Our visit to the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection this week (a collection! and you can use it!) has us reeling with an aesthetic inspired by the specimens: “hard angular forms that reflect mechanical origins”. Big and bold, and fun, and (maybe this is just us…) the kind of beautiful fun that smells of popcorn. So… we rounded up some things we liked. A big thanks to the amazing David Shields for the tour!

Wood Type and Wooden Toys. Get it? We couldn’t miss the opportunity to praise Timba Smits and the amazing mag “Wooden Toy Quarterly” (“Direct from Melbourne and Sydney!”)

Carli Dottore wento to school in Ohio and then lived in NY and then in Nashville and then in Philadelphia and now she lives in Rome, Italy, but only for a bit. She keeps a tumblr and has a website

We found this at the Parliament of Owls site, made by Owl Parlamentier (that’s totally a word) Lauren Sheldon, who spends her days with “like-minded designers hell-bent on pushing each other to create the best work possible (and occassionally taking a break to stuff our faces with dumplings)” Dumplings are serious business, people.

There was a Pecha Kucha event. We went. We stood outside. It was cold and there was a line and it was cold and we… left. And what that means is that we forfeited the opportunity to nab one of these babies by Stu Taylor and DJ Stout of the Austin Pentagram offices. Maybe next time we’ll take some gloves and wait it out.