These inspiring new project-idea pages at kolo.com are definitely worth a look. Pour yourself
a cuppa joe and take your time browsing through them. Just go here.

The "Inspiration" web pages showcase Kolo projects from the new book by Vanessa Holden and
Susie Cushner: Photo Album, The Essential Guide to Sorting, Sharing + Keeping Photos.

Which of these project idea(s) do you find most inspiring? Which kind of album would you most like to
create? Or do you have a good project idea of your own to share? Feel welcome to click on COMMENT
(upper left).

Kolo has a new Facebook Page. If you're on Facebook, stop by, say hello
and become a fan! Just go here.

Artist Lie Fhung is a master of symbolism, and this third in a series called "Dream Archives" is no exception. For several weeks, she's been working on Dream Archives, perched high up in her studio overlooking the lush green mountains of Lantau Island, Hong Kong. Previous "Portals" of Dream Archives have appeared recently on Koloist.

Slated for exhibition in Jakarta, Indonesia in fall 2009, this art installation is being fashioned entirely with Kolo Havana Boxes. The one shown here, "Ancestry," was made with digital print and acrylic. As she's done with others in the Dream Archives series, Fhung cut a hole into the cover of the box to add a bookplate.

The next three pieces of the Dream Archives project, including this one, Portal #003, are reincarnations of my existing works with the "To Breed Or Not To Breed" theme, which can be seen here.

Much more about the Dream Archives project, including photos of the previous "Portals," appears here.

For more about the artist, check out Fhung's bio under Contributors in the right-hand sidebar of this page. And see more of her work on her sites here and here.

Artist Hiller Goodspeed studies graphic design at Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida. He turned a small Kolo Vineyard album into a bound collection of found-objects mixed-media collage. Here are just the first few pages.

This is the third in a collage series that Hiller calls Moon Soup:

The letters on the cover are keys that I pulled off an old broken typewriter that I picked up for $5 years ago. I thought the keys were interesting, so I put them in a Ziploc bag and figured I’d use them for something some day.

I’m in the habit of collecting things – origami paper and old books and magazines and photos. I have boxes of stuff. I like compiling it all and making something from it. It’s fun -- after collecting stuff for years and years, you end up with a bank of materials to use. Sometimes I even find cool stuff in the trash, like old comic books and newspapers.

Like once at a fair I found a pile of discarded, unused paper snow cone cones. I liked the shape, so I saved ‘em. Another time I passed a house where an old Japanese man had died, and they were getting rid of all his stuff. He had taken a bunch of his old newspapers, cut them up into small squares and glued them together, like a pad of post-it notes. I liked the paper -- mostly black type with just some headlines in red. I brought it home and I now use it in my art.

And about the name of his artwork, Moon Soup:

A couple years ago I was at Kennedy Space Center on the coast of Florida and while in a gift shop I happened across a rack of astronaut food -- one of the items was "moon soup." I wrote it down and collected it as I do with the materials I use. A few weeks later, when I first had the idea to create these pieces, I thought it an appropriate title for the collective work.

Thanks to our friend, art student Sterling Poole, who introduced Hiller Goodspeed to Kolo books.

These images of Moon Soup also appear on the Koloist Flickr page.

More Moon Soup soon...

You might recognize that white booklet in the second photo (stamped "Frankfurt" on the cover) from a previous post on Koloist here. That post and this one, here, show two different ways these Kolo Essex booklets can be used...

...Patrick Ng just organized Travel Photo Cafe events at c!ty'super and LOG-ON stores throughout Hong Kong. On his blog he's been posting some cool projects from the events, including this one showing Kolo Essex Travel Booklets and a Kolo Newport album, about which he wrote:

One of the cool things about KOLO's refillable travel book called Essex is that you can actually archive the thinner refill onto a larger album. This way you will have an album showing selected photos as well as the actual journal you used when you were traveling.

Some of us like to stick everything collected in a trip to a thicker journal, write a lot and never miss a thing. This creates bulky books and may not be a good sight on a nice clean shelf. KOLO's Essex however invites you to strip things down to the essentials and keep things simple and elegant, just like the usual KOLO aesthetic which brings out your content (photo and text) while the album itself becomes a nice decor.

Travel/Photo journaling style is really a personal choice. I love to create junks and think back later what really happened. On the other hand, I admire clean looks. Perhaps a lot of small/thin refill notebooks filed into a clean album with selected photos is the solution to satisfy both wishes. I'll explore more.

See more at Patrick Ng's blog here and here.