about process, precision, and future projects.

From diagrammatic collages to surreal sculptural pseudo-playscapes, your work, while fantastical, seems to encourage the perception that it is meant to be used for a specific function: creation, recreation, meditation. What kind of purpose does art serve for you? What effect do you want it to have on your audience?

Art has always been about exploration and inspiration for me. I get excited working with new materials and looking for new bits of ephemera. Each piece is both an Lose Weight Exercise in solving spatial/compositional problems and the examination of a variety of themes: interstitial spaces, unfulfilled histories, new combinations of forms, and unfulfilled potentials. For the viewer, I want to instill that same sense of confusion, curiosity, and contemplation.

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Graphic designer and illustrator Luke Elliott hails from Nottingham, England and packages products so perfectly, you might even find yourself with a hankering for some adorable Quaker Oats.

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Successful blogging relies on a set of conventions that limit its own potential. Frequent posting keeps readers interested but tends to discourage in-depth analysis. Cross-platform compatibility restricts layout design to single-column vertical scrolls. Font options are scant, low-resolution images reign and non-linear flairs are frowned upon.

All that is slowly changing, and web journalism is starting to look more like, well, journalism. These cautious baby steps towards a prettier Internet are arriving through the advent of Apple’s “apps,” which allow designers to work within the fixed canvas of an iPad screen, as well as boutique websites that shun daily RSS traffic and search engine optimization in favor of paced-out content that’s as well written as it is visually appealing. The transition is not without its pitfalls– emulating a newspaper layout can easily veer into the realm of tacky 1994 CD-ROM design. Grain & Gram is one of the few sites getting it right.

It’s a brand new “gentleman’s journal,” built around beautiful photo essays that focus on one man, his work, and his personal style. Combining elements of blogs like Backyard Bill and The Selby with the rare class of fashion magazines like Fantastic Man, Grain & Gram is a promising new entity both as a style blog and as a design inspriation. Breaking the rules and transcending them in the process, its in-depth portraits of contemporary men are supplanted with intimate interviews, side-column tangents, and gorgeous video content, like the clip below from their feature on scruffy motorcycle-riding printmaker Nick Sambrato.

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Future Shipwreck superfriend Michael C. Hsiung set off salivary glands at Mastodon Mesa recently with his glorious laser-etched wood carvings, tantalizing fans while keeping the one-of-a-kind pieces off the market. Now we can all own a stunning (and practical!) Hsiung-designed Merman carving, thanks to Grove, a Portland-based design collective that makes eco-friendly bamboo iPhone cases.

Don’t miss the other tasteful cases in Grove’s artist series, featuring work by artists like Leandro Castelao, Nando Costa and Stubborn Sideburn:

“I’m not very interested in conceptual art. I absolutely love Jeff Koons’ work to look at but reading about it bores me to tears. I worry I am either old fashioned or a philistine. Perhaps it’s the English suspicion of anything intellectual. To me, something visually delightful is its own justification.” – Wildrid Wood, toymaker.

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Sugary sweet illustrations by French graphic designer Denis Carrier. I especially love his ode to Chatroulette, up on the top left. Here’s how he explains his work:

Denis Carrier, looks like his work: not so big, not very muscular, but really funny and simple.
A central idea, clearly introduced, often humourous, always effective. No twirl or flourish, his illustrations are hand made or use vector techniques: and that works! Somewhere between naivety and a strange world, you’re of course welcome!

Carrier also co-founded PNTS art direction studio with fellow rad Frenchman Aurelien Arnaud.

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