Gif: shoot a basket

Shooting…..(Read…)

Be Water My Friend! Bruce Lee Remix

A musical tribute to the legendary martial artist Bruce Lee…(Read…)

Brass middle finger keys

Best Wishes Key from Goodworth & Co. Brass middle finger key. Cool design…(Read…)

spogagafa 2012 cologne

There is green inspiration and fresh garden ideas planned for 2012. From
2 to 4 September, the green industry will be meeting again in Cologne
to ..

antobjects

Small robotic sculptures made from parts of old electronics by Anthony Oh.

Vintage Footstool

These limited edition footstools are upholstered in vintage fabric that we personally source from all over the UK. Each unique print has its own histo..

Ten Things to Read Over Labor Day Weekend

With precious little summertime left and that daunting stack of books still awaiting your “summer reading” attention, we’ve compiled this list of ten quick yet delightful online reads that will keep you busy while we spend the holiday weekend in Fashion Week prep mode (i.e., napping, binge-watching obscure documentaries, and multiple visits to the Reed Krakoff store). Until Tuesday, design fans!

♦ Whimsically grim storylines? Check. Dour yet dancerly protagonists? Yup. Eve Bowen examines “A Treasure Trove of Edward Gorey” and lives to tell about it. (New York Review of Books)

♦ Galliera, the Paris Museum of Fashion, is closed for renovation until the fall of 2013. That didn’t stop Lynn Yaeger from paying a visit. (T: The New York Times Style Magazine)

♦ LACMA’s plan to open a show featuring Robert Mapplethorpe’s gay sadomasochistic photographs two weeks before Election Day proves we’ve come a long way—maybe, writes Robin Cembalest. (ARTnews)

♦ Meanwhile, LA cops have declared war on street artists. (LA Weekly)

♦ With his first solo exhibition in 12 years opening next week, Futura gets reflective. (Interview)

♦ Whatever happened to digital art? Claire Bishop discerns the “subterranean presence” of the digital in the analog-loving art world. (Artforum)

♦ “I prefer buying things and figuring out where to put them later than regretting not buying them,” says designer Christian Louboutin. Peek inside his barn-cum-shoe archive, which houses 8,000 pairs and counting. (WSJ. Magazine)
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Nike Designer’s Beautiful "Game of Thrones" Sigil Re-Branding. Will George R.R. Martin Say Yea or Nay?

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Fan fiction, or “fanfic,” is the phenomena whereby fans of a particular fiction series like Star Wars or the Harry Potter books begin writing their own spin-off stories to share with other fans. Writers get points from the community for both how interesting their stories are and their fidelity to the universe of the original; for example, no one gets kudos for writing about Han Solo running an auto body shop in Massapequa.

The closest industrial-design-related thing I can think of to fanfic are those RC guys that we saw in the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier post, though you could argue that, impressive as it is, it’s not quite ID. But an interesting graphic design version of fanfic just came to my attention: Darren Crescenzi, a Portland-based Brand Designer for Nike and a Game of Thrones devotee, has essentially “re-branded” the house sigils from George R.R. Martin’s five-tome epic. (By “house sigil” I mean coat-of-arms, a family crest; click here to see an earlier post on the subject.)

As reported by Fast Co., Crescenzi re-interpreted what were of course only written descriptions of each sigil mentioned sporadically throughout the books, and found himself engaged in a massive graphic design exercise:

“That endless pursuit of visual consistency [required at Nike] was one of the driving forces behind the look and feel of the poster. I never thought of the project as a series of logos; The approach was much more that of creating an icon set.”

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Crescenzi’s finished product, which comprises some 42 crests on a poster, is undeniably beautiful. However, he is selling them as prints, which somewhat alters the project from being a labor of love to a vehicle for profit. That makes us very curious to see GoT author Martin’s take on them, as he is famously prickly about fan fiction, particularly where it concerns profit.

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In Brief: IKEA to Launch Hotel Chain, Restoration Hardware CEO Resigns, Fab Teams with Blu Dot


Blu Dot’s Real Good Chair, Medium Strut Table, and Perimeter Light, part of a custom color collaboration with Fab.

• Perhaps envisioning the day when the globe will be saturated by Ektorp sofas, IKEA is diversifying. The company’s real estate development arm is building an IKEA village, “Strand East,” on 26 acres in London. Expect underground parking and plenty of meatballs. Meanwhile, those who can’t score one of the 1,200 new homes in IKEAville will soon be able to spend the night in an IKEA-owned hotel. The company plans to build 100 hotels across Europe, according to a Reuters report. Rather mysteriously, the budget chain will contain no IKEA furniture. The first hotel is expected to open in Germany in 2014.

• And if those room vignettes in the IKEA catalog appear more alien than usual these days, you’re not losing your Ekenäs. In a move to cut costs and get more bang for its Boksel, the company is increasingly using 3-D graphics to fill its pages. “This year 12% of IKEA’s content for the Web, catalog, and brochures were rendered virtually,” notes Jens Hansegard in the Wall Street Journal. “That number will increase to 25% next year.” The army of photographers, carpenters, and set designers that produce the IKEA catalog (in 62 different versions in 43 countries) are being retrained to apply their skills to spaces that do not exist.

• Just when Restoration Hardware was firing on all cylinders with its ersatz Axel Vervoodt vibe, even heeding the call of urban dwellers for chunky armchairs fit for tiny apartments, chairman and co-CEO Gary Friedman has stepped down from his posts after an internal inquiry into an intimate relationship he had with a 26-year-old female employee. Carlos Alberini is now the sole CEO as the company prepares for an IPO. As nonexecutive chairman emeritus, Friedman will continue in an advisory role as he starts a new “incubator” company with ties to Restoration Hardware.

• In cheerier news, our friends at Fab have cooked up a unique partnership. Tomorrow the flash sale site will unveil seven furniture pieces from Blu Dot in exclusive custom colors. “Fab is offering Blu Dot design staples in bright orange, black, gray, and crisp white—that’s right, ladies and gentlemen: we’re one step closer to ridding the world of boring beiges,” noted a post on the company’s blog. Available through September 29, the pieces include a desk, tables, and a loopy floor lamp. We’re partial to the mod seating: shipped flat and folded into sturdy shape along laser-cut lines, Blu Dot’s Real Good Chair ($120) lives up to its name.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Cool Hunting Video Presents: Genspace

Brooklyn’s community biotech lab, a place for experimentation and learning

Cool Hunting Video Presents: Genspace

In our latest video we explore Genspace, a community biotech lab based in Brooklyn. When most people imagine a research laboratory they usually don’t envision it living in an unassuming building on a major urban thoroughfare, but Genspace—one of the first labs of its kind in the US operating…

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