The Infectious Blog

A little news on some tweaks and modifications to our design challenges here at Infectious. As of today, we are killing Open Submissions.

(Don’t know what Open Submissions were? Basically our ongoing design challenge where you could submit any art for any product we did. We would periodically launch winners, usually a handful every month.)

So we are replacing Open Submissions with a slightly new thing called Free4Alls. Why? Well… Open Submissions felt a little too ambiguous. As an artist you never knew if you were a potential winner or not. There was no decisive end to it. Which left everyone in limbo.

So now, we will hold Free4Alls, a design challenge where you can submit any art or design for any Infectious product, just like open submissions. Except now there will be a beginning, an end and explicit winners.

And if you aren’t chosen as a winner, we’ll let you know…. so you aren’t left hanging.

So farewell to Open Submissions. Hello Free4Alls.

Some obvious questions you might have:

Q: Can I re-submit the same design to another Free4All.
A: Sure. If you submit and we think it doesn’t make sense, we’ll let you know.

Q: What are the prizes for Free4Alls?
A: Each free for all will have prizes associated with and posted to the design challenge page.

Q: Will you do a Free4All every month?
A: Maybe. If they rock and you all love them we’ll do more.

On Wednesday night Infectious threw a holiday party to be remembered. Team Infectious and our community of artists and friends celebrated the holiday season over at Fabric8 Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission district. Many thanks to Olivia for sharing her beautiful gallery space with us.

Reuben Rude, Nico Berry, Alphonzo Solorzano and our on-staff artists cranked out some mini-masterpieces on the spot and the rest of the night was packed with goodie bags of free Infectious art, festive refreshments and even a testosterone-fueled jumping jack and push up claps contest. Still no word on who was the winner – we’re sure the saga will continue next year… Until then, happy holidays from us to you.

We’re doing a little Holiday throw down at Fabric8 in the Mission. Come join us for a little December libation. We’ve got free drinks, random, quirky goodie bags for the first who show up and live sketching from numerous Infectious artists. All while supplies last.

Time: 7pm on December 16th.

Here is how to find the spot.
View Map

This week Jade Klara graces us with her winning design Spookasem. Spookasem is an Afrikaans word that translates as “ghost breath”, a fitting title for Ms. Klara’s piece. Her whimsical and transient images seem as light as air, yet they captivate viewers with their strong and adventurous subject matter.

Jade lives in Cape Town, South Africa, where she is currently preparing for her upcoming shows at C.A.V.E. Gallery in Los Angeles in December and at Salon91 Gallery in Cape Town in January 2010. When she needs a break from making amazing art, Jade practices her skateboarding and enjoys the occasional mochi ice cream.

When asked about her art Jade said, “my work is there to create a happy bubble in the pit of your stomach that takes you away from real life things for a little while.” It sure worked on us!

Back in July we challenged our community of artists to dream up a laptop skin that creatively revealed the glowing Apple logo in our Cut to the Core design challenge. A tsunami of press and purchases followed the launch of the first round of winners, so we decided to spoil you with a second batch of designs that also cut us to the quick.

Congrats to our round two design winners!

Greg Koenig and his glow-in-the-dark design A Little Rusty will shed light on your computer (and your affliction for lovable robots). Greg wanted to “create a piece that integrated the glowing Apple logo, to make it feel that the logo was interacting with the artwork” and what better way than to do it with light…

Ivan Flores brings new meaning to the term apple jack with Jacked In. As is the case with most great designs, Ivan says that he wanted to draw something that he himself would want to see on his laptop. “I wanted to take advantage of the Apple logo light to illuminate a cute sci-fi chic who happens to be wearing headphones plugged into the laptop as if she’s listening to iTunes.”

Mike Klay takes a decidedly cutthroat approach with the clean 45 degree angles of his crossbones in The Rebel. It kind of reminds us of Steve Job’s propensity for flying pirate flags in Apple’s days of yore.

How do you like them apples?

Join the Infectious crew tonight at DIY Shopwars – a charity event put on by Delicious Drips to benefit Project Open Hand. Local creative businesses were set some homework. We were each given a blank Qee vinyl toy and had to customize it anyway we saw fit. Our CEO Tim gravitated towards Captain Kangaroo, our designer Mikey did some impressive sculptee clay work on the Ultimate Warrior’s hair and our piece de resistance was the Slim Goodbody toy that our Production Manager Dennis meticulously painted. The “Superhero of Health” also comes with his own little custom doll wig. Infectious will be in attendance at the 1:AM gallery tonight along with the crews from Kidrobot, Precita Eyes Muralists et al. All toys will be on sale with the profits going to an excellent cause. Come join in the fun!

Muchos gracias to Junko Mizuno for delighting our eye-orbs and tickling our fun-nybone at her recent book signing for Little Fluffy Gigolo PELU Vol. 1 at the New People store. We thoroughly enjoyed reading the book in English (finally!) and experiencing her fan base first hand. One such fan was this well-quaffed individual who asked Junko to sign her Infectious skateboard.

Later, we all hit the Japantown.  Hard. We got our groove on at Do Re Mi where we rented out a karaoke booth for several fun-filled hours. All we can say is thank god it was a private booth! Without revealing too many embarrassing details, we’ll say that there was lots of soju, voice crackling, high kicks, a little Kiss from a Rose and a lot of bad rapping. Next time, you may think twice about missing a karaoke night with Infectious.

For our next installment of our Rad Collabs blog series, we’d like to highlight Liz Kueneke. This Chicago native and current Spain resident has traveled the world, collaborating with everyday Joes and Josephines on participatory embroidery projects. She has stitched maps of neighborhoods in Brooklyn, NY to Los Angeles, CA; Bangalore, India; Rome, Italy and Barcelona, Spain just to name a few.

Her embroidered maps not only lay out the geography of said neighborhoods, but they also map out social history based on the experiences of the inhabitants. This adds a real human element that is lost in municipal maps. Through these collaborative projects, she helps communities come to a new understanding of the places in which they live. Click here to learn more.

Yo Infectoids,

Come out and join the whole Infectious team this Saturday, August 22nd as we celebrate our beloved catalog artist, Junko Mizuno’s release of her graphic novel, Little Fluffy Gigolo PELU Vol. 1. She will be signing copies at 2 pm in the New People store in Japan Town, SF. The signing be followed up with an Infectious outing where cocktails and some off-key karaoke are on the menu. How can you pass up an opportunity to listen to the musical stylings of our very own team members singing some great hits from legends such as Abba, David Lee Roth, Tupac, and Britney Spears. Experience the Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Hope to see y’all there.

Love and high fives,
Team Infectious

Infectious has a thriving community of artists and we are obsessed with collaboration in all its shapes and forms. We love to see artists coming together to contribute creative input towards creating output, and have chosen to highlight an artist collective each week to demonstrate the camaraderie and creative mastery that is embodied in collaborative works in this blog series we call Rad Collabs. To kick things off, we’ve chosen to highlight a cooperative whose openness and non-exclusivity has yielded some beautiful and inspiring work: Sumi Ink Club.

Sumi Ink Club is a Los Angeles-based (but not always in one place) drawing collective which was founded in 2005 by Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Anderson.  Created with the credo “all ages, all humans, all styles”, the club was a means to fortify social interactions. Originally intended to use ink and paper Sumi Ink Club has also printed on fabric, walls, created stickers, tee shirts, magazines, and books, and has exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Fischbeck and Anderson are visionaries of all things collaborative. Their side project, Lucky Dragons, is the musical equivalent of Sumi Ink Club and it utilizes the concert space, turning it into a multi-media art piece which centers on audience participation.

Regular open meetings for Sumi Ink Club are held in a studio in Los Angeles’s Chinatown.  If you’re in La La Land and you want to join in on the fun, check out their blog for scheduled meetings. If you’re not in the area, visit their online store.

Mandarin Plaza

970 Broadway,  Ste. 212

Los Angeles, CA 90036