There’s nothing like pushing things to the last minute for the holidays.
And this homespun little number is no exception.

Cecil and Britches return for their third holiday installment in as many years. And this is their biggest adventure yet. To celebrate, they’ve made the jump to HD format for display and Flash video for delivery.

I hope you enjoy the film. I think I enjoyed making it.

Let me know what you think.

Interesting idea and thoughtful execution for Software-Asli.com, which I gather is a software reseller website. Agency credits go to Bates141, Jakarta.

Good question.

BMW gives us a compelling answer in the form of GINA, a truly revolutionary vision for what the future of automobiles – or at least their skins – may be.

GINA stands for Geometry and Function in (infinite) Adaptations. Figure that one out.

Simply stated, it’s a way of looking at car construction that brings into question more than 100 years of dogma and tradition. It’s light. It’s flexible. And it elicits an emotional reaction that your everyday Turtle Wax won’t buff out.

Oh, and it winks.

Have you ever been stabbed with a spear just below and slightly behind your left kneecap?

If so, you might have some appreciation for how I felt somewhere between mile number ten and mile number eleven of my first half-marathon.

I’ve since learned that the injury was probably an ITB flareup, caused from an over-aggravated iliotibial band. I’ve also since learned that ITB stands for iliotibial band. But at the time, all I could wrap my head around was the pain – which forced me to stop on the side of the road for my own private little moment of dispair. Getting back into the race wasn’t a question. But doing so would be slow and limpy, as I would have to favor my previously undiscovered ITB.

But here’s the thing. The moment I remember most from my first half-marathon wasn’t when the ITB thing happened. It was after – when an anonymous runner whisked by and slowed herself down just long enough to say, “Keep it up. You’re doing great.”

I don’t know who she was. I didn’t see her face. In fact, I really didn’t see much more than the sides of her running shoes as she passed. But those six simple words stuck with me. They kept me going for the final 3 miles, and helped me cross the finish.

And that part, as I recall, didn’t suck.

That’s a line that Sarajo uses to describe her urban habitat in Los Angeles, which “borders Thai Town, Little Armenia and Koreatown, with Guatemalan and Salvadoran bakeries nearby.”

Sounds like a great place from which to draw inspiration. Or to get lost within.

The same can be said of her work, which is at once whimsical and dreamlike – with a tactile presence that draws you in and tangles you up. Her sense of color and line quality (in both paint and thread) is just delightful.

And Sarajo Frieden’s commercial illustrations are just as compelling as her personal work. I just love this poster series for Old Navy. And this endearing little alphabet.

Still curious? There’s this too.

It’s a law of nature. If you don’t continually protect the integrity of your work at every stage of the process, it will slowly but surely trend downward.

In small, seemingly insignificant ways – and in sweeping wholesale ways – your work will tumble. More experienced peers may discourage your idea, brushing it off as “already been tried.” Hand-wringing account teams will put on their client hats and challenge every aspect of the idea, even before it’s seen the light of day. And clients will swat at it and run willy-nilly, as though it were a bee in their face.

Business objectives will change halfway through the project. Things will be tacked on in the eleventh hour. Partners and vendors will drop the ball. These things will happen.

But it’s your idea. Pick it up and carry it.

I was there for fourteen hours.

I slept there. I ate breakfast there. And I was driven from the airport to my hotel room and back again there. The rest of my time was unceremoniously reserved for business.

If you do the simple math – the math that I failed to consider before booking my travel – you’ll quickly realize that fourteen hours in Orlando might as well be fourteen hours in Omaha, with the oh-so-subtle addition of palm trees, higher humidity and a shuttle bus driver who happily points to a road sign and reminds you that your hotel is only two miles away from Disney World.