STOP PROPOSITION H8TE
Writer Matthew Porter traveled from Atlanta to California to marry his partner in August of 2008, but the passage of Proposition 8 in November may strip him of his marriage rights. At first Porter was stunned the same-sex marriage ban had passed. “In California, I never thought it had a chance,” he says. But he quickly turned his disbelief into action and worked with others to launch Stoph8te.org.

The site challenges the creative community to protest Prop 8 through the tried-and-true medium of the poster. Check out work from SpotCo, Modern Dog, Vivitiv and Kuhlmann Leavitt, then start thinking about your own submission. Organizers hope to auction off original art to help raise money to print, sell and post these and subsequent graphic statements in cities around the country. As Porter puts it, “Marriage rights are civil rights, and civil rights are not up for vote.” stoph8te.org | matt@porterwrite.com

MINORITY REPORT
Unlike corporate diversity training, Kiss My Black Ads brings a sense of humor to the topics of race and marketing. This new blog features work for, by and of multicultural people, and you’ll find wincingly bad vintage ads right along with the latest slick efforts from Nike. “The focus is reaching out to other African American creatives and saying, ‘We’re out here,’” says Craig Brimm, the blog’s author and the creative director behind boutique shop Culture A.D. in Atlanta. The site is a fantastic source for inspiration, and in a perfect world, your boss would let you out of that diversity workshop just for reading it. http://kissmyblackads.blogspot.com

STEAL THESE POSTERS
Computers and pixels aren’t the only path to real interaction. For the Toronto International Film Festival, the creative team at zig captured the magic and motion of the movies with printed posters. How? By turning these inanimate objects into giant tear-off pads much like that notepad sitting on your desk. Each one contained multiple poster designs and hung alongside at least two other pads at various locations around the city. People walking by ripped off posters and took them home, changing the image series as they claimed souvenirs. The posters reinforced the idea of motion with grainy, blurry images—their visual backdrops modeled bad TV reception, perfectly contrasted with clean, crisp type. www.zigideas.com

CRAFTY FLICK
Before Handmade Nation, the book, there was Handmade Nation, the movie. In 2007 a seven-minute preview of this indie flick, which chronicles the DIY arts and crafts community, hit YouTube, and it was so compelling three publishers wanted to turn it into a book. The latter arrived in stores last year, but the documentary is just now making its way into the world, with a New York premiere slated for February 2009 at the Museum of Arts and Design.

Director Faythe Levine decided to make the movie while operating her own craft business, because she thought it was important for someone from the inside to tell the community’s story. “The whole film is a labor of love,” she says. “It was financed on my credit card and with community support.” The flick covers everything from indie craft fairs to crafts and politics, and fans of the DIY movement will recognize some of the featured crafters, such as Jenny Hart of Sublime Stitching and knitted graffiti group Knitta. www.handmadenationmovie.com

VITTLES FOR LOG SPLITTERS
The typical fundraising cookbook offers up plenty of hearty food for the stomach but doesn’t do much for design taste buds. Just in time for the flurry of Lincolniana that will accompany the 16th president’s 200th birthday, A. Lincoln Cookbook: A Cookbook of Epic Portions manages to please both kinds of appetites.

Steve Hartman, president of design firm Creativille in Edwardsville, Ill., teamed up with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Volunteers to cook up this stately and desirable volume, whose first printing seemingly sold out before the ink had dried on its pages (it’s now back in supply). For the covers and divider pages, Hartman set gorgeous silver, china and other dining-related treasures from the library and museum’s collection against simple black backgrounds. “[The publishers] wanted to make the people who bought the cookbook feel like they took part of the museum away with them,” he says. Inside there are recipes from staff, volunteers and even Mary Todd Lincoln. But where’s husband Abe? Take a close look at the cover, and you can spot his ghostly reflection in the spoon. www.alplm.org/store/home.html

MAKE DIGITAL HISTORY, AGAIN
As the legend goes, SXSW Interactive is where the term blogging first came into existence. And a few years ago it was definitely the place where Twitter tweeted its way into online consciousness. This year’s festival runs March 13–17 in Austin, and as thousands of digital shoulders rub together, there’s no telling which spark will start a fire. But you can count on learning about everything from web design and tech business models to game design and wireless innovation. “There’s a massive, overwhelming amount of activity to choose from,” says Shawn O’Keefe, interactive festival producer. And we hear that includes some pretty wicked parties. www.sxsw.com/interactive

GIMME SHELTER
There’s an 8-ft.-tall structure in Michael McDaniel’s lawn that looks like it was dropped there by aliens. In reality, it’s part of a personal project he started after being appalled by the response to Hurricane Katrina.

McDaniel—a senior designer in Frog Design’s Austin, Texas, office—started sketching temporary shelter ideas after the disaster, and his wife thought one looked especially promising. Now that idea has morphed into the full-size mock-up of what he calls the Exo. This temporary shelter is designed to be set up in two minutes or less. Inside there are four bunks that fold down from the walls like Murphy beds. Weary disaster victims will also find power outlets, ceiling lights, a skylight and air conditioning (which McDaniel even tested when the air conditioning broke in his house). But the Exo is just one piece of McDaniel’s Reaction Housing System; the system is essentially a kit of parts designed for rapid deployment in disaster zones. More than 20 Exos, for instance, fit on the back of a semi. A tarp can be draped over several Exos to create a communal space. The shelters are also reusable, and the goal is to bring the cost for each one in around $5000—significant savings over a FEMA trailer. Next: McDaniel is looking to secure funding for a small production run. www.reactionhousingsystem.com

SUGGESTIVE TYPOGRAPHY
Here’s a brief you’ll probably never receive from a client: Design a tart card for a typeface or a letter of the alphabet. If you’re among the uninitiated, tart cards are paper promos—reputedly first used in London phone booths—where sex workers advertise their services.

“They have their own visual language,” says Caroline Archer, author of the 2003 book Tart Cards and the woman behind this call for entries. “It’s fascinating to see how people who are not designers, not typographers, are creating postcards.” Her open invitation for the Tart Card project flips this scenario around by giving professional designers permission to mix sexual innuendo with typography. The results range from clever to crude, with a card for Helvetica proclaiming, “Use me. Abuse me. Love me to death.” Instead of phone booths, you’ll find these cards on display early this year at the St Bride Library in London. Then they’ll be auctioned online to raise money for the printing and graphic arts library. Look for updates at www.uktype.com.

PIRATES WHO SHOP
If the selection gets stale at the Pirate Supply Store, someone might end up walking the plank. Luckily, creative studio Office just restocked the shelves with 50 new products, including Scurvy Begone, Peg Leg Oil and an all-purpose Treasure Shining Kit that works on grime, blood and guilt.

It’s all part of a pro bono project to benefit Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia—an address, a pirate store and a nonprofit tutoring center for kids. Every time someone buys Glass Eye Drops it supports the center, but finding out what’s inside all those bottles is a little more diffcult. “Most people who buy stuff at the pirate store aren’t as interested in what’s in the bottle,” says Jill Robertson, principal at Office. “They’re interested in buying into the experience. It’s this crazy, imaginative, interactive experience.” Her firm helped enhance the pirate magic with a cohesive visual identity for the store, but one not so consistent that all the pirate products feel like the same source made them. www.visitoffice.com | www.826valencia.org

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
Michael Lebowitz says it’s still the wild, wild West for interactive agencies. He’s the founder and CEO of Big Spaceship in Brooklyn and a board member of a new group known as the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA). The idea started when a number of firms began informally gathering to share information. “For that first meeting there was no specific goal other than to see what happened if we all got together,” he says. “By dinner the first night we realized we had more to gain than lose by sharing.”

Eventually, those gathered decided the entire interactive community would benefit from knowledge sharing, thus forming SoDA. As of now there are 18 agency members, and more will be added. SoDA will stay invitation-only through 2009 but is exploring ideas for associate memberships. The group’s still working out such basics as bylaws, but its overall hope is to become a voice for the whole interactive industry. Members are already giving talks at schools and conferences, and they’re exploring partnerships and publishing opportunities. Stay tuned. www.societyofdigitalagencies.org

LEFT: Unknown artist; Front Street, looking north; Morgan City, La.; postcard; 1929; photomechanical reproduction; 3½ x 5½ in.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive RIGHT: Walker Evans; street scene; Morgan City, La.; 1935; film negative, 8 x 10 in.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive
BEHIND THE PICTURES
Walker Evans’ images of poverty in the South are haunting, but for those who have tried to express themselves through photography, it’s almost as moving to see some of the inspiration behind his work. Evans collected thousands of postcards over his life, and these realistic images directly affected his photographs. You can make the connections in person at Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard, which runs from Feb. 3 through May 25 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. www.metmuseum.org

UGCX LIGHTS UP
If you’ve looked up from Facebook or your latest Twitter feeds lately, you’ve probably considered the fact that the social content revolution is fully upon us. Now mediabistro.com is sponsoring UGCX, the User Generated Content Conference and Expo, to bring those working in the exploding user generated content and social networking spaces together Feb. 9–10, 2009, in San Jose, Calif. UGCX is the first trade show to focus on social content, according to sponsors. “Technology is simplifying the creation and distribution of content and therefore disrupting established markets. Attention is shifting from large organizations to innovators and early adopters. UGCX will provide an opportunity to discover and explore the possibilities and challenges which lay ahead in a user-generated economy,” says conference cochair Lee Torrens. Session tracks will focus on social content, photography, music, and video/film. And to those can’t attend, rest assured you won’t be technologically left out in the dark: You’ll be able to follow the conference via Twitter. www.ugcxevent.com/step

Full Disclosure: Both STEP inside design magazine and UGCX sponsor mediabistro.com are part of Jupitermedia Corporation.

GREEN INSPIRATION
There are plenty of design conferences, but few come with this kind of ringing endorsement: “Compostmodern changed my life in 2006,” says Gaby Brink, the green design event’s lead producer for the second year in a row. “I sat in the audience and thought, ‘Holy shit. This is where I need to put my creative firepower.’”

If you’re looking for a green epiphany of your own (and perhaps some sanctified compost), this now-annual event will take place Feb. 21 in San Francisco. It’s produced by the local AIGA chapter, in collaboration with AIGA national’s Center for Sustainable Design. Look for new hands-on workshops and an overall focus on scale—the idea that sustainability is a systemic problem. Not on the West Coast? Catch the simulcast online. www.compostmodern.org

STUDIO LETTERING FONTS, REDUX
STEP often receives requests for more information about products and services featured in articles. Here, applications of House Industries’ Studio Lettering Collection fonts demonstrate their versatility in creating “hand-lettered” flavor. (Readers may recall that the Studio Lettering Collection was the “steam engine” in Allan Haley’s “Huerta vs. House” article in the November/December 2008 issue.) The Studio Lettering fonts, a collection of three script faces and a useful ornament font, feature sophisticated OpenType engineering, robust character sets and extensive language support. For $160, you can produce headlines and display copy like this.

The Studio Lettering Collection is available at www.houseind.com.