Year: 2014

Think of a creative department. How many designers are normally on staff? A couple. Maybe up to six or eight. You’d normally have one manager for these two to eight designers. Just how many graphic designers are there in America…

A dog sits in a kitchen and smells unseen fresh bread. He patiently waits for this delicious treat. For the past couple of hours here at Panera, I’ve been looking up at the painting, appreciating how the yellow in the…

Funny seeing these two photos next to each other in my flickr photostream. One a tower built of glass and steel. The other, made of plastic magazine racks. Both have a gleaming highlight stream across their surface. One a desirable…

These are the markings that would appear at the large durasteel front door of Jabba the Hutt’s palace. The eyeball markings on the ground identifies that the front gate is protected by a TT-8L gatekeeper droid.

Stack many objects together, the final result transforms into a whole that is different than the parts. Take a brick building. At the start, bricks are individual units. Rectangles of hardened clay. Stack them together in a planned fashion and…

Next time you water you cactus, instead of pouring the water into the dirt, pour the water over the top of the cactus. I like to dribble the water on the top and let it naturally climb down the needles…

(image via jesuisley.com) I find it easiest to be optimistic when you have a firm foundation and meaning in life. Everything else is just circumstantial. Anything that goes wrong is an opportunity to grow and learn. Three personal examples: 1)…

Trees needs caffeine. Putting syrup back into the trees. Tree reading nutrition label on Coke can. Sweet nectar of the gods. (from @kevinthau on Jelly) Crooked coke ?? (from Johanne Kirkeby on Jelly) You must be barking mad (from Ian…

When one photo is able to capture multiple stories, you have a photo that tells one million words. Read about each of the stories below this loooong vertical pano photo. Flowers Emerging from a long cold winter, Chicago’s flowers grow…

A fog crawls over Chicago, photographers slide their cameras out to capture the gray beast. Chicagoist selected 14 photos of today’s fog in Chicago. The second featured image is my photo of the Water Tower pumping station. While riding the…

The Art Institute of Chicago recently “restored” Gustave Caillebotte’s painting, “Paris Street; Rainy Day” (1877) Wow, the umbrellas are really blue now. They almost feel like alien hovercrafts. Perhaps Gustave Caillebotte was predicting an alien invasion on the streets of…

The Art Institute released an app that explores nine artworks on display in the modern wing. Each artwork has several mini factoids and videos uncovering specific details about the background behind the work. The free app, “A Closer Look in…

Ever look at items on a website and then have ads for that website follow you around other places online? Christie’s the high-end auction house is stalking me on the internet. “Click on Calder” a Christie’s banner ad asking me…

Summer is here! Every year in the summer Chicago raises the bridges to let sailboats swim over to Lake Michigan. This beloved ritual marks the start of summer for many Chicagoans. The second bridge raising in Chicago happened on a…

Do you ever put iPhone icons next to each other on your iPhone, because they look cool together? I need one more iPhone app icon with an animal to complete an iPhone screen tic-tac-toe. My iPhone home screen now features…

On the day of black, rainbows of color stream onto the Way of the Cross. Between all the kneeling and standing, chanting and silence, my booklet would become illuminated with splashes of color. As my girlfriend observed, “it’s like a…

General Mills’ new policy: if you engage with us online, you can never sue the company. The Consumerist reports: In new language recently added to General Mills’ website, consumers who interact with the company online will be agreeing to give…

Make a photo available via a Creative Commons license allows it to run wild free on the internet. You’ll never know what will happen. In 2007 I shot this HDR image of a tugboat on the Chicago River. Accidentally using…

The tulips are starting to break the ground in Chicago! While walking to work, the dirt graveyards on Michigan Avenue started to get some life. Little red sprouts coming out of the soil! Standing in the middle of Michigan Avenue,…

Watch a little boat fly up and down the Chicago River releasing green dye (youtube video). The pattern the boat follows looks like the one would use mowing the lawn. Next year I wanna see zig-zags! If the boat was…

The Muppets have Facebook Pages for Miss Piggy, Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Animal, and Walter, but not Rowlf the Dog. Unbelievable. A Facebook search for Rowlf the Dog yields only his Wikipedia page. Rowlf totally needs a Facebook…

Vertical lines. Horizontal lines. The difference between the two means the difference between the World Series trophy and a weber grill. These are works of art for sale by my brother, Erik Maldre. Venturing into the never-ending snow with his…

An image search for my name, Matt Maldre, brings up four photos of me–and a photo of the great artist Joseph Beuys. Google is implying that I am the late Joseph Beuys. While I would love to have this honor,…

While putting away laundry, I tweaked my right knee, prompting me to lie down and think of this poem: Popped right gone knee, stopped night laundry — Matt Maldre (@mattmaldre) February 13, 2014 At first I was thinking about how…

At the Olympics, stuck in a bathroom with no cell phone? Nobody around. What do you do? You know the Russian construction is really cheap, so why not just break through the door? That’s what American Olympian bobsled pushers Johnny…

I’m extremely honored that the Yahoo Creative Team asked that one of my photos be included in the 10-year Flickr anniversary video! Here’s their request: I immediately thought they would want to use one of my most popular photos, like…

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7… How about counting using odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 9… I bet you can can count using even numbers. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc. But what about reciting all the odd…

Four hours and 33 minutes of a realistic drawing is condensed down to 3 minutes 42 seconds in this youtube video: The artist Marcello Barenghi does have some mad skills. But you can also make a drawing like this with…

I love questions. Does anyone know of any book that are about questions? Specifically the history, science, or psychology of questions. Not a book with lists of questions. Nor lifestyle or career books. But books that talk about the nature…

The Croatian language has a lot of the letters k, v, and z. Type of bunch of those letters into Google Translate like this: vzkvzvkzv zk vzkvzkzv kzvkz vzk vz kv zvzvkvz kvzkzv kzvkzvzvzv kvzkzv Google thinks that it’s Czech.…

The clothespin artist stands at the front steps of the Art Institute of Chicago in the summer of 1994. My fellow college freshman friends and I approach this man selling clothespin necklaces and tshirts with simple clothespin silhouettes. While signing…