This morning we ducked into a three-fer session moderated by Steven Heller called Works in Progress. It goes without saying that we can never get enough of Stefan Bucher's Daily Monsters, an obsessive, compulsive, and as Heller says, possibly psychotic addiction. But today Bucher revealed that he actually started with the monsters during a difficult time in his life: "I found comfort in ink." The book is coming this spring, here's proof. He's also working on all the products for the next 826 retail store: LA's Echo Park Time Travel Mart

The second presentation is difficult to reproduce here but we'll try. Warren Lehrer in essence "performed" his book-in-progress named Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley: A Life in Books, an illuminated novel about the 101 books created by his alter ego, Bleu Mobley. Lehrer actually designed book covers and wrote excerpts for all 101 books, which he's compiled into this crazy narrative that chronicles Mobley's early fiction, a string of self-help books, and finally, his habit of blurring fiction with nonfiction, which results in him being jailed. Someone needs to publish this book, but most importantly, you should run if you ever get a chance to see Lehrer present this project.

Seeing as he's a former DJ, it was fitting that Jacob Trollback, opened with some music to set the mood. Then he presented the absolutely stunning work for an animated wall inside the rippling waves of Frank Gehry's InterActiveCorp building. Each InterActiveCorp entity was rendered in a gorgeous little narrative: time-lapse blooming flowers for a dating site, beautiful digital clocks, an iconic 3D newsfeed, and the most incredible computer generated animation for a travel site, where the simple rolling footage of telephone poles, overpasses, train cables and a single plane sailing through the blue sky tells you everything you need to know about the thrill of going places.

All AIGA NEXT coverage here.