Beautiful and super fun trompe l’oeil style alphabet photography by Vienna born, New York based Bela Borsodi. Apart from being clever and talented, Bela must be an incredibly patient person in arranging these incredible sets before photographing them. Imagining the patience required for this makes me get all fidgety…

World’s largest meeting place for Scandinavian design – Stockholm Design Week and Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair – took place last week between February 7th and 11th. Even though I’ve never (yet!) had the pleasure of attending this event in person, I’ve always kept a reasonably close eye on the goings-on in the fine city of Stockholm, and Scandinavian design scene in general. Couple this with the fact that I’ve been teased and tantalised by countless press releases about some of the products released at the fair this year, I decided to share with you a little round up of some of the things which caught my eye. Awww, aren’t I nice? I know, I know – it’s ok, stop saying it… I’m totally blushing now.

It is interesting to note that vibrant colours and colour blocking seen in Milan last year are still very relevant in the world of furniture and product design, and we can expect to see this trend continue filtering through the mainstream for quite some time. Super duper I say, as delicious colours are “a few of my favourite things”. So without further ado, I present you with the following little gems…

Did you ever have a moment where you saw something so awesome that you immediately proceeded to hyperventilate and had to quickly look for a paper-bag to breathe into and calm yourself down? No…? Yeah, me neither. I’m waaaay too cool for that… *Fidgets nervously* Oh ok, except maybe when I saw this.

At the recent Dries van Noten menswear fashion show at the Grand Palais in Paris, five painters were busily working on a 30m long mural while a bunch of well-dressed models strutted they’re stuff on the catwalk. The painters ignored the models walking behind them and continued working on their canvas wall, carefully recreating the work of typographer Job Wouters (aka Letman) and Dutch artist Gijs Frieling…

Yayoi Kusama is a contemporary Japanese artist who puts dots all over her world. Her obsessive compulsive nuttiness is close to my heart and Kusama’s is definitely one of my all time favourite artists. Since December 2011, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) has been showing her work in a ‘Yayoi Kusama: Look Now, See Forever‘ exhibition. Part of this event is a seriously cooltown interactive installation for children called The Obliteration Room – a series of rooms were painted completely in white where every room surface, piece of furniture and decoration was treated as a giant white canvas. Over the course of two weeks, kids were given thousands of colour dot stickers and were encouraged to make their creative contribution towards transforming the white space into one exploding with vibrant colours…

Yelling out “WOOHOO” at the top of my lungs feels like the only appropriate way to greet you in this first post for the year and to welcome you to our brand new site!! Man oh man, what an EPIC adventure this has been. Little did I know how much work was going to be involved in redoing the site and migrating all the content – I have a new found respect for web dudes and their craft. This new site simply wouldn’t be possible without the help and dedication of the two leading men in my life – my super awesome kick-ass code busting kung-fu web developer brother, and one and only supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Husband with mad Ninja-skills (who recently took his very own Leap of Faith to join me on this yellowtrace adventure full time – oooohhh the excitement!!)

Over the last few weeks, our days were filled with many tekkie adventures – some happy, triumphant and hi-fivey, others definitely not so much. But this steep learning curve has made us even better at what we do so that we can continuing to build on what we’ve learned and work on ongoing improvements of our site…