Hasta La Ideas

Milan 2012: Elle Decoration UK editor Michelle Ogundehin tipped collaborations with Japanese designers and manufacturers as the most exciting development in Milan this year when she paid a visit to Dezeen Studio. In this first instalment of our interview with her, she discusses the calming effect this has had on the design industry and how quality design has become more accessible to high street brands.

One of the collaborations Ogundehin mentions is between Japanese furniture brand Karimoku New Standard and a selection of designers – see those projects here.

We published an abridged version of this interview in our Friday TV show (below).

Dezeen was filming and editing all week from Dezeen Studio powered by Jambox at MOST. See all the TV shows here.

Ji Lee’s simple plug-in removes text from any site to let images stand alone

The endless stream of information available on the web can easily get clogged with an overload of messaging. To simplify your daily surfing sessions, former Google Creative Lab Creative Director Ji Lee—with the coding help of Cory Forsyth—has come up with the Wordless Web, a simple browser plug-in that takes any website and gets rid of the text, leaving only pictures. As longtime supporters of Lee’s “special projects“, we were keen to see a substantial array of websites’ content reduced to a context-free assortment of images with one simple click.

By presenting the Internet as a palette of pictures only, the website reader becomes a viewer. “No text means no context,” says Lee. “You’re free to enjoy the images in their purest form, without names, labels, definitions, or purpose. It makes the pictures we see across the web more mysterious and open to interpretation of our own imaginations.”

Although we love the clean look of most websites without words, we noticed an interesting effect that the “Bubble Project” founder has exposed as a true eye-opener. While some websites benefit from being free of text, others seem to turn into giant advertising billboards. Regardless of the outcome, Wordless Web is an interesting adventure in turning something so vital upside down. Give it a go yourself at Wordless Web.

In occasione del Fuorisalone di quest’anno, è uscito il secondo numero di Polkadot Mag. Cover di Francesco Bongiorni e impaginazione di Dario Verrengia. Lo potete trovare in distribuzione free nelle città di Milano, Roma, Torino e Bari. In alternativa, scaricatevelo qui.

Bamboo is often presented as a green wonder material, showing up in everything from flooring to bicycles to laptop cases; but it’s important to understand that while the material itself is fast-growing and renewable, the processes needed to transform it into a finished product can negate the sustainability factor.

When outdoor gear company Patagonia needed to design a warm-water wetsuit—something more in line with the temperatures in their native SoCal than, say, the frigid Dungeons of South Africa—the green-minded company looked into bamboo to provide the fiber. But research showed that roughly half of the solvents needed in the production process would end up as waste. Then they struck upon a novel material for a wetsuit: Recycled polyester. There’s plenty of the stuff, and it’s a sign o’ the times that we can (and should) start seeing used plastic as a valid raw materials alternative to something that grows out of the ground.

In the video below—which is filled with enough beautiful surfing shots to make you hate your job—Brett Krazniewicz, Patagonia’s Technical Material Developer, explains around 1:37 why bamboo got the boot and polyester got the props:

via coolhunting

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I wish I could do this!

and this:

(The work of Moscow-based designer Sergey Shapiro.)