1. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

What recession? As usual, ICFF was full of bizarre, bank-breaking booths, from Bernhardt Design’s cheesy, trip-inducing, scuff-marked white plastic flooring (below left) to Amuneal’s aluminum-tubing bunker (below right), complete with bent iron (looking) butterflies. It apparently took only four days to build, and, no, they don’t know how much it weighs (if you build something like that, you’d better). Nearby, brandishing an axe, Shimna woodworker Timothy Aaron Huston (above) explained his booth’s accessories, which, besides the hatchet, include a double-take-inducing stuffed rabbit. “I told my boss I needed a $100 eBay budget,” he said. Huston predicts the axe will replace the antler as this year’s pointless-in-an-urban-setting design accessory. We’ll see.

 
 

2. If you can’t have the better booth, have the better business card.

Shimna had a cupboard full of wooden blocks stamped with its website (bummer about the logo coincidence though). Panelite had bubbly little clear plastic bricks of their paneling. Both are sitting on my desk now, while the rest of the cards I got are…somewhere.

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