Northern and Southern Californians may have their differences, but making lovely paper goods inspired by our state is not one of them. Every day I am greeted by the 2010 Odd Birds of LA monthly calendar by Krank Press, located here in LA and yesterday a friend of mine surprised me with the California Republic postcard booklet from Yellow Owl Workshop out of Bernal Heights in San Fran. Both share brightly colored, simple graphics based on their respective theme and the quaint look that comes from the hand printing/pressing process. Gotta love those quails!

Visit Krank Press's Etsy store to check out the popular Perpetual Gardening Calendar and other paper goods.
Yellow Owl Workshop creates a range of goods including cool stationary, stamps and even ceramics.

Jeffrey Deitch, NYC gallerist extraordinaire, will be leaving the East Coast (and closing Deitch Projects) in June to take over the Museum of Contemporary Art here in LA. He was interviewed last week as part of the show "Don't Piss on Me and Tell Me It's Raining" at apexart in New York. I'm familiar with Deitch and his gallery but I didn't know much about his background, like, for instance the fact that he has an M.B.A. from Harvard and worked for Citibank as an art advisor. He sees his move to MoCA (aka "the public sector") as a personal attempt to counterbalance the money-centric vibe within the art world, with which, he admits, he himself is associated. Read the full interview here.

I find the framing (pun!) of Sarah Jessica Parker as a mentor to burgeoning artists a little bizarre but basically this looks like Project Runway with canvas.

CS5 will be formally introduced next week (but, rumor has it, won't ship until the fall) and Adobe has been posting sneak peeks of some advanced features, including this demo of the probably too good to be true Content Aware tool in Photoshop. 

Great graphic by Patrick Thomas on the cover of the NYT Book Review today that illustrated two reviews of Vietnam-based novels.

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