It kind of goes without saying that 2020 has been a bit of a dumpster fire of a year. But it hasn’t been all bad for us, at least as a family. With our twins having turned 4 in the Spring of 2020, we’ve spent a lot more time together than we would have otherwise. There certainly have been times where we spent too much time together! We could have never have guessed that both Katie and I would be working from home full-time, and with the kids being pulled out of daycare early on, they were with us all at the same time. It was a pretty crazy first 6 weeks of working 16+ hour days before we broke down and hired a full-time babysitter to help us corral a normal workday.

When I first thought of pulling together my favourite photos from this past year, I was thinking it was going to be a nice collection of some of the more interesting things I shot along the way on our trips, but as I went back through all my favourites, all the pictures of the kids kept rising to the top. As crazy of a year as it was, and after spending so much time together this year, we still got out and did a lot – all outdoors, which is what we would have been doing anyway. We did our best to stay away from where the crowds were going and did more camping trips with just our family, where normally we’d be out camping with different families. In the end, we’ve tried to shelter the kids from what’s going on, and I think as far as they know, everything we did was exactly as it was planned. It’s made us pretty thankful that they have each other to play with, and seem to have adapted to the fact that playgrounds are just things we walk by – which was really hard for them in the early days.

We’re a skiing/snowboarding family, so in the winter months, we’re out in the snow as much as we can be. We got out plenty of times this year before the Pandemic shut everything down on us – in fact, we were up at Cypress Mountain on the day early in March when they announced they were closing at the end of the day, for the season.

It looks like a bunch of my favourite photos from this year happened out on the ski hill. I guess that’s because it was a bit of a rollercoaster where our daughter started off not really wanting to ski the first few times out, but our son was really into it. I know we had some pretty heavy snow days, and that made things tough for her, and she sat off to the side and we took turns playing with her at the bottom of the hill. But then something clicked for her. And then it was pretty competitive for her to really excel at it. And that was amazing to watch. I know we got a few looks when we were up at the top of Cypress Mountain because you don’t often see kids that small skiing all on their own (without leashes, etc.), so it was fun to watch them just take off full-speed down the mountain and be passing kids twice their age.

In a lot of ways, not a lot really changed for us either. We did plenty of camping in the Summer of 2020, and that’s something we would have done anyway. All this camping also seemed to happen on the rainiest year of camping we’ve ever had. The first three outings were almost completely in the rain the whole time. One of our trips started off with us setting up our tent in puddles of rain in the dark, where the tent soaked up the water from the bottom and so we started off a 5-day camping trip with a wet tent. We got it dried out inside enough to make it sleep-able, but after four straight days of downpour, the tent started leaking at the top. So our tarp game was pretty strong this year, and we also took the time to do a top-to-bottom rainproofing of the tent.

Katie and I have been talking about doing a paddle up the Widgeon Creek forever. I’m pretty sure it was the hottest day of the summer when we decided to finally pull the trigger. It was a great way to spend the day, and we spent lots of time just floating in the river to cool off. We’ll definitely be making this trip again the next chance we get.

For years I’ve wanted to put on an event that gets a bunch of creatives together for an evening on the ski hill. That finally happened this past February when I put on the inaugural Creative Pulse ‘Mountain Time’ event. We got about 25 creative industry people together for a night at Cypress Mountain. It was a great night out on the mountain; we all met some new people and relaxed in the bar for a little apres-ski. Just as I was planning the much-asked-about follow-up event, COVID came and shut the ski hills down for the season.

Check out the thumbnails below to see some of my other favourite photos I shot this year.

Favourite Photos of 2020 Gallery

Click the thumbnails below to see larger previews with captions.

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The Vancouver Dirt Jump Coalition launched our second bike facility at Hastings Park in Vancouver this past weekend. I’m really proud of this one because it really caters to riders of all ages and abilities; dirt jumps have a little steeper learning curve than a pumptrack, so this really opens it up to everybody. This being a pump track, it requires less maintenance as it doesn’t take the same kind of abuse that dirt jumps like we launched in 2010 in Vanier Park.

After several meetings with users, it was determined that dirt jumps at this location weren’t the best fit. Given the large open space where they’d be much more exposed to the sun and rain, which means the jumps would break down much faster if they’re just baking in the sun without proper water systems and an existing community in place to maintain the jumps over time.

Ironically, this pump track now stands about 60 feet away from where I had met with Mark Villiamy (retired Park Board planner) more than 15 years ago to discuss where Vancouver’s first dirt jump location might potentially be; in a lesser-used corner of Hastings Park just off the backside of Playland. In the fall of 2010, we opened the Vanier Park Dirt Jumps at Kits Point, a location I never thought would be possible – it was just too good to be true.

Hoots Bike Parks (Facebook page) designed and built this project, which includes the large pumptrack and a much smaller, beginner-level pump track that was designed specifically with young children in mind. This is located right beside the tots’ playground so that parents could be close to their children doing a couple of different activities simultaneously. The pumptrack is lined with some bridge-style bike skills components that create a perimeter to separate the track from the commuter bike path that curves around the track.

This was a project I worked on for a few years and in a much larger capacity. I was asked to sit on the advisory board for the Hastings Park Open Space Advisory Group, meeting many times spanning more than a year with park planners, engineering firms and landscape designers as they planned the redevelopment of Hastings Park. This redevelopment included the Empire Fields soccer field, sports plateau, community bikes paths, reimagining Creekway Park (where Brittania Park meets up with Hastings Park at the north end of the park), and the daylighting of the original stream that was buried decades before and be the official ear to the Park Board representing the Leeside Tunnel which houses the Leeside Skateboard Park (which has its own group overseeing it, I was making sure all agreements were being honoured and that nothing went sideways on them).

This wasn’t like any of the dirt jump and skatepark projects I have worked on before; this was a much larger, more encompassing holistic approach to the redesign of Hastings Park. In the end, I’m really impressed with how it all turned out. I really got into a few different parts of the redesign I didn’t think I would, such as the daylighting of the original stream and the commuter bike paths throughout the park.

You can read the original Vancouver Courier article about the grand opening here.

See also the grand opening of the Vanier Park Dirt Jump Park and Pumptrack.

 

Here are some additional images of the park’s redeveloped sections and some of the Hastings Park branding and wayfinding designed by Public Design.

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The BC Chapter of the Graphic Designers of Canada interviewed me recently after I became a CGD certified member. I recently made it a priority to get more involved in this professional organization after being heavily involved in volunteering in my other passion, BMX biking.

For over 15 years I’ve been involved in groups like the Vancouver Skateboard Coalition and Vancouver Dirt Jumping Coalition to help get public skateparks and dirt jumps built in the Lower Mainland for all users. It’s time for me to give back to my profession. I started volunteering at GDC events, and have been getting involved with other design-related organizations and events, such as the relatively new Creative Pulse group – check the link for their Facebook page and keep up to date with their events.

In the GDC profile, I answered questions about why I wanted to become a certified graphic designer (CGD) and the value of the certification, as well as how I first got interested in design and how living in BC has influenced me. The interview also highlights work from my portfolio, including the Tugboat Group website redesign, Jind Fruit Co. packaging line, Jamieson-Hilts Insurance Brokers rebrand, Windset Farms office interior and wayfinding signage and the Windset Farms packaging design. These are also a few of the projects that I submitted to the GDC for my CGD certification.

I also included a photo I shot early one morning while out camping by canoe. It was a beautiful still morning on the lake with herons squawking away in the distance. I shoot lots of photos when I’m out on adventures and this one hangs on my living room wall.

Thanks to the GDC BC Chapter for the opportunity for me to share my work.

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Here’s a little rundown of What I’ve Been Up to in the last few months… Since Instagram has pretty much knocked my iPhone Photo Dump series out of commission, I want to bring back some form of a journal… Something I can look back at to see what I was doing and/or working on at that time. I shoot a ton of (resource) photos every month and barely any of them see the light of day, so I want to share more of them.

Vancouver Aquarium Expansion Grand Opening

Katie and I went to the Vancouver Aquarium’s expansion grand opening party the night before we left for California. The new entrance with the high-tech 360° wrap-around video screens is pretty wild; all the new stuff looks great. We also took in the Planet Earth: Shallow Seas 4-D Experience, which is very well done. I won’t spoil how awesome the 4-D experience is, but I will say it’s better than the ‘Bugs Life’ one at Disneyland.

California Trip

A good friend of mine was getting married in LA in early June, so we flew down for that and extended our stay for a much-needed vacation. We hung out in Venice Beach, stopped for half a day to photograph an interior design job I did at Windset Farm’s Santa Maria office and massive greenhouse facility. From there we drove up the coast through Big Sur and then flew home from San Francisco… An amazing trip, and you can see more about the trip here.

Speaking of work, I’ve been busy adding projects to my portfolio – some of these have been finished for a little while, and maybe you’ve already seen some of these things on the shelves of your local grocery store.

• Windset Farms Office Environmental and Wayfinding Design
• Windset Farms Packaging Design
• Jind Fruit Co. Packaging
• Jind Fruit Co. Buyer’s Guide
• Jamieson-Hilts Insurance Website
• Jamieson-Hilts Insurance Identity

Rain City Chronicles

We rarely miss any of the Rain City Chronicles events, and with the theme of ‘Guilty Pleasures’ at The Rio Theatre, we were in for sure.

Camping at Weaver Lake

We like to get out and do as much camping as we can, so we rounded up a couple of other friends, Derek and Matt and they joined us at Weaver Lake. It’s a pretty convenient spot to hit because it’s only a couple of hours outside of the city, but it feels like you are in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Lots of canoeing, swimming, floating, hiking around and good times. Here are a few photos that round out the weekend.

Buntzen Lake Swimming & Hiking

Buntzen Lake is our go-to hang place because it’s not too far away, and it really does put you in the middle of nowhere with very little effort. So even if we only have a few hours, we can either hike around the lake; or if we have a bit more time we’ll take our canoe up, paddle over to the far side to get away from the crowded beach.

Listening to:

(according to my Last.fm stats for June/July)

Mastodon – Once More ‘Round The Sun
Collapse Under the Empire – Sacrifice & Isolation
Long Distance Calling – Nighthawk
Sleepmakeswaves – Love of Cartography
The Raveonettes – Pe’ahi
Letting Up Despite Great Faults – Neon
Rival Schools – Found
Killing Joke – In Dub
Whirr – Around
Black Lung – Black Lung s/t
The Whigs – Modern Creation
Torche – Songs For Singles
Afghan Whigs – Do to the Beast
Floor – Oblation
Dwarves – The Dwarves Invented Rock & Roll
A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Sea When Absent
Red Fang – Whales and Leeches

The post What I’ve been up to… June/July 2014 appeared first on Chris Young Design, Art Director and Graphic Designer Vancouver, BC.

We made the trip down to Los Angeles in mid-June for my good friend’s wedding; Jonathan and Wendy were getting hitched and we weren’t going to miss it for the world. We planned a vacation around their wedding; staying in Venice Beach where it would be central to where we’d be going. From Venice, we’d head up the coast through Big Sur and then fly out of San Francisco. A relaxing vacation with lots of beach time, then driving up the coast was exactly what Katie and I needed.

In Venice we stayed just off the famous canals at an apartment we found on Airbnb. It’s a great place, and we’d definitely stay there again. We spent the week lounging on the beach, meeting up with friends, and hitting a few amazing restaurants while we were there.

Jonathan and Wendy had their wedding at Smog Shoppe in Culver City, just outside of East LA. Back in the ’80s the place was a smog-check centre (as the name would imply); it’s an unassuming looking place from the outside but is a gorgeous place for a ceremony and reception. The indoor/outdoor courtyard has garden walls filled with vertical gardens, mostly desert plants and succulents.

Some of the bridal party were joining Jonathan and Wendy for a day at Disneyland and California Adventure Park, so we joined in on the fun too. Since we were doing both parks in one day, we made efficient use of our time and hit many of the busiest rides in both parks by jumping in the singles line. My FitBit recorded that we walked 24,033 steps that day; that’s more than 17km and our feet were so sore after all that walking. It was a very hot day, so I’m pretty surprised we didn’t leave with sunburns.

We started making our way up the coast, making a brief stop in Santa Maria, CA to visit Windset Farms’ 3-million square foot greenhouse facility. I had spent the last several months working on the interior design treatments of their office and wayfinding signage for the entire facility; you can see that portfolio piece here. It was great to see this project in person– I’m really pleased with the completed project, and their greenhouse facility is HUGE!

After a few hours in Santa Maria, we continued north up the coast via Highway 1 to Big Sur. We made a few stops along the way, including the Elephant Seal Rookery at San Simeon. There were plenty of elephant seals lounging on the beach, and you can get pretty close to them.

Normally on a trip like this, we’d be camping, and we’d have all of our gear with us. We flew down for the wedding and decided it would be too much trouble to bring tents and sleeping bags. Katie found a rental cabin at Riverside Campground and Cabins in Big Sur; a lucky score considering these cabins are often reserved many months in advance.

After a few days in Big Sur, we continued our drive up to San Francisco. We found an apartment on Airbnb in the Mission District, so we’d be central to everything we wanted to do on this trip. We had limited time in San Francisco, so we had to get into tourist-mode as soon as we dropped off our stuff in the apartment.

PHOTO GALLERY  |  This gallery has all the images from the above article, and plenty more; scroll through them with your ‘right arrow’ key.

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In my last post, our honeymoon in Nicaragua, I mentioned that I wanted to put together a post just about the colours of Nicaragua. Everywhere that we went in Nica, no matter how nice or how poor the neighbourhood, the buildings were beautifully painted bright colours, often with crazy colour combinations. I was kidding that when it comes time to paint the house, the husband goes out and grabs his choice for a colour, then the wife goes out and gets her choice without ever speaking to one another. Then they bust out the brushes and go for it. It looks like that’s what happens here for about 30% of the houses. Bright green and pink? Bright orange and red? Teal and yellow? Maybe mint and yellow? Hey, why not– it won’t look any crazier than the building next door.

When I first thought about putting this photo gallery together, I was going to concentrate on just the doorways that I shot. I’ve always loved sets of photographed doorways, but taking a better look at all the photos I shot that there were many other colourful things I wanted to share. It wasn’t just the houses that were so colourful, the churches were brightly painted, and even an old cemetery high up in the mountains is beautiful.

Even the pool at the place we were staying in was beautifully painted and incredibly inviting. Not that I would pass up getting in a pool no matter what it looked like in that Nicaraguan heat.

PHOTO GALLERY  |  Enjoy this gallery of beautifully (for the most part) painted buildings and doorways. There are lots of crazy colour combinations to think about for future design jobs. This gallery has all the images from the above article, and plenty more; scroll through them with your ‘right arrow’ key.

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A two-week trip to Nicaragua over Christmas and New Year is exactly what we were looking for for our honeymoon. Katie knew someone from Whistler who now lives in San Juan del Sur, having built her own house as well as a rental place that’s listed on AirBNB, so we figured why not; when else would we ever make this trip? We got married in August 2013 – you can see more about that here in this blog post.

We stayed at Casa Santosha, part of a yoga/surf community in the hills a couple of kilometres up the road from San Juan del Sur. It’s run by Heidi, a fantastic host, sharing her home with us, cooking us a few delicious meals, taking us out to a couple of different beaches with surfing lessons, and setting us up with lots of activities and tours of the area. Armed with a little less Spanish than we should have had, we did pretty well at learning on the fly or having our rough translations down in our pocketbooks. The people of Nicaragua were very friendly with our broken Spanish, and we were always able to figure out what we needed to do.

On one of the hottest days, we walked down the road to do a Canopy tour with howler monkeys. It’s part of a tour with 16 long zip-lines, and it was pretty awesome. The braking was all manual on the zip-lines with a thick piece of leather glued into the palm of a glove so you could control how fast you’d go down the line. I’m pretty sure I came in way too quickly on most of the lines, but especially on the 1000+ foot one. Looking down above the tops of the trees is pretty spectacular.

We went on a 3 hour horseback ride that meandered through the countryside and then across three beaches– Playa Mathilda, Playa San Lorenzo, and Playa Maderas. This was a great way to see the area, at a nice slow pace where you could take in the sights and animals.

We did a day tour of some other areas of central Nicaragua, where we started off the day with a visit to an organic coffee plantation on the Mombacho volcano. We then continued to the colonial city of Granada, which was beautiful with all the old buildings so brightly painted. Granada was founded in 1524 and is rumoured to be the first European city in mainland America. We stayed here for a few hours and took our driver Edgard out for a nice lunch in the Central Park area of the city.

After lunch, we took off to the artists’ market in Masaya and checked out hundreds of individual markets to find some local pottery. To end the day off, we swam in the crater of the massive Apoyo volcano; it’s the largest volcanic lagoon in Nicaragua and was breathtaking to swim in, and was so refreshing after so much walking and driving around. We left just before the sun went down, and as we made our way back down the sketchy mountain road, we came across an old cemetery. I asked our driver to pull over so we could check it out. It was a surreal experience in this very colourful mountaintop cemetery just as it was getting dark out.

We ended our trip by taking a ferry over to the Isla de Ometepe (Ometepe Island), where we rented ATVs and toured the island that’s made up of two volcanoes, Concepción and Maderas, that create the shape of an hourglass. Okay, I change my mind; I think seeing the island by ATVs is the best way to see things firsthand. In the couple of days that we spent on the island, we could see a lot of the island that we absolutely would not have been able to see without. Some of the roads were so bad that they were a pretty rough ride on the ATVs, and we had to drive miles on them, particularly when we were making our way over to do a kayak tour.

We did a kayak tour of the Rio Istiam (Istiam River), where we could explore the lush biodiversity, see giant iguanas and baby howler monkeys up in the trees, and even saw the elusive caiman alligator. We had to stand up and balance across a couple of kayaks to see and get a picture of the caiman, which is not a great time to lose your balance.

We fell in love with the food there, which is primarily rice and beans– which can be very boring, but we found it really flavourful in Nica. I ate a ton of fresh fish almost daily and was blown away by the prices, relatively cheap by our standards. That top left fish plate was caught just minutes before it was thrown on the grill, a great way to finish off our kayak tour of the river. We found some recipes for the rice and beans and now make it at home all the time, served on our hand-made pottery from Nicaragua almost puts us back there. We cannot wait to get back down there and explore even more of the country.

PHOTO GALLERY  |  Enjoy this photo gallery from our Nicaraguan honeymoon below, just a small sampling of the 1000+ photos I shot. This gallery has all the images from the above article, and plenty more; scroll through them with your ‘right arrow’ key.

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It was an absolutely perfect, hot August day with barely a cloud in the sky. We had exactly the wedding we wanted, and it’s exactly where we wanted it. I proposed to Katie on the bridge you see in the background of the first photo– since it’s her favourite place in the world, that was a pretty easy choice as to where I was going to ask her. I had to wait until we were in New Brunswick to ask… I popped the question a few days after we were back east for her brother’s wedding back in 2010.

We put our collective event planning experience together and did all the planning and details of the wedding ourselves. We designed the invitations, and even printed our own invites at home on a hobby letterpress machine called an Epic L Letterpress. This was a lot of work, and a lot of fun. We probably went a little overboard by creating a full website, but we wanted to share as much information as possible with people coming from all parts of Canada and the US; better to have it than not.

We bought an ‘Epic L Letterpress’ machine, a hobby/craft machine (which I believe has now been discontinued; we bought ours locally on Craigslist). We followed these instructions from Boxcar Press on what we were going to need to do to get the most out of our machine. After we designed the invite, we sent off the artwork to Boxcar in New York for them to produce the high-quality polymer plates. I ordered the special letterpress paper direct from Neenah Paper in Wisconsin – we went with Crane’s Lettra Paper. It’s 100% cotton, high quality, feels great and isn’t cheap. We went with the Fluorescent White in the 100lb weight; so it feels substantial in your hand. And then we ordered the matching cotton envelopes because we also letterpressed the return address on them. Matching thank-you cards were also letterpressed and folded, and we also made matching envelopes with the return address. It was really rewarding to do all this work ourselves, we put a post up on our wedding website letting people know that we did it all ourselves– otherwise you’d never know.

Below are a few photos of us printing the invitations at home in our office.

Katie worked with the caterers, Betty and Russell Dobbelsteyn at A Chef’s Table to put together a great menu, and they came through with an absolute stunner of a meal. Some people commented that it wasn’t just the best-catered meal that they had, but may very well be the best meal they’ve ever had. And we agree. People are still talking about the dinner months later.

We’re so happy that we went with our gut and used photographer Sheldon Parsons for our photos; we loved his more editorial/casual style of photography. Sheldon lives in Toronto now, so if you’re in that part of the world and looking for a wedding photographer– look no further.

PHOTO GALLERY  |  Below are a selection of photos from the day – sorry there’s so many, it’s really hard to whittle these photos down. This gallery has all the images from the above article, and plenty more; scroll through them with your ‘right arrow’ key.

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