Unpardonable lapses on these. My only excuses are a number of personal events that interfered with Saturday marketing, and a lost charger for a dead camera battery. One of these photos was actually shot with an iPhone (guess which).

The unintended benefit, though, is getting to see a fast-forward progression of the season’s offerings over the course of the summer. First we have the haul from June 26:

Lots of classic indicators of early summer here: snap peas, garlic whips, porcini mushrooms, asparagus and strawberries of the particularly fragile and incredibly delicious ‘Hood’ variety. The latter are identifiable by their diminutive stature and the wet spot on the pint container where one of them’s gone squishy from the bike ride home.

Now contrast that with last weekend, August 21:

Peaches and tomatoes! And huge piles of each at several stalls. It’s almost as if Oregon is apologizing to us for running out of strawberries. That white orb-thing hiding behind the basil is a tiny orange-fleshed honeydew melon, which was nice but a little disappointing. Best leave those to hotter dryer places, and we’ll stick with the berries and stone fruits.

It doesn’t show up that well, but the fluted thing resting on top of the purple artichoke is a variety of zucchini that my friend Tobias at one of the market stalls (he’s also an industrial designer — cool, right?) recommended so emphatically I had little choice. It was fantastic. Whatever this variety’s called, it’s uglier than a normal zucchini, gets way bigger without getting woody, and tastes twice as good. On the other hand, he also recommended that strange dark green jutting out above it, which is apparently an ancient predecessor to broccolini or something. It tasted like twigs.

It honestly does my heart good to see the progress of time in my shopping basket, especially when one joy gets displaced by another in this way.

On the other hand, ask me again in February after I’ve filled my tote bag with parsnips and rain for the ninth consecutive weekend and maybe I’ll have something different to say.

Bit of a redundant haul photo this time, I’m afraid: bread, fish, beer and strawberries as per usual, with the addition of an astonishingly good 12 dollar pinot noir from a small winery that sells exclusively through farmers market stalls. I owe that discovery to a co-shopper who prefers wine to beer, lucky me. The conversation with the winemaker was extra interesting–wine, along with just about everything else, owes more of its price to the distribution and marketing than the actual making, so a 12 dollar bottle like this would probably run closer to 30 if he were to actually jump through all the hoops needed to get it on a supermarket shelf. Also available through the internet for a few dollars more, if you’re interested.

Clockwise from left: strawberries, lacinato kale, beer, romaine lettuce, beets, green garlic, black cod, carrots (topped), torpedo radishes. Center: Fleur de Lis demi baguette

Slightly less ambitious haul this week, partly reflecting a busy week that left less time for cooking. It’s not all bad–every evening spent not cooking was spent elsewhere in good company–but that’s meager consolation for the stack of magnificent collards slowly wilting in my fridge.

A few new and notable things in the basket this week. Black Cod from Linda Brand, which sadly ran out before I could score any last week. Enlightening tidbit from the conversation with the stall guy: black cod is a mostly Pac NW thing, and enjoys nowhere near the notoriety it ought to considering that it’s likely the world’s most delicious fish.

The opening of the Hollywood Farmers Market in Portland ranks as one of the most exciting days of the year for me; whether this is a sign of how wonderful the food is here or how boring my life has gotten, I can’t really say. Probably both.

But I was there May 1st, an unusually chilly day for a venue I tend to associate with summer. The pickings were good, enough to convince me to invite the Communication Design department over for dinner the following week, giving a reason to shop with purpose the following Saturday, May 8th (the market’s just on Saturdays). To entice them, I shot the picture above.

Food photography is a specialized discipline, I’m aware, and I’ve read through enough cookbooks to know that lighting, composition, mood, framing and all of the other things we associate with portraiture are just as important when shooting broccoli. My personal favorite example of the art is undoubtedly Nigel Slater’s Appetite, a gorgeous cookbook crammed with full page elegantly disheveled still-lives, of food the way we wish we were eating it: lush and chaotic and indulgent, tightly cropped to suggest bounty, with crumbs and wrappers and well-loved wooden utensils scattered around.

There are some shots of sausages simmering in gravy, and roasted chickens, but also messier and more charming ones of the seedy underbelly of the culinary process: grease-smeared carving knives, stain-spattered aprons, the burny bits left on a grill pan post-grilling. I sigh and coo when I read this book, and well up with gratitude toward my friend Alex, a food writer with exceptional taste, who gave it to me as a present very many years and meals ago. The small sampling visible on the book’s Amazon page hint at its glory, but definitely miss the best ones.

Considering how much effort I lavished on this blog during its first few weeks of existence (new platform, new theme, portfolio pages, resume and so on) it might seem a bit odd to have suddently dropped updating it for four months. If you’re mathematically-inclined enough to calculate the ratio, in fact, you’d get a

[time spent redesigning the site]/[time spent completely ignoring the site]

ratio of about 1:12. Which is undeniably pathetic.

If you were indulgent, you might give me the benefit of the doubt and suspect that it’s because I’ve been busy elsewhere, and you’d be right. Or you might have just checked my LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter status and discovered that I have a job. A writing job, ironically, and more specifically, a design writing job, for a firm called Ziba that looms quite large in the creative landscape of Portland, Oregon.

Perhaps it’s for similar reasons as the cobbler leaving his progeny unshod or the barista who drinks Taster’s Choice (er…excuse me….Via)(which my former boss referred to as “coffee sauce”) at home, but one of the initial side effects of writing for a full-time living has been a reluctance to do any for my own benefit. This has included lapsed and paltry email correspondence, I’m embarrassed to say, and reluctance to write journal entries, tweet beyond the bare minimum, contribute to friends’ experimental magazines, and participate in cool shit like 48 Hour Mag.

Well enough of that. Over the past few days I’ve taken a second look at this so-called writer’s fatigue and discovered a hidden inverse: once you’ve spent three months writing daily for other people, the process starts to get automatic, and this imparts a certain fearlessness to writing of the non-career-building sort. So while I can’t ensure anything particularly fun to read (this post, for example, has been about approximately nothing), I can make a decent promise that there will be words.

Next post: How I got this odd job.

Another video from the San Francisco installment of the Coroflot Creative Confab series. This time, it’s the entire panel discussion, clocking in at just under 45 minutes. So while that’s a bit much for the casual browser, it’s a tremendous resource for anyone studying the art of creative hiring.

This is a fast-paced conversation with recruiters and directors from four of the most successful creative companies on earth, and they get quite specific about where they look for designers, how they assess their potential, and how they keep them engaged.

Left to right: Me, Steve Johnson (LinkedIn), John Foster (IDEO), Kate Gilman (24 Seven), Emily Delmont (Google Creative Lab)

COROFLOT CONFAB PANEL SF 10/21/09 // LIVE SHOOT BY : F/22

Once again, many thanks to Josh Couto and Drew Dorsey for a fine shooting and editing job in a tough recording situation. Their previously posted 5 minute interview video from the same Confab event is here. A summary of the discussion, and photos from the event are here.

I came across this Flickr tag, collecting photos by several contributors of Josiah McElheny’s “Island Universe” series while they were on exhibition at the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid’s Parque de Retiro last year. This sculpture series is the culmination of several years of freelance modeling work I’ve done for Josiah, starting with “An End to Modernity” in 2004.

These cosmologically-derived chandeliers, photogenic to begin with, become positively breathtaking in this venue, bathed in natural light and reflecting the elegant curves of the Palacio itself, a massive glass house modeled after London’s Crystal Palace in the 1880’s and a monument to industry and modernism in its own right.

“Island Universe” photos on Flickr.

It’s not often that a break in career coincides with a holiday lull, but my departure from Core77 in mid-December constitutes just that: a three week break, though recent conversations indicate this is soon ending. I’d been planning on migrating my blog over to a more flexible platform for some time now, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity.

So: Presenting carlalviani.com v2. It’s on WordPress now, which is an obvious improvement over Blogger from my end, and coupled with proper hosting, enables far more flexibility than its earlier incarnation. Most immediately noticeable is the ability to install custom themes; the one you’re looking at now is Basic Maths, and I’m deeply infatuated with it.

One of the best parts about organizing the Creative Confab series for Coroflot last year was interviewing the panelists. Khoi Vinh, design director for NYTimes.com was perhaps the most enlightening, and I’ve followed his blog ever since. Among his numerous claims to fame is an instrumental role in the rigorous application of grid systems to web design over the past decade. When I heard he was creating a WordPress theme last November, I knew I’d found a solid reason to finally migrate my blog.

Learning Wordpress from scratch and installing the theme took the spare hours of a holiday week, and I’ve spent a bit of each day since then taking advantage of its flexibility to divide the content into something more sensible. This means my design projects now occupy their own Portfolio section, links to favorite writing samples get their own Writing page, and the brief story of how I got to my current state of professional affairs now dwells independently on the About page. Added content and organization is in the works, but in the meantime I’m looking forward to a blog that’s actually a blog. Twitter’s fun and all, but sometimes I’d rather write on a topic that doesn’t get full service from 140 character bursts.

While preparing for the San Francisco installment of the Coroflot Creative Confab series in October, a freelance videographer and AAU student named Josh Couto approached us. In exchange for free access to the event and a venue for showing his work, he offered to shoot and edit the event for free, going so far as to conduct short interviews on the subject of creative employment with three of the panelists: Emily Delmont of Google Creative Lab, Kate Gilman of 24 Seven, and John Foster of IDEO.

CREATIVE CONFAB SF 10/21/09 // COROFLOT • CORE77 // PRODUCTION : DREW DORSEY & F/22 from F/22 on Vimeo.

What we expected, to be honest, was a working document to record the happenings of the day. What we got was something much more valuable: a series of beautifully shot and sensitively edited discussions that get closer to the truth of the creative hiring process than anything in recent memory, told by some extraordinarily knowledgeable and qualified hiring experts.

This is the first of the videos. It logs in at just over 4 minutes, but ties together several themes that have recurred consistently throughout the past year’s research: the necessity of network-building, the difficulty of determining culture fit, and the crucial need for designers to demonstrate collaborative ability and dedication to their art. My involvement in this one is indirect: I assembled the panel and helped organize the event, but the interviews are all Josh, and his colleague Drew Dorsey. Nice one, guys.

As of this week I will no longer be working for Core77.com and Coroflot.com. I’ve been writing for and working with these two phenomenal design-oriented websites, in various capacities, since late 2004, shortly after I graduated from the Pratt MID program, and before moving to Portland. It’s no exaggeration to say that Core has been the one consistent presence that’s lasted my entire professional design and writing career.

This presents an unusually clear opportunity to answer some questions I’ve gotten over the years, about what it’s like to work for such an iconic publication, and what exactly I did there (quite a lot of it wasn’t writing, especially toward the end). From a professional perspective, it also seems like a good idea to document the range of things I did and learned, which is so broad even I have trouble believing it some times.

The Core77 Ping-Pong Squad, at ICFF 2008 with (OMG!) Konstantine Grcic. I'm in the back.

Core77

In 2004, I wrote an article for Core called American Design, Anyone? in response to some observations at that year’s ICFF; for a first-ever feature article, I still think it’s not bad. Getting this right worried me enough that I spent over a month doing research, and quickly realized one of the great perks of writing for publication: you get to talk to a lot of interesting people. For this article it was Jason Miller, Aric Chen, and Dave Alhadeff, three NYC-based furniture designers and curators, but in the years since, I’ve gotten to interview industrial and interaction designers, CAD industry leaders, branding experts, materials experts, design recruiters, design educators and journalists. It’s a humbling and fascinating part of the job, and more work than you might expect: for every hour interviewing, I probably spent two preparing, and another two reviewing.

In the five years since then, this has led to a body of published work far bigger than I would’ve thought possible, especially considering how much was produced while I was busy doing other things–industrial design and CAD until late 2008 (see earlier posts on this blog), and Coroflot editorial and community management thereafter (more on that later). Here’s a brief run-down: