With an intriguing mix of comics, illustration, short stories and photography, it’s a good portrait of the mild chaos and creative outpouring going on in the studio. Half art-book, half magazine, this first issue features work by Ana Freitas, Joana Toste, João Paulo António, João Tércio, Nuno Duarte, Patrícia Furtado, Pepedelrey, Pedro Potier, Ricardo Blanco, Ricardo Cabral, Ricardo Venâncio, Rui Lacas, Sara Barbas , and was beautifully designed by Tiago Tavares.

My participation includes 6 portraits of Lisbon people - Lisbon is actually the proposed theme for this issue - and a selection of Daily Metro Sketches.

It will see the light of day in the end of May, in the International Comics Festival of Beja, where The Lisbon Studio will also have a exhibition, and will be available to purchase on several specialty bookshops and online, on the upcoming website. I’ll keep you posted!

Lots of kinks to iron out on the next few days, I’m sure.

To start, some of the older posts don’t even have all the photos, due to a change in the slideshow plug in, but i’ll add them back soon. I’m also still working out some colours or spacing issues, and adding a bit more content here and there.

Overall, though, I think it deserves to come out and see the light of day. So come on, have a look, explore the little monster and then come back here and tell me what you think. All feedback is very welcome!

Reflecting on what it means to be a freelance web designer turned out to be a very interesting exercise, as I realised that 20 years ago, when I crossed that patio for the first time, web design didn’t even exist. A web designer wasn’t what I wanted to be when I grew up, how could it?

Thinking about how it all changed so quickly and unexpectedly, I tried to learn a bit more about the history of the internet and the world wide web, and where it’s going. Technology is moving so fast that I can’t really say what I’ll be doing in five years time. Pretty exciting!

I hope everybody enjoyed my class, maybe learned a thing or two, and went home wanting to find out more about the subject. As promised, here are the links to four fantastic videos that inspired my presentation:

Did You Know 3.0

History of Internet

Predicting Ted Talk: The next 5000 days of the web

Ted Talk: Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech

Tomorrow I’m off to Barcamp Portugal, in Coimbra, where I’ll be doing another presentation, this time to a totally different crowd. Geekland here I go!

 — UPDATE — 
Another interesting video about the first steps of the internet:
1981 primitive Internet report on KRON (via @cdeath)

Coraline is the beautiful new 3d stop motion adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book with the same name. I’m such a big fan of Neil Gaiman (and illustrator Dave Mckean), how is it possible that I never stumbled upon this book before? Shame on me!

Directed by Nightmare before Christmas’s Henry Selick, Coraline is a horror movie for children, as dark and scary as it is sweet and whimsical. It’s a great story, translated into beautiful images, fantastic 3d technology that feels like magic, a delightful soundtrack by Bruno Coulais… i could go on and on about it, but it’s better to just go and see it for yourself.

The Portuguese adaptation was left in the capable hands of my friend and Gaiman fanatic Nuno Markl, and the Portuguese cast did a brilliant job. I particularly enjoyed Maria Rueff and Ana Bola as Miss Forcible and Miss Spink - and it was so nice to meet them in person at this avant-avant-premiere. I also loved Nuno Lopes as Mr. Bobinsky, and my friend and client Luís Gaspar, as the cat. Although it’s a shame the original version won’t even be available in Portugal, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.

Until I get my hands on the book, I’ve downloaded the soundtrack from iTunes, and have wasted a considerable amount of time swapping my eyes for buttons on the official Coraline website. Right now, I wouldn’t mind diving into a fantasy world for a while.

And I might just go and see it again, once is definitely not enough.

In addition to all the friends that would stay with us now and then, I saw a few house mates come and go. There was Xico (my boyfriend), Danny, Charles, Angi, Jeremy, Aude, Angi again (who lived in a tent in the middle of Fleur’s studio for three months), and of course, Fleur herself. Fleur was THE housemate.

At the time, Fleur was running her own company, creating and producing incredible costumes with strange fabrics and hi-tech materials, among other things. She was the one who rescued me from the flat-sharing hell I was living in, and invited me to Tudor Road. She also rescued me from the flaky job I had at Argun Stationers and dragged me into freelance world, being simultaneously a mentor and my main client. And we became great friends.

Living and working in the same space makes for very intense and complicated friendships, though. By the time we decided to move out of the house, we were definitely in dire need of some space. As it happens, our time-out lasted about 5 years.

Nowadays, the distance between us is only geographic, and although the Tudor Road days are sadly over, instant messaging is here to bring the chatter back. Great chatter, I have to add. Fleur writes so well, I practically forced her to open a blog (to be honest, she hardly gave me any resistance) and share her ramblings with the world. Please stop by Biancafiore’s Lexiphania. and wish her a happy birthday while you’re there!

And in fact, those two weeks were amazing. Fantastic, marvelous, awesome, superb, I’m-running-out-of-superlatives, spectacular… I enjoyed every second of walking up and down the big avenues, trigger-happy on my endless supply of camera gigabytes, never a bad moment to be experienced, never even being allowed to feel lonely. Just me and the city, what else did I need to make me happy?

I never suspected that parting would be so hard. Leaving New York broke my heart and left me sighing every time I glimpse that skyline on a film or tv show. I’m aching, I’m mourning, drowning in work and dull weather. And I’m not ready to go through all the photos and memories yet.

To make things worse, New York is everything but a faithful lover. So many return from there with this sickly heart disease, proclaiming their passion at any mention of the city, counting the days to go back for few more moments of adoration. So many return to write beautifully about it, and display photos of every skyscraper, every scene, from every angle.

What chance have I got to say something new? Being in love with New York is such a cliché, I might as well be wearing one of those two-dollar “I heart N Y” t-shirts, isn’t it?

Sure, I’ll get over it, and manage to write about it sooner or later. But hang on a bit. It may take a while before I kiss and tell.

I meant to post a bit more than I did when I was in New York, but can you blame me for not wasting any time writing while Manhattan was out there, calling me out to play? Still, it’s very nice to know there were lots of people following my Twitter updates as if it was an exciting soap opera.

So, this is what’s happening. Instead of a live diary, I’ll be posting my daily adventures in the next few weeks. Slowly, as I process all the photos - my trigger happy finger went nuts in such an brilliant scenery, as expected. All the video snippets will be gathered into a music-video-style piece as soon as I manage to have some time.

Also, I will select and edit the best photos to create a manageable holiday slideshow for friends and family. I’ll probably add them to Flickr as well, maybe even print them in a booklet.

The homepage in now back to normal, but you can still see all the photos I had on there, the“Holiday Photostream”, taken with my adorably low-fi iPhone camera. As for the posts I wrote while on the go, I will add some photos to them as well.

Monday is knocking on my door, and the new week will bring tons of new work, lots of phone calls to make, e-mails to respond to, people to see. Things on this site will start to move again, but at a slow and relaxed pace, so please don’t be impatient! I’m glad to be back, please stick around too!

I’d seen it in enough movies to know that Coney Island should actually be renamed to Corny Island. The charm of that small strip of old fashioned beach resort is precisely that there isn’t a sliver of sophistication in miles.

Long gone the hot Summer days, I wasn’t able to see Coney Island in all it’s glory. Autumn left the place sad and abandoned, and even the famous Cyclone rollercoaster was closed - such disappointment! Despite the cold weather, the rest of the Astroland amusement park was open, with most of the small rides pumping their conflicting tunes, but not moving due to a lack of customers.

I bought a ticket for the Wonder Wheel, wondering, indeed, if Manhattan could be seen from the top. It could, on a clear day, according to the middle aged man controlling the access to the carts. He’d seen the Twin Towers burn from up there.

Coney Island had seen better days, when he was a young boy, he explained, shaking his head in dismay “It was the world’s playground! Now, it’s reduced to three major attractions!” But in the Summer it’s still so crowded you can hardly move, he assured me: “It’s just too cold to be out here, right now”

Many of the boardwalk bars and restaurants were open, with only a couple of tables out for the locals. They’re wooden boxlike shacks, overly decorated with colourful handpainted type and illustration, little cartoonish statuettes and, of course, plenty of American flags. The long glass counters display all sorts of greasy to very greasy food. Apart from the pizza slices and hot dogs, everything is deep fried.

They even have a novelty delicacy strangely called a “Mozzarepa”: It’s some sort of fried corn stuff with cheese inside. It’s sheer genius: corny and cheesy at the same time. Coney Island at it’s best!

I wanted to try something more traditional, though, and I found something that always made me curious, when I saw it in the movies: a corn dog. As it turns out, it’s just a sausage on a stick, covered in -you’ve guessed it - deep fried cornmeal.

From the sea facing bench where I was munching away on my first (and last) corn dog, I could see the wood pier streching into the bay, more crowded than I thought it would be. It wasn’t full of tourists, or idle families in weekend leisure trips, however. Upon closer inspection, I realised people were fishing, with their long rods and buckets of bait.

Apart from the Jewish holidays, that would still atract a small crowd of visitors, the locals had the beach for them again. The day was as clear as could be, and I did see Manhattan from the top of the creaking Wonder Wheel. It seemed so very far away.

What’s the rush, I keep asking myself, why the eagerness, why the impatience? I don’t know, it’s stronger than me. New York is out there, it’s spectacularly huge, and although I’m here for two weeks, the clock is ticking loudly in my head and doesn’t allow me to waste time. Walk, walk, walk!

Greenwich Village and SoHo are adorable and quirky. Much more relaxed than the big avenues, as people seem to slow down and enjoy life in a different way. It’s so interesting to see the different moods of this city.

The system of fast and slow trains on the subway seems confusing, but it’s not that hard to get used to it. New Yorkers don’t drive much. And as the cabs and limos get stuck in the gridlocked traffic, the subway really is the fastest way to move around. That’s why you find every kind of people down there, even the high powered suited executives.

Everything needs to be fast around here. Including the food, of course. But that’s a whole other story!