Live Now: In-the-Moment Inspiration

A true exercise in art therapy, or what all motivational posters should aspire to be.

It’s still January, and 2010 has already provided no shortage of loss, tragedy, and challenge. But amidst all of this digital distemper lies a website we love for its seemingly infinite supply of authenticity, hope, and optimism.

Live Now! is an art project whose mission is “powerfully pursuing the notion of ‘living now.’ Engaging participants to live meaningful lives & be happy!”

The homepage greets you with a lovely image reminding you of the importance of living in the moment. With messages like True happiness is giving it away and Practice happiness rendered in winsomely quirky typography, each click-through leads to another picture and message.

The images’ style varies, but they all share the kind of handmade energy in response to which you can’t really help but smile.

What confirms these sentiments as so much more than pablum — besides the artistry of their rendering — is the personal story of Live Now!‘s creator, designer and illustrator Eric Smith, who conceived of the project after being diagnosed with three different types of cancer.

Cancer changed the way I ate, slept, and most importantly the way I live. Before cancer I was like most folks, just cruising along. It was during my treatment, when starting to discover what cancer could give to me — the ability to absorb every moment as if each one were my whole life.

Since Live Now! launched, Davis has opened the experience to a host of other talented artists and designers (David Gibson, CD Ryan, and Kate Miss, among others); he also continues to take submissions. We were even more excited to learn that the project’s various messages are available in print form, allowing you to curate a changing rotation of inspirational messages for yourself.

Live Now! reminds us of another fantastic typographic project around personal growth and happiness, Things I Have Learned In My Life, by Brain Pickings favorite (and three-time TEDster) Stefan Sagmeister. Such collaborative initiatives augur an emerging pattern in graphic design work — call it the aesthetics of authentic life principles.

So put down the newspaper, close that Firefox CNN disaster report tab, let go of the earthquake hashtags, and swap them all for an early-morning shot of motivation and encouragement — because you can rarely have too much of either. To experience beautifully crafted messages of Carpe Diem visit Live Now!, well, now.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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Phylomon: The Game of Life

Pokemon meets Mother Earth, or what preschoolers have to do with the life of life.

The UN has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. And while we’ve seen a number of smart, ambitious scientific and creative efforts inspired by and advocating nature’s bounty, the fact remains that preserving the incredible natural variety of species is in the hands of the future generations. So raising children with a biological sensibility and getting them excited about biodiversity is at the root of any viable effort.

Which is why we love the understatedly brilliant Phylomon project by The Science Creative Quarterly, a wonderful repository for well-written, unconventional scientific literature.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. ~ E. O. Wilson.

Phylomon is a web-based initiative for creating Pokemon-like cards, using real creatures and nature’s own “character design” genius. The project was inspired by a recent study that found young children have the remarkable ability to identify and characterize more than 120 different Pokemon characters, but fail to name more than half of common wildlife species. So Phylomon has set out to broaden children’s natural characters vocabulary, drawing inspiration from the clearly successful model used by “synthetic characters” like Pokemon.

Submissions will be crowdsourced from a variety of creatives, with the scientific community weighing in on the content, game designers invited to brainstorm innovative ways of using the cards, and teachers participating to evaluate the educational merit of the cards.

Best of all, the hope is that this will all occur in a non-commercial-open-access-open-source-because-basically-this-is-good-for-you-your-children-and-your-planet sort of way.

Because Phylomon depends so heavily on the creative community’s contributions, we urge you to submit yours. Use this Flickr pool if you’re a designer or illustrator, this one if you’re a photographer, or this one if you come from the education community.

And if you still have doubts about the momentous importance of biodiversity, take it from Ban Ki-moon, the UNSYG himself — it’s important, alright.

Read up on Phylomon and contribute — why not?

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Curation with a Conscience: The Working Proof

How to cover your causes and your walls, all at the same time.

Given how few and far between life’s simultaneous having-and-eating-cake moments come, we’re taking today to celebrate just such an opportunity. Thanks to a fledgling website called The Working Proof, you can now outfit your walls affordably and in style, while contributing to some great causes at the same time.

Launched in October of last year by design duo (and husband-and-wife team) Anna Corpron and Sean Auyeung, The Working Proof is an online gallery and print shop featuring limited-edition artwork, with 15% of the gross from each sale going to an organization of each artist’s choice. All of the prints sell for less than $100, making for a truly accessible aesthetic and social investment. Corpron and Auyeung, co-founders of multi-disciplinary design studio Sub-Studio, release a new image from an emerging artist each week on Tuesday afternoons, with 13 so far representing a range of charities and social enterprise ventures.

Brooklyn-based artist and wallpaper designer Dan Funderburgh directed the charitable portion of his sinuous letterpress print Optimist Club / Midwestern Can Snake to Transportation Alternatives, an organization that advocates for increased biking, walking, and public transit options in New York City.

Scottish artist Scott Balmer‘s three-color screenprint The Mystical Forest gives its charitable cut to The Kids in Need Foundation, an Ohio-based charity that provides free school supplies nationally to students and teachers. Other charities benefiting from The Working Proof‘s model include Architecture for Humanity, Doctors Without Borders, and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. The list of recipients is as diverse as the works themselves, each hand-created and -numbered.

Illustrator Jacqueline Kari Bos lists among her artistic inspirations Annette Messager and E.V. Day, influences we admired in the artist’s screenprint Aurora, with its tessellated fields and lovely lace overlay. Bos paired her print with Show Hope, an organization that assists orphaned children financially and in finding families.

The Working Proof blog features interviews with many of the site’s artists, as well as information about other ways to support them and the organizations they represent.

To improve both your life and your walls, visit The Working Proof or follow them on Twitter.

Kirstin Butler has a Bachelor’s in art & architectural history and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a freelance editor and researcher, where she also spends way too much time on Twitter. For more of her thoughts, check out her videoblog.

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