Hasta La Ideas

Nearly 2,000 canoes and kayaks floating on Fourth Lake in the Adirondacks, with all of the individual boaters holding hands in an effort to break the World’s Largest Raft record – Nancie Battaglia, Sports Illustrated/Getty Images (image rotated 90 degrees to fit here)

National Geographic has posted this year’s “Visions of Earth” photo series, a sort of best-of-the-best of what our planet has to offer in terms of visual beauty, both natural and man-made. For some reason I find the top-down photographs the most compelling, as they literally broaden—or is that heighten—your perspective, showing you things you’d recognize from the ground but would have no opportunity to see from above. (Or in the case of the moth scales, at such magnification.)

While there’s nothing specifically industrial-design-related here, anyone interested in the visual arts is bound to find dozens of inspiring images; NatGeo has made not only this year’s pick available for free viewing, but has also posted their archives stretching back to 2006.

The Space Shuttle being “delivered” from California to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida – Carla Thomas, NASA/Reuters

View from the Burj Khalifa – Samar Jodha

A crop circle, origin unknown, located in Switzerland – Sandro Campardo, EPA/Corbis

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When Chanmi Grace handed me her business card I almost asked her to design mine right there on the spot. Her cards are slightly wider than average and they’re thick enough to be used as a weapon. Seriously, these corners could take an eye out. Moreover, the eye-catching visual identity she designed for herself looks like a chemistry formula with the letters in her name standing in for elements. Coincidentally, her name includes some of the main elements for basic life: C (carbon), N (nitrogen) and H (hydrogen). I love how she plays with letterforms, stretching out the C in Grace to the length of two letters so both names take up the same amount of space even though they have a different number of letters.

Her typeface Dodu Curbe is a sophisticated serif that’s also readable. The slightly elongated lines gives it an elegant, swan-like appearance.

Chanmi describes it as “a modern typeface, but more formal in appearance…[with] slightly higher visibility by giving more weight to serif. The font is a modern, neoclassic typeface in reaction to experimentation with proportions. The descender is slightly shorter and extended compared to other modern typefaces like Didot and Bodoni.”

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Earlier this week, we shared some lessons from the speakers at the New Amsterdam Bicycle Show, which took place on April 28–29 at the Skylight Soho in lower Manhattan, alongside a series of photos to illustrate the breadth of exhibitors. Here, as promised, are more photos of our unofficial pick for Best-in-Show: Brooklyn builder Horse Cycles (although I agree that we ought to heed BikeSnobNYC’s advice to lay off the bike porn, it’s fine to partake in small doses, right?)

Of course, we’re playing favorites here: we first met founder Thomas Callahan at the first New Am’ about a year ago, he’d just moved into his South Williamsburg workshop. Since then, he’s tried his steady hand at all variety of accessory (racks, lights, etc.), built out the paint booth (where I first saw the blue beauty above a couple weeks ago with a fresh clearcoat) and even taken to making custom surfboards.

But more than anything else, he’s honed his craft, and it shows in the details…

This track frame, built for an art exhibition, features Strawberry ‘wishbone’ seatstays and bronze tentacle details

The frame, which is available for sale, has never been built up; see more photos here.

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UPPERCASE stockist Pink Olive is turning five on May 5th and having what looks like a lovely party to celebrate. If you aren’t lucky enough to be able to attend in person (they are having s’mores) check out their online shop. With two stores in East Village, Manhattan and Park Slope, Brooklyn they have built a successful business over the last five years. Congratulations on your fifth birthday Pink Olive!

Slice and Dice, glass and bungee cord, Elevator Gallery, London, 2011

Ben Woodeson’s art makes people uneasy, anxious even. But as his precariously balanced glass pieces demonstrate, the fear of what might happen next is at the very centre of his work…

Woodeson is part of a new group exhibition curated by Crystal Bennes called Pink Does Not Exist. It opens at the Flat C gallery in north London later this month and Woodeson will be showing two pieces which look at how we invest certain objects and situations with our own fears of what they might do, or do to us.

Kick Ass Nail Your Butt to the Wall Glass Sculpture, sheet glass and bungee cord, 2012

Woodeson uses basic materials (glass, bungee cords, the gallery walls or floor), basic scientific principles (gravity, states of equilibrium) and manipulates the tension generated by arranging them in certain ways. His artworks “deliberately straddle a line between stability and instability, action and inaction,” he says.

Screaming ankle slashing tension glass piece (60 second self-destructive sculpture), sheet glass, 2012

His numbered series of Health and Safety Violations, for example, examines an endless list of potential public infringements: swinging a cobblestone or a can of motor oil around in a confined space; playing with electric sockets; leaving massive bits of glass on the floor. (The cobblestone piece is unsurprisingly really dangerous).

One of the pieces he’ll be showing at the Pink Does Not Exist show is Health & Safety Violation #2 – Shocking, a live electric fence, which visitors will have to negotiate in order to see the rest of the show. Unnerving, potentially very annoying, but who knows if it’s really on or off?

Other projects rely on random timers to set them going but these also come full of suspense: will you be present in the gallery when the plastic bag splits, pouring steel ball bearings over the floor? Or when the ball bearing drops from a great height and smashes the sheet of glass?

Even when nothing is going on, there’s the ever-present itch that something is about to happen.

For details of the location of the Flat C Project Space in Stoke Newington, north London email hello@flatclondon.co.uk (the gallery is a private residence). Pink Does Not Exist runs from May 19 until June 2 and features work by Woodeson, Ross Sutherland, Freddy Tuppen, Trevor Kiernander, Catherine Hyland, Henrietta Williams, Nick Love, and Gregory Sale. More of Woodeson’s work is at woodeson.co.uk.

Semi-visible corner piece (head banger), 2mm glass and paper, 2012

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