Last week I had one of those moments of befuddled emotions when I got an email from my editor at Print, Joyce Rutter Kaye. After an astounding 10 1/2 years at Print, Joyce is moving onto another great gig at NYC & Company, New York City’s official tourism, marketing and partnership organization, as senior editorial director. Let’s hope her design authority can do something about that nausea-inducing NYC logo I had to shield my eyes from every time I hailed a taxi.

Joyce’s decade at Print was an exceptional time for the magazine, including seven National Magazine Award nominations. After Print was nominated for General Excellence under 100,000 circulation in 2007, I interviewed Joyce for mediabistro.com right before the awards show. They didn’t win that night (stupid atomic scientists), but they were nominated again this year and won yet again, bringing Joyce’s win record to three out of the last six years! Considering how many bazillion under-100,000 circ magazines there are out there, that is pretty much, like, amazing.

So as I was mopping the tears of joy-sadness from my eyes, there was yet another wave of celebration when I heard that another of my editors at Print, one Emily Gordon would be taking the editor-in-chief reins. Before becoming managing editor at Print, Emily worked at numerous magazines and newspapers, including The Nation, Newsday, PEN America, and Legal Affairs. A journalist and critic since 1993, she has written about books, culture, and technology for publications such as The New York Times Book Review, Salon, A Brief Message, and The Washington Post Book World. She received her MFA in poetry from New York University.

And I’ll just add a few more details to that official bio: Emily’s also a faculty member for the newly-created D-Crit program at SVA (check out their new blog), she writes the spectacular Webby Award-winning blog about the New Yorker, Emdashes, and was recently seen on the local news swing dancing in the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. But you’ll have to ask her about that yourself.

Congrats to both ladies on amazing back-to-school season transitions!

My younger sister Beth and I have birthdays five short days apart. The last week of August holds some of the giddiest anticipation of the year, as I ship off her gift then wait to see what delectable goodness will arrive via Priority Mail for me.

There are a two simple rules for our gift exchange. First of all, we prefer anything used, pre-owned or old; preferably used and pre-owned by an old person. Who is now dead. Secondly, some element of the gift should be handmade. This part’s easy because we are ardent card-makers, and simply re-engineering the most recent J.Crew catalog into a compilation of tasteless double entendres—Beth’s specialty, not mine—counts.

But still every year, I want to up the ante, so this year I looked to a recent article I wrote for the September issue of ReadyMade about the amazing DIY silkscreening studio here in LA, FreshPressed. Jonathan Sample was your typical jaded graphic designer until he realized he was totally missing out the fun part of his job…the part that actually required making stuff. Banking on concurring trends of the ironic t-shirt movement and a resurgence of the hand-drawn aesthetic, he started FreshPressed to bring the seemingly-complex  world of silkscreening to the masses. Even the Photoshop-clueless can walk into FreshPressed, scribble something on a piece of paper and walk out with a hand-silkscreened t-shirt in about an hour.

I knew right away no silly new graphic by me could beat original vintage artwork created by Beth herself, so I dug up this circa 1987 museum-quality drawing Beth made of She-Ra, Princess of Power, riding her horse Swift Wind (yes, I had to look that up). After trying to manipulate and clean up the image myself, Keith (who has made several projects at FreshPressed himself) steered me towards the high-tech tools of tracing paper and a marker, and I recreated Beth’s masterpiece, scanned it back in and created an Illustrator file (something that Jonathan and his team can all do for you if you’d prefer).

When I got to FreshPressed Jonathan burned my screen after making sure the size and line thickness would work for what I wanted to print on. After picking out my paint color (pink, duh) and a few test prints, I was pulling the squeegie over Beth’s best gifts ever:

A t-shirt to show the world that she, too, possesses the power of Grayskull.

And a tote bag for toting around her sword when not in use.

This Friday, FreshPressed is having its first art show with work by local artists Kime Buzzelli, Sean Cassidy, Rory Wilson, Frohawk Two Feathers, and Andy Mueller. If you’re around, be sure to stop by and check out the digs so you can start envisioning your next gift. And here’s the ReadyMade article as a PDF (with a studly photo of Jonathan for the ladies out there).

Among my favorite pieces to write are the Space Shot stories for Fast Company, in which I get to infiltrate some corporate headquarters and get the lowdown on a company’s quirky work culture. For this particular assignment to visit Oakley’s headquarters, however, I especially felt like an undercover operative. I started contacting them a year ago for a tour, only to be gently but firmly rebuffed by their gatekeepers. Turns out they were in the midst of a gigantic, $2.1 billion buyout by Luxottica, the Italian eyewear company that manufactures their biggest competition, Ray Ban. When the sale was complete, I was granted access, and a few weeks later, I stepped into the room you see to your the right. Yep, that’s where the super-tan, super-friendly Oakley employees get to, like, go hang out every day.

And you can go there, too. Along with a retail store, there’s a customer service center located in this hall (behind blast door #2, of course). If you’re looking for a more intense immersion, take the tour, which begins with a totally extreme video in a theater that looks like it was salvaged from the set of Star Wars, and then winds through an Oakley museum, where you’ll see the infamous fluorescent “blades” you’ll remember from the 80’s. I thought their ads were so cool back then, I used to cut them out of SKI Magazine and plaster them to my closet wall.

You can read my story about “Oakley’s Optical Illusion” in this month’s Fast Company. And be sure check out the slideshow of fantastic photos by Dwight Eschliman, who has managed to shoot the space with all the drama of a sci-fi action flick. It’s Battlestar Galactica: Orange County.

I’ve been lax in reporting on the goings-on behind-the-scenes at DnA since I felt so far removed from the scene for so long. But there is some very exciting design and architecture news happening over at KCRW, not the least of which is that my dear friend Clive Wilkinson, the George Clooney of the local architecture community, was picked to design KCRW’s new station. A tip of the martini to Clive!

On today’s show, Frances talks to the architects behind a few other cultural behemoths which open or re-open next month:  The Mark Taper Forum downtown (right) and The Broad Stage in Santa Monica. I’m probably most excited for the Mark Taper Forum revamp by Rios Clementi Hale because the 1967 building is by one of my favorite LA architects, Welton Becket, who you’ll know from such hits as the Capitol Records Building, the Theme Building at LAX and the Cinerama Dome. The brand-new Broad Stage, on the other hand, is, like every other new cultural building in LA lately, named after the deep-pocketed Eli Broad, who also seems to have a thing with architects named Renzo (Piano did BCAM, Zecchetto did The Broad Stage). If you want to hear more about Broad’s quest for citywide domination, read the ever-delightful Jade Chang’s piece on the philanthropist in Metropolis, where she says he “wields his vast fortune like a blunt instrument.” Careful!

Also on today’s show: Talking about the future of production design with Alex McDowell, who is responsible for the look of tons of movies including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Corpse Bridge, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fight Club and anything else that freaked you out in the last 15 years or so. We also have the lovely Elena Manferdini, who I previously captured during her show at SCI-Arc, and the British design writer Liz Farrelly talking about her favorite fake vs. real architectural experience in LA.

But that’s not all! Perhaps the biggest news for DnA this month is that we now have a blog! Frances has been doing an amazing job recounting her design adventures, even all the way from Denver where she’s currently reporting from the Democratic convention for To The Point. I’ll be contributing, too, as well as doing some event coverage. So along with your listings for design events to add to the DnA calendar, be sure to point me towards the next design party! I’m sure I won’t need much pointing.

For the next week, I’ll be guestblogging for the irreplaceable Lesley Balla over at Eater LA while she goes somewhere to eat without having to dash back to the computer and write about it afterwards. I’ve got the Eater tipline to keep me informed and of course my extra-secret sources planted throughout the restaurant design community (they hear all). But be sure to keep me posted if you see or read anything about restaurants, nightlife or food in LA, won’t you? I’ll buy you a drink.

See you back here next week.