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Thanks to FeedMagnet for making the Instagram feed on our site a reality. Remember to tag your Instagrams with #instaBros for your chance to win a Butler Bros tee. Super talented photog Randal Ford is going to help us judge all of the September entries and pick one winner. Will do a blog post featuring the winning shot.

In other collaborative news… we are building innovation labs to help the Austin Children’s Museum and Legacy Foundation make engagement and development leaps organizationally. Our teams include; “Think Wrong” pioneer John Bielenberg and Greg Galle from C2 in San Francisco, vision-to-action consultants Mark Eckhardt and Richard Demato from bi-costal NOMAD, and a host of Austin’s best and brightest designers, writers, coders, and misfits.

Out To Lunch Foods is in our extreme makeover chair. Don’t worry, their killer recipes are going to stay the same. Thus far we’ve partnered with Alexis Sanford from Spot Inquiry to help the owners crystallize their purpose, setting the course for our rebranding work. This is going to be tasty folks. We are so proud of their product and how they operate.

St. Stephens Episcopal School here in Austin will have a new brand film in the not too distant future that helps them engage the world with their reason for being on full display. This is the school that produced Terrence Malik and Tom’s Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie. There’s certainly something special happening on their 300 acre hill country campus and it’s time more people know what, exactly, it is.

Another family business, a cousin if you will, is spawning in the form of The263; a restaurant and purveyor of provisions located near Lake Austin. The brain child of our brother-in-law Dennis Liddy, it’s on a fast track to opening as is all of the identity work that will accompany it.

On Monday of this week we said so long to the ambitious talent of Tucker Walsh who stayed with us for a week to forge a soon to be released short film for the WILL WALK Foundation. Tucker’s focus and passion for real stories consumes him and it was a pleasure to have him in studio.

And last but certainly not least we are hosting Derrit DeRouen as a design fellow in our space through this winter. He’s a pleasure to work with and when he double clicks on a file we are always psyched to see what pops up.

Jump over to Facebook and tell us who you love working with. We love meeting new folks.

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Now more than ever tobacco is a social justice issue. TReND’s research proves this. We know where MLK would come down on the issue of tobacco’s disproportionate grip on communities of color. Big tobacco is dug into the African American community in an especially deep way and is addicted to the dollars that flow from it.

But the great irony is that MLK likely found his true calling while picking tobacco. The story from NPR after the jump is an amazing one:

Martin Luther King Jr. could hardly believe his eyes when he left the segregated South as a teenage college student to work on a tobacco farm in Connecticut.

“On our way here we saw some things I had never anticipated to see,” he wrote his father in June 1944. “After we passed Washington there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to.”

The slain civil rights leader, whose birthday is observed Monday as a federal holiday, spent that summer working in a tobacco field in the Hartford suburb of Simsbury. That experience would influence his decision to become a minister and heighten his resentment of segregation.

“It’s clear that this little town, it made a huge impact on his life,” said John Conard-Malley, a Simsbury High School senior who did a documentary with other students on King’s experiences in Connecticut. “It’s possibly the biggest thing, one of the most important things, people don’t know about Martin Luther King’s life.”

Until then, King was thinking of other professions such as becoming a lawyer, Conard-Malley said. But after his fellow Morehouse College students at the tobacco farm elected him their religious leader, he decided to become a minister.

In his later application to Crozer Theological Seminary King wrote that he made the decision that summer “when I felt an inescapable urge to serve society. In short, I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.”

“Perhaps if he hadn’t come to Connecticut, hadn’t picked tobacco up here, hadn’t felt like a free person, hadn’t felt what life was like without segregation and been elected the religious minister, he may not have become such a leader in the civil rights movement,” Conard-Malley said.

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In 2006, GSD&M asked us to produce what amounted to a video annual report. We created the concept of a stop motion animated book. Then we executive produced and creative directed writer/director Jeff Nichols, Shiny Object, and Randal Ford to bring it all to life. The resulting piece takes a pile of disparate elements and weaves a compelling narrative about the scope of the tobacco control issue and the Legacy Foundation‘s effective movements therein.

The piece was used to communicate with key stakeholders of the Legacy Foundation.