The Action Blast played their first show at The House of Blues in Chicago, and I was there to take a few photos after some happy hour boozing this past Friday. My steady hand prevailed thanks to my bullet-proof Irish drinking genes, and The House of Blues spacious photo pit.

I almost quit the idea of starting my own clothing line altogether when I first started out because I literally didn’t know what to design. What could I put on my t-shirts? No one likes a shirt with just a logo on it–unless you’re Nike. I didn’t like semi-offensive parody shirts. I couldn’t use band names. I couldn’t afford any sort of licensing to use comic book superheroes. Essentially I was left with NOTHING.

Josh Smith, the designer behind one of my most favorite websites, Hydro74 had his first event called, “Back in Black” and shot some footage at the show. If you haven’t seen it yet check it out below, but definitely check out his design portfolio.

It’s hard to come home at the end of a normal 8 hour work day only to have to sit back down at your computer and start plugging away at more design work, or more development work like I do every day. Here’s a list of non-conventional ways I go about finding motivation and/or the inspiration to do more work.

A friend sent me this link today which contained a funny comic with an interesting take on religion, and the absence of religion, and devout irrational beliefs when it comes to religion.

Sometimes when I’m reading/web surfing I come across thought-provoking quotes that I can’t take my mind off of. If I can, I try to keep track of them via my Facebook page or cell phone. The reason I do this, besides trying to make myself look deep/cool to chicks who look at my various web profile pages, is because believe it or not ideas for t-shirts, tattoos, mission statements–you name it, they tend to dry up. Here’s a few of my most inspirational quotes, and how I keep track of them.

Rise Against is a constant source of inspiration for many of our t-shirt designs and ideals. Their videos are equally as powerful and moving as most of their music and the new, “Audience of One” video is no exception.

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need? I came across this outline from a book by Dan Ariely called, “Predictably Irrational” that had some incredibly insightful information about people and why we at times seem to act completely irrational. It covers giving away things for free, putting high price points on products to create demand, and even the benefit of arousal!

A pretty cool summary as to how Mode Chicago came up with the concept for the Obama 08 Campaign

An inspirational 3d motion graphics video, Gantz Graf.

It’s not very often that you get to find websites that are brand new to the market and that are actually trying a totally different approach to business. Recently, we somehow managed to get in contact with the great people at Cameesa, a new kind of Threadless…

I came across this very well done spoof video of the Dove Evolution video that became so viral some time ago. It’s a humorous jab at the Dove video and carries a very interesting message that, “no one wants to look at ugly people”. I don’t know about you, but they basically seem to have [...]

I found this gem of a site today and I thought I’d share it with the world here via the AssaultBLOG: Rock n Role The site/clothing line is run by Ali Maclean and here’s a little tidbit from their about The former “Gig Guide” girl on Indie 103.1 showed off new pieces from her Rock’n’Role [...]

Just got a chance to see the Lakai Fully Flared skate video intro on youtube. It’s about 5 minutes long clip with a badass soundtrack coupled with some awesome pyrotechnic explosions courtesy of Spike Jonze. The video was directed by Ty Evans and features M83 — “Lower Your Eyelids to Die With the Sun”. It’s [...]