Snow Man.

Yesterday we followed our weekend ritual by getting up early, reading the papers and then watching our favorite television show, CBS Sunday Morning. This week's program featured a fascinating segment on a gentleman by the name of Kenneth Libbrecht who photographs, of all things, snowflakes! As we woke up this morning covered in a blanket of snow and ice, it seemed only fitting to write about this talented lensman and his passionate pastime. Call us crazy, but honest to God we had no idea that under a microscope these miniature marvels actually look like .... "snowflakes!" We suppose our thinking was that these perfectly formed snow crystals were just some sort of stylized interpretation of the real thing. Well, Mr. Libbrecht who is a Physics Professor at Caltech in Pasadena, California has definitely proved us wrong and he's documented his frosty work in a book titled: The Art of the Snowflake. In it, he describes a typical snow flake as "a stellar snow crystal composed of a thin plate of ice with six (hexagonal) primary arms that regularly have sidebranches called stellar dendrites, hence appearing fern- or tree-like with no two identical (like fingerprints in Man)." We are completely spellbound with these stunning photographs and apparently we're not the only ones. In 2006, the United States Post Office selected 4 of Libbrect's images to be part of their winter holiday season and ended up printing approximately 3 billion stamps! We agree with poet Henry David Thoreau who had this to say about snowflakes; "How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat." However, make no mistake...Design Therapy is OVER the snow dammit! (To order the Art of the Snowflake click here and to watch the CBS Sunday Morning segment click here!)