Paul Steucke photograph of raccoon in tree, via Today’s Document.

If you peer at the sidebar, you’ll now see something that’s been absent from this site since 2005: a blogroll. Ever since the redesign, I’ve been wanting to get something in there that reflects the variety of weblogs I’m reading now. The problem with blogrolls, if course, is that blogs come and go and personal tastes never stay put for very long. For instance, it surprised me how many blogs I read five years ago that were devoted to junky pop cult collecting, a subject I can now only stand in small doses. Hopefully the sites linked here will stay around for a while.

The current blogroll is made up of personal favorites bookmarked in Firefox over the past year, things I’ve stumbled across at Tumblr via 4 Color Cowboy, and older blogs carried over from the My Big Fat Link Log 3 post of August 2008. The latter was pretty interesting, since roughly two-thirds of the blogs linked there are either abandoned or dropped (I suppose future historians will mark the years 2009-10 as the era of the Great Blog Exodus). On the other hand, it makes me admire all the more those who have been at it for five to ten years, or longer – thumbs up!

Maybe it’s the Pinterest/Tumblr influence, but great imagery is something I never expected to enjoy from others’ weblogs (some of which is shared here). Enjoy.

Photograph by Joseph Kelly, via Battered Shoes.

Book cover design by David Johnson, via Aqua-Velvet.

Photograph of teenagers in New Mexico, via National Geographic Found.

Shopping center architectural art, via damahadaman.

Bobby Hackett LP cover art, via Groove is in the Art.

Last weekend, while cleaning out excess stuff in our garage, I came across this forgotten little acrylic-on-board study I once did back in the ’90s. Although the piece is somewhat derivative of Anthony Russo‘s art, it still appeals to what I’m continuing to strive for in art, and in life: simplicity. When doing art, the temptation is to keep adding on and adding on, when the most effective art (to me) continue to be the pieces that communicate an idea in just a few brush strokes or pen marks. Unfortunately, that concept is easier to think about than to actually do… but I keep trying.

That whole idea of whittling down a drawing to its essence also came to mind when I was perusing the illustrations for a piece of vintage paper ephemera that C. recently acquired. The imagery below comes from a booklet published by the Melamine Council to promote the proper use of plastic dinnerware. It might have been a lost cause in the ’50s and ’60s, trying to make these common household items look elegant and sophisticated, but in the context of this brochure it actually works – beautifully. The uncredited artist (or artists) did a masterful job of paring down the ideas of stylish living, feminine beauty, and cleanliness into simple – yet never simplistic – illustration.

We’ve been back from our California vacation for more than a week now. It’s taken a while for re-grouping, however, since I came down with the flu immediately upon return to home. Now that I’m feeling better, I’m able to share some of the photos I took there. The photos accompanying this post are shot with an iPod Touch 5 and fudged with Wood Camera, an Instagram-like app.

For this trip, we went back to Disneyland. You probably already know that I love Disneyland. My spouse hates it, however, so we go there probably once every 8-9 years as a compromise (I’m actually cool with this arrangement!). In my adult life, I’ve been there in 1987, 1995, 1996, 2005, and now 2013. I’ve enjoyed every time, but it seems like every new visit, the park becomes more tourist-trappy and not so special. At least for this new trip, we had two and a half days of exploring, which made for a more relaxed trip overall. Despite several major attractions being closed for refurbishments, Disneyland was fantastic. We used the Fastpasses wisely and got onto nearly all the rides we wanted (the Golden Horseshoe Revue wasn’t doing any live performances, only serving food). On the newly re-done Star Tours, I ended up being the rebel spy that our ship needed to transport – fun! The crowd at Disneyland was nice and mellow, a change from the somewhat more ghetto-y crowd at DCA the previous night. After our Disneyland day, we got together with the fabulous, unbelievably talented Disney designer Kevin Kidney, who braved a hoarse voice to chat with us for about an hour.

I was also looking forward to Disney’s California Adventure and seeing the massive changes they’ve made since our 2005 visit, when we saw all we wanted in a mere half-day. The Hollywood Street, made to look like Los Angeles of Disney’s 1927-33 era, is a fantastic place. We loved taking pictures and noticing the real-life buildings they used as inspiration. The whole area is so classy and beautifully imagineered, a complete turnaround from the cheesy, thrown-together look of DCA on our earlier visit. Later on that night, we got a prime viewing spot for their nightly World Of Color water/light show – even the Disney-averse Christopher was impressed with this one, and that’s saying a lot. The photo below is of us, wet and dazzled, ready to get back to the hotel. The merchandise at both parks was yet again overpriced and underwhelming, but overall we came away happy and thoroughly entertained. At the Disney Gallery, I came away with a swell coffee table book – Poster Art of the Disney Parks – as a memento of our trip.

Disnelyand/DCA didn’t make up all of our vacation – the first morning, we stopped at Newport Beach and walked around for more than an hour. It was lovely; we’ve never been to that particular beach, which had some trash issues but otherwise was fine ‘n mellow. On our way back to Phoenix, we traveled to Simi Valley and the Reagan Library for their exhibit of Disney-related objects (of course!). The museum was beautifully laid out, and if the Reagan exhibit was somewhat revisionist/optimistic it was nicely done and very admiring of the man. The Disney part had a ton of great stuff, including a re-creation of Walt’s office (seen for many years in Disneyland) and a fascinating/strange display of the model heads of all the U.S. presidents used for the Walt Disney World Hall of Presidents.

While the imagery with this blog post gives a good idea of our trip’s visual delights, we took a ton of other (unaltered) photos – which are seen in the Flickr set below.

• Newport/Anaheim, California – Feb. 2013 (Flickr photo set)

Animal skull found on Newport Beach, 2/11/2013.

Lifeguard station at Newport Beach, California, 2/11/13.

Nemo Submarine port hole, Disneyland, 2/12/13.

Princess Fantasy Faire diorama at Disney’s California Adventure preview center, 2/13/13.

Matt and Christopher after a long, tough day in Disney’s California Adventure, 2/13/13.

Display of bust maquettes for Walt Disney World’s Hall of Presidents attraction, Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California, 2/14/13.

Cherry trees in full bloom at the Reagan Library, Simi Valley, Calfornia, 2/14/13.

Christopher Geoffrey McPherson – The Babi Makers (2013).

We’ve spent the last few weeks working on the release of Christopher’s latest book, a cautionary sci-fi tale called The Babi Makers. The very concept of the book had my creative gears spinning, and I immediately thought of doing something that was contemporary, yet also evocative of funky old sci-fi things like Omni magazine art and paperback book covers from the ’50s and ’60s. I originally thought to have just a landscape in the bottom half, meant to represent the community of Nové depicted in the book. It wasn’t quite working, however, and that’s when Christopher thought up the idea of including figures looking over a cliff. That’s where it finally clicked.

The Babi Makers is available as a Kindle download, or as a paperback. Below, some imagery that guided me along in the design process.

Wassily Kandinsky – Variegated Black (1935).

Sci-fi paperback book covers, 1960s (Avon edition of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy).

Early OMNI magazine covers and art (July 1981 issue).

Japanese Friendship Garden, Phoenix AZ 2012

Changes are afoot for this old weblog, as you can see with the minimalist re-design (big thanks to Kris for helping out!). Scrubbles.net is not going away any time soon, but the redesign is part of a larger effort not to place so much of my online identity on a made-up word that I came up with on a whim in July 2000. This has been brewing for awhile, but probably the tipping point was regularly searching for “Scrubbles” in Twitter and finding out about all the stupid, illiterate, vulgar people who used that word. If anything, Scrubbles.net is not stupid, illiterate or vulgar — so essentially Matt Hinrichs will be diversifying himself from his origins.

Not to fear, however — I will definitely keep Scrubbles.net going with thoughtful, long-form posts at least once a week. The weekly Flick Clique is going away, but I will make sure to periodically post on films that catch my eye (don’t forget to check out my DVD Talk reviews!). Mostly I’d like to use this space to get back to exploring design, illustration, retro kitsch and other stuff in more detail than would be contained in yer average tumblr post. It’ll be loads of fun, and I already have a swell book (a birthday gift to myself) that will be shared here shortly.

Like I said, the redesign is just part of a bigger re-branding project for me. It includes:

• My new Matt Hinrichs Design & Illustration portfolio page, now at Cargo Collective. This replaces the self-hosted, old-style HTML site that I’ve hand-coded since ’bout 1996. While it still needs to have a few pieces added, the site looks nice and professional.
• A Tumblr page with its own domain – 4 Color Cowboy. This is where I’ll be posting short daily stuff – images, videos, songs, whatever. I’ve long had an aversion to sites like Tumblr that are so damn passive, but I suppose this is a sign that I’ve finally joined the Borg. Surprisingly, Tumblr is a fun, fun place and their interface (unlike WordPress) is a breeze to set up and use.
• My Scrubbles Twitter profile has been rechristened 4 Color Cowboy with a new profile design. Exciting, and a little nerve-wracking since there’s the possibility that my current followers will get confused and un-follow me. Since Twitter is more readily identified with their users’ real names, however, I’m not too fearful of that.
• My Flickr user name has also been re-branded to 4 Color Cowboy, although the URLs for all the images remain the same.

Although I’ve been hella busy lately (p.s. – whatever happened to using the word “hella”), I have had a few spare moments to pull together this new, improved version of the LitKids print with Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island. I originally printed Jim as part of the original few LitKids in 2010, but the lines on the drawing ended up being too thin and as a result only a few decent prints came out of it. This newer version, re-drawn with more robust lines and printed in three colors, came out much nicer. I ran out of Treasure Island pages on this one, so some of them were printed with circa 1910 copies of Swiss Family Robinson and Aladdin.

The Jim Hawkins Edition 2 LitKids Print is only $12 at my Etsy shop.