Update #3: (drumroll) Arno is/was Andy “Malarkey” Clarke. What a crazy — but funny — bloke!

Update #2: Jeremy Keith responds to Arno after receiving a similiar email, but for perfume.

Update: Arno responds to this post. (read below first if you haven’t already for the full scoop)

You know, I’ve sifted through a truckload of emails in the past few years about instant credit reports, money-making opportunities and not to mention salespeople interested in selling me everything from pet rocks to laser-guided golf ball retreivers.

In all this time I’ve never once received a domain acquisition email, until today of course.

Not more than 8 hours ago, I received an email from an Arno Zimmerman in regards to purchasing, or actually acquiring this domain for a “well-known Hollywood studio”. The email was a bit hazy, but to keep this on record for future conversations I’m presenting it here in it’s entirety.

Read on as I really can’t make this kind of stuff up:

Dear Mr Sagen,

My sincere apologies for writing to you unannounced. My name is Arno Zimmerman and I am CEO of an Internet domain name acquisitions agency based here in Los Angeles, California.

My agency is currently engaged by a well-known Hollywood studio. The studio is producing a new action movie called The Kartooner. The movie has an all star cast, including Bruce Willis in the title role, and will be released in the fall. My client is therefore very keen to purchase the rights to the domain name kartooner.com from you.

I am sure that you will understand that I cannot provide you with much in the way of information about our client at this time. However I can assure you that they are sincere in their offer, and that they are keen to conclude this purchase quickly.

I would be interested to learn how much you would require for this transfer of ownership.

Many kind regards,

Arno Zimmerman

Okay, admittedly, you caught me off guard Mr. Zimmerman. If someone were to tell me — like you just did — that Bruce Willis would be starring in an action movie called The Kartooner, I’d be hesistant to believe such a thing.

However, if you want to talk about the greenback, I might be willing to budge for about $66,000 dollars, give or take.

Let me know, alright? In the meantime, I’m going to try and figure out what I’d purchase with that kind of money.

Arno Responds

For the past few days I’ve been working diligently on a brand spanking new design for this site, as the current design has always been meant as a temporary placeholder. When I say brand spanking, I mean it, as it will include previous elements I’ve used in other site incarnations (mainly heaps of beige) and for the first time in this site’s history there will be an “artwork” section. (Oooh.)

One of the main reasons for this realignment “re-envisioning” is that I’d like to tie the blog together with my other domain, eriksagen.com which includes a working portfolio and a resume for the time being. Eventually there will be a slick company site in place of what’s there now, but that’s far off a bit.

Branding is crucial to me at this point and has worked well for other people, like Jon Hicks, Veerle Pieters, Dan Cederholm (and Mike Davidson) to name a few. There’s an instant familiarity and connection when you visit these sites and that’s intentional, so bringing everything under one roof (albeit a sometimes leaky one) is important to me.

Back to my mentioning an artwork section, I’ve decided to beef up my portfolio. Over the years it’s become, well, a bit stagnant due to other priorities and distractions taking focus. However, shoving all that aside briefly, I’ll be putting up artwork from the past, present and future, which will be the present by the time I hang them up in a digital gallery.

Many thanks to the handful of supporters over the past few months (even you, Anton) for encouraging me to do this, especially since I advertise that I’m an illustrator and yet have very little to show for it. Who would’ve thunk?

In a nutshell, things will be changing for the better around these parts.

That’s all folks!

It’s hard to describe the journey from New York to Austin, TX, mainly because it wasn’t quite how I imagined it would be. In my mind, I would’ve boarded the plane on time, with a few minutes to spare. I would’ve landed at the Austin International Airport, grabbed my cobalt blue duffle bag, rented the car I had made a reservation for and drove to my hotel without getting lost.

You might have guessed where this is going, but, it was undeniably more complicated than what I just described. Rather, my flight was an hour delayed, my luggage went missing for close to 2 hours and well, I got lost. Despite looking over the maps and convincing myself that I was going to go from Point A to B without any trouble or confusion, it ended it being a frantic trip buzzing in and out of Texas traffic and finally after a desperate call to the hotel I finally found the place.

The redeeming factor in all this was going out to dinner with Matthew Oliphant, Anton Peck, David Thompson (who has a slick ‘Hitchcock-esque’ logo), Will Pate and Steve Marshall. Prior to coming out here I had only heard of (or seen the work of) Anton Peck and Will Pate through mutual friends and collegues. Already, I feel like I’ve made a few new friends and SXSW hasn’t even “officially” started yet.

Consider this design a placeholder as its purpose, while temporary, is meant to replace what would otherwise be an unstyled template. I don’t know about you but I’d much rather see a sparsely-styled layout than the bare minimum, default browser style. The latter can be quite the eyesore, especially if you suddenly have blurred vision or if that tune in your head, yes that one, is preventing you from thinking straight.

For weeks I’ve contemplated whether I’d do this redesign live or behind the scenes and while I can weigh the advantages of keeping it behind close doors, personally I’ve always enjoyed seeing designs flourish live, even if live means “a span of 30 days or more.”

Since I’m participating in CSS Reboot, I wondered if doing the redesign live would be against the rules, but seeing as though Nathan Smith pulled the curtain back early, it seems as if I’m in the clear. Regardless, the official unvieling will occur sometime in November, so I’ve got plenty of time to fidget with things.