I ended up going to Cut & Paste last night which is an annual design competition where 2D, 3D and motion designers compete in 20 minute rounds to come up with the best design based on a given topic/theme.

The night started off perfectly with great street parking just minutes from the venue (The Metro), which is very impressive because parking in the city on a Saturday night is a huge pain in the butt. Next up, we got to jump the queue because we already had our tickets and to top it all over the night’s sponsors Becks had free beer for the first hour. So far the night was looking awesome.

There were some very impressive designs from the night. But the thing that I was most impressed by was their lightning speed. They’ve only got 20 minutes to come up with a completed design, and in 3D that’s crazy. This one time I helping g with her 3D work and it took me nearly 3 hrs just to put a couple of sticks on a building.

For full coverage of the night have a look at Charles’ blog – Empty Wrapper. He’s done an awesome job of covering the night’s proceeding.

Below are some of the designs from the night.

3D design
The guy that did this design had to leave his sister’s wedding to attend the competition. I was hoping he’d win so it would make missing the wedding worth while.

Ray Kristianto took out first place with this 3D design below. It was so crazy, there was so much detail and precision with this design. Sorry it’s not the best of photos, my hands were a bit shaky from all the free Becks beer.

2D design
We all thought Adam Paquette’s design below should have won. I mean seriously how in the world can you do that in 15 minutes! There’s so much detail in the shading.

This is the design that won. The judges kept saying that they were really impressed by the ideas and concept, so I guess it’s fair enough that Lev Berry won. I didn’t get a great photo of this one because I really didn’t think it would have won.

The winner’s get a trip to New York to compete in the global Cut & Paste comp. Hope they do well!

I love tees and I must admit, I do have a rather large collection of them. One of my favourite places to buy tees is from threadless.com. Being a US based company I haven’t bought from them in a while because the Aussie dollar has been pretty crap. But with recent tradings closing at about 80c I thought it was time for a top up.

We placed our order about 2 weeks ago. So for the past week whenever a parcel arrived at the office I’d quickly ask “Is it soft?”. After a week of asking I finally got the answer I was after. The soft parcel with my name on it arrived today, props to the packaging which looked like a t-shirt. In the midst of my excitement and jumping I accidentally stabbed myself with the pen knife as I was trying to open the parcel so I couldn’t do the honors of taking each beautiful tee out one by one, less I bleed all over them.

One of the things that I love about threadless is that they’re quite clever with their designs often using optical illusions, play on words or just total randomness. We ordered 8 tees in total – bulk ordering to save on shipping, which is usually what kills you when you order online from the US. I got 2 tees this time round which worked out to be about AUD$15 per tee (including shipping). What a bargain!

Mine is the red one with one gingerbread man cut out and the other gingerbread man half stuck. The design is appropriately called Gingerbread Nightmare. Love it!

I’ve had this trusty little tripod for years now and it’s been a great friend (especially when times were dark). Many times when I used it to stablise my coffee-shaking hands my friends would point and laugh. The poor thing was just misunderstood. It really did work wonders with the camera.

The little tripod died on me the other night. I’ve been trying and trying to fix it, sitting there for ages but it’s just won’t stick. It’s neck is broken so it just flips and flops around and it won’t lock in place.

Ordinarily I’d be happy because now I get to go shopping for a brand new tripod. One with all the latest and greatest new features. But I’m kinda bummed. I actually really liked that tripod.

Oh well, such is life. Things break – you replace them.
At least I’m helping the economy.

Going to the supermarket when you’re hungry is never a good idea. You always end up buying a heap of junk food and the worst thing, well for me anyway, is that you know you’re only buying it because you’re hungry, but you manage to convince myself that you really would like eating this later.

While strolling down the chocolate aisle in my hungry state I spotted these familiar, but unfamilar bars. NEW Cadbury Bubbly – “chocolate with an aerated mint flavoured (or chocolate) centre”. Hmm… sounds a lot like a good old Aero bar to me. Intrigued as I was, I bought one of each flavour to test out.

I love mint Aero bars so I had pretty high expectations for this, while they looked and felt the same it just didn’t quite cut it for me. The Cadbury chocolate just didn’t blend as well with the mint. So the original mint Aero bar is still a winner.

On the other hand, while I’m not the biggest fan of the Chocolate centred Aero bar, the chocolate Bubbly is really good. It’s like a Dairy Milk chocolate bar, only funner.