Desedo family member Bradford Young has done it again. This time the venue is the Sundance film festival where he has won the Cinematography award for the U.S. film Pariah. We suspect that it is also the first of many great distinctions to come. The film, directed by Dee Rees, played the festival a year ago as a short, and has already been picked up for distribution by Focus Features. Brad was actually at Sundance with two features this year: Pariah, and Andrew Dosunmu’s Restless City.

I first met Brad in grad school and we’ve had a great many discussions over the years about a life in film — working together when possible. Inspired by a four-hour conversation we once had on color correction, we recorded one of our conversations. Here’s what happened.

Being from Louisville, Brad has an even bigger legend to live up to. Here’s hoping he can top that one as well!

I always wondered if the biz people at Gap cynically pushed that BS logo on us a few months ago as a way to generate PR after having seen the media storm over the Tropicana packaging. Sorry Gap. I swing to American Apparel, both for t-shirts, and Helvetica-based logo.

But Howard Schultz seems to speak the language of design in a way that Marka Hansen, president of Gap, seems to have missed when the company attempted to crowdsource the logo project via facebook. I buy Shultz’ reasons for the switch, and the new logo remains Starbucks-y, which I guess is the point. The elephant approves.

This past Halloween saw team Desedo plus a few hundred of our closest friends breaking things down in Brooklyn. At some point the camera came out. We’ll call it an exercise in creativity, a night of fun captured on film… Embedded journalism! All of that to say that time marches forward. And we like to march right along beside it. At times with booze and homies.

The Monster Mash was thrown by Jamie and Debbie (whose freshly minted ghost kitty is worth a checkout too). Of course, the scariest costume of the night goes to the guy with the custom-embroidered Bed Bugs hat and strap-on mattress. Don’t wave that thing at me, buddy.

– UPDATE:
an even better pic of the bed bugs costume:

Not our elephant, but close.

People often ask where the idea for the Desedo logo came from. And for them, I have scant little information — an image I thought up. There were tons of elephants dancing in my mind around the time that the specific one we use now was drawn. But it’s reassuring to know that it comes from somewhere real. And that someone has actually seen the image I was only imagining at the time.

Ami Vitale has clearly been there. And, judging from her portfolio, a few other places too.

We had a little break from the norm here at Desedo HQ recently. It’s not all fun and games in the writers’ room. It just looks that way.