Life & Research Notes

We quietly opened up our new Taco Lab Blog a few weeks ago, along with a small refresh of the main TL site.

It’s a little ridiculous it’s taken us this long to get our blog started. But now that we’re coming up on our one year LLCification anniversary (March something!), we’re noticing that we’re a lot more comfortable and efficient with the basics, and we have enough interesting projects and initiatives going to warrant some regular updates.

So please check it out, and check back when you think of it. The shiny new blog has me rethinking this one too. Lately I’ve slipped into the habit of simply recycling content from other places rather than creating my own. So I may make some changes in my approach here to try to start actually writing again. If so, yay.

The folks here at Electric Works have a new online version of their store, bringing their delightful and rare merchandise to a much wider internet. Some of the highlights:

The Magic Garden makes a wonderful inexpensive gift for that special someone. Simply add the magic solution and watch it grow.

The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie surprises and delights.

Crocheted Owls (amigurumi) are a top seller, from what I hear.

Beeswax crayons are high quality and come in a variety of thicknesses.

Link: http://store.sfelectricworks.com/

The Taco Lab, LLC is pleased to announce a radical new collaboration with world famous bitwise biologist and curiosity curator Prof. Engd. For the first time ever, Engd’s massive collection of fine miniature creatures will be published in its entirety, one each day for all of 2009:

View these mini monsters online: Professor Engd’s Étagère of Hypnopompic Hexadecimal Miniature Monsters.

Mariko has started tracking her miscellaneous finds on her new blog, The Daily Mariks. Highlights include knitted hamburger outfits, panda bites, and obscenely buff women.

Gentrify is getting a lot of attention the past few days, plus some polite inquiries from the Yelp folks about WTF we’re doing. See also Lifehacker, Delicious, NOTCOT, Thrillist, Laughingsquid, SFist, Curbed SF, and even Future of Real Estate Marketing! Plus various linkage on Twitter and even Pownce.

Reactions range from expressions of horror and disappointment, to ironic glee, to thankfulness and requests to bring it to other cities! The 734m team (Visnu, Gerad, Huned, and I) is meeting tonight to go over all this and figure out what to do next.

Update: Now on Apartment Therapy! Feels good to get on blogs that I actually read regularly.

Update 2: Featured in Venturebeat, and syndicated on The New York Times!

A new look for October, including redesigned page transitions, mini slideshows for project images, much improved IE6 compatibility, and no more weird plaid background.

Last week we quietly deployed the new Taco Lab website, and we posted a revision today. If you remember anything about the old old placeholder page (think giant Helvetica text and a horrible hand drawn taco guy), you’ll agree this new version is overall an improvement.

Our key design imperative with the new site is to balance clarity of vision, sincerity of our business (we’ve been working together for almost a year now!), and a sense of play and humor that we feel fundamentally distinguishes Taco Lab from other design and technology firms. We are also seeking to show the wide variety of mediums and technologies we work in, and to provide some sense for the types of services we offer.

So please check out the site. We already have a laundry list of improvements we’d like to make over the next few weeks, and any additional ideas or feedback would be greatly appreciated. Also, as we’re just ramping up full time now, we have some spare cycles to throw at cool projects, so any hookups or suggestions would be most welcome.