Exploring a new city is great, crappy tourist maps are not. Not only do they stubbornly refuse to return to their original folded form but, consequently, fall to pieces in minutes. God help you if it rains. Emanuele Pizzolorusso could well irradicate map-induced rage from major tourist destinations with his “Crumpled City” maps. No need to fold these waterproof beauties— just screw them up and shove them in their little bag. How liberating.
Our California office is looking for an experienced graphic designer with strengths in developing packaging, marketing collateral and on-line communication. Candidates should have 3 to 5 years of experience, supported by strong visualization skills, comfort working in multidisciplinary teams and excellent communication and internal “client” facing skills. The ideal candidate will have an extremely keen eye for detail, and the ability to create flawless production ready art-work. Flexibility in-dealing with shifting priorities and looming deadlines is a pre-requisite.
For one week only, you can get your very own piece of polar ice to keep in your freezer at home. Dutch artists Coralie Vogelaar and Teun Castelein have traveled to the Arctic circle to pick up a large piece of Greendlandic ice and shattered it into a thousand pieces for the world to share.
This weekend, MyPolarIce opened at Museum Square in Amsterdam and pieces of ice are being sold for 24.95 euros until December 6. Their goal: “To sell the pieces to people throughout the country that cherish and preserve it. To let the ice hibernate in the freezer compartment of their refrigerator for better times to come.”
Each piece comes inside a 9-inch transparent capsule inside an expanded polystyrene container (both designed and branded very nicely), which can keep the ice from melting for about three hours. “Come get your relic from the last ice age, come get your piece of history and bring the heated discussion home,” says their video.
While we commend MyPolarIce for their innovative global warming awareness campaign with a business-model twist, we’re not yet lining up (or making a reservation to book a piece of ice, as you can also do on their website). Our eyebrows are slightly raised at the smell of gimmick, because it has surely happened before.
When my son joined our family, a friend gave us a gift card to our local grocery store. This was an amazing gift because it freed up some cash in our grocery budget that we could then use on much-needed baby supplies.
I was thinking about this grocery store gift card when creating our shopping list for the upcoming holiday season. A good number of people on our list will be receiving gift cards for things they usually buy, so they can free up some money in their personal accounts for other things they want. Random gift cards to places they don’t typically frequent could be a bad idea, but if you know the exact places your friends and family go, you can help them out this year.
Consider practical gift cards, to services and places such as:
While looking for a place to buy raw leather online for a project I’m working on, I came across Acorn Bags, an anonymous husband-and-wife team who handmake classic-looking saddlebags for bicycles. While they don’t sell raw leather, they do sell hand-cut punched leather straps for DIY’ers; but for those looking for finished product, they’ve got some good ones to offer as well. Check out their currently-sold-out Medium Saddlebag, up top, with expandable collar; I’m also a fan of their also-freaking-sold-out Roll Bag, below, for spare tubes and tools, and which can be stacked atop other bags.
See the rest of Acorn Bags’ lineup here. But be warned if you’re doing your Xmas shopping, their site is currently better for inspiration and not commerce–Question #2 on their F.A.Q. list is “Why are you always out of stock?” (Short answer: “It’s just the two of us!”)
Reverting To Type opens next week at London’s Standpoint Gallery and will feature new work by a host of letterpress practitioners from around the world, including Black Stone Press (Canada), IMPO$T (Australia), Prensa La Libertad (Argentina), Yee Haw! Industries (USA), and London-based Mr Smith (the star of our latest CRTV studio-visit film). Here’s a sneaky peak at some of the work…
Phil Baines’ print is a streetmap listing shop types. Size 445 x 570mm in an edition of 35. £60 each
The exhibition has been curated by Graham Bignell of New North Press and graphic designer Richard Ardagh. Besides featuring prints and publications by letterpress print practitioners from around the world, New North Press has also approached a number of artists, designers and writers – including Catherine Dixon, David Pearson, Phil Baines (his piece is shown above, detail shown top) and Vikram Seth – to collaborate with them to create new work.
“Reverting to Type aims to highlight the pioneers at the helm of the current resurgence of interest in letterpress,” says Ardagh of the show, “from computer-based designers with a desire to ply a craft with a tactile immediacy that has been lost with modern technology, to traditional presses finding new ways to revitalise their design output.”
This is the Hatch Show Print piece created for the show – with a nice detail shot below. it’s printed at 650 x 1020mm and is priced at £130
Catherine Dixon’s collaboration with New North Press yielded the above print (detail below). Like Baines’ print, it’s 445 x 570mm and printed in an edition of 35. £60 each
OPX created the above poster (detail below) with New North Press for the show. 445 x 570 mm, edition of 35, £60
This is David Pearson’s design. It’s been printed in the same edition / same size / same price as the ODX print above
Typoretum’s Rural Fete poster is 500 x 675 mm and priced at £60
The above print by Jens Jørgen Hansen is printed in an edition of 4 at 420 x 600 mm. £75
And this is the exhibition poster (above) which is printed at 535 x 770 mm in an edition of 180. A copy will set you back £30 (available from the show only). It was printed from this setting:
Here’s a film that the curators made to help publicise the exhibition:
Reverting To Type runs from December 10 – January 22 2011 at Standpoint Gallery, 45 Coronet Street, London N1 6HD. For opening times etc, visit standpointlondon.co.uk
To paraphrase Steve Jobs, a central problem with multitouch as a desktop user interface is that we need to work with our hands on the horizontal (think of the keyboard, mouse, or tablet on your desk) and view on the vertical (the monitor in front of you). Jobs indicated that Apple testing showed users’ arms would become fatigued from constantly reaching out to touch a vertical monitor.
Well, check out Media Computing Group’s BendDesk concept, a wicked touch display that curves like a halfpipe:
I have problems believing something this bulky will become the dominant solution, but I think it’s a neat and important step in the development of desktop multitouch. And as CNET’s Ed Moyer suggests, I’d love to be able to modify Photoshop docs with my hands, then flick the finished image up onto the vertical part of the screen to examine.
Après la vidéo de Kuroshio Sea, voici l’aquarium de Georgia qui est classé comme le plus grand aquarium du monde avec plus de 30 millions de litres d’eaux douces et marines. Situé au coeur du centre d’Atlanta à Pemberton Place, voici cette captation des équipes de Stillmotion.
These conceptual cooling units by London designers PostlerFerguson would be made from 3D-printed sand.
Called Microclimates, the pods would be printed layer by layer on a large rapid-prototyping machine using locally sourced sand and a magnesium binging agent.
Water evaporating from the porous material would lower the temperature of the sand, in turn cooling the air as it flows through each pod.
A complex internal structure would create a large surface area for this heat exchange to take place efficiently.
The project was designed for Dubai gallery and studio Traffic.
What strikes us about Dubai is the energy and technological sophistication of the city that has arisen in the last few decades in one of the most ancient areas of human civilization. Dubai’s architecture is striking not only for its design, but also for the leaps in construction technology employed to realize it.
Our proposal draws on both the hypermodern, global city of today and the traditional building techniques that are ancient Dubai’s heritage. Microclimates is not just an installation, but a building language that can be reused again and again to create new public spaces. Traditional Islamic architecture dealt sustainably with the harsh desert climate by careful control of light and airflow through elements such as the masharabiya, wind towers, and earthen walls.
Microclimates are built up layer by layer out of locally sourced sand combined with a magnesium based binder. Using custom software, Microclimates is based on a three-dimensional interpretation of the masharabiya built from local sand by using a large scale rapid prototyping machine (developed by D-Shape), with a complex internal structure whose large internal surface area efficiently conditions air passing through it by evaporative cooling.
Combining the principals behind these ancient building elements with the most advanced computer-aided manufacturing techniques, we are able to create new methods of construction that draw on the aesthetic and sustainable benefits of traditional buildings to realize a modern vision of what 21st century architecture in Dubai could achieve.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
