Hasta La Ideas

Les designers allemands de chez Fifti-Fifti ont créé la « Take-Off Light » qui est une lampe artisanale dont l’abat jour est entièrement fait en papier. On peut voir de très jolis motifs faits aux lasers sur les lampes. Les différentes lampes sont à découvrir en détails dans la suite.

Filmed during an early morning in the capital by designer Tom Williams, a road painter exhibits some effortless heavy duty lettering skills…

According to Williams’ Vimeo page, which recently attracted the attention of Brand New, the short clip was uploaded two years ago but it remains an interesting document of some largely unseen typographic practice.

“I could see them moving down the road painting some other road signs, and knew there was supposed to be a BUS STOP sign in that spot, so I set the tripod and camera up and waited for them to start,” Williams writes on the post.

Aside from the captivating way the letters are turned out – for me the ‘S’ is the highlight, as is the way the signpainter keeps one arm behind his back – it’s impressive to see this is all done without a stencil.

There appear to be some faint chalk marks on the ground, but other than having a length of wood as an additional guide, it’s freehand work.

“They block out the area of each letter pretty roughly as you can see,” writes Williams, “then just freehand within that. No stencilling.”

According to page 106 of the Traffic Signs Manual (available as a PDF here), at a given stop the words ‘BUS STOP’ must be marked out every complete length of 12m.

(If anyone knows what kind of material is being used to paint the text onto the road surface – plastic, an epoxy? – we’d be happy to hear from you in the comments below.)

UPDATE – “Ed” in the comments says “the material used is 200ºC Thermoplastic with glass beads mixed in so as to be reflective. The thing he’s ‘drawing’ with is basically a square bucket with an edge cut off the one side, so it pours when tipped flat and doesn’t when tipped back.”

Director and animator Johnny Kelly and designer Scott Burnett have created a short film to show why design is important. The film features simple and charming graphics, and no language, so it can be understood universally.

Shape, shown below, was commissioned by Pivot Dublin and Dublin City Council, and was originally part of the city’s bid to become world design capital 2014. While Cape Town picked up that accolade this year, the team decided to go ahead with the project anyway, in order to promote wider understanding and acceptance of design. The film is at the centre of a website, makeshapechange.com, which provides a broad overview of what it means to be a designer.

<object width=”560″ height=”315″><param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” /><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always” /><param name=”movie” value=”http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=90208216&amp;force_embed=1&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=0&amp;show_byline=0&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=ff0179&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;autoplay=0&amp;loop=0″ /><embed src=”http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=90208216&amp;force_embed=1&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=0&amp;show_byline=0&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=ff0179&amp;fullscreen=1&amp;autoplay=0&amp;loop=0″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”560″ height=”315″></embed></object>

“I was approached by Ali Grehan from Dublin City Council who had seen a Chipotle animation (Back To The Start) that I had worked on a few years ago,” explains Kelly. “She liked the way animation was able to break down complex information (in that instance, farming practices) into digestible form and thought there might be a way to tell the story of design.”

Kelly brought Burnett into the project and the duo thrashed out a structure for the film. “We thought quite a bit about who the film was for, and what they might get from it,” continues Kelly. “For instance my wife is from a rural part of Ireland, and although she is now a very talented (if I may say so) interior and product designer, I think I speak for her when I say she didn’t really have an awareness of what design was when she was growing up – what it meant, that it could be a career. In a way the goal was to reach out to people like that, it would be lovely if a ten-year old watched this, and afterwards thought a bit more about the chair they were sitting in, or the pen they were using, or how hard their phone is to use.”

Grehan was insistent that the film not feature any language or narration, so that it could be accessible to anyone. “When designers talk about design we quite often put it on a pedestal, telling of importance rather than showing and letting people make up their own minds,” says Burnett. “While from the first meeting we were agreed that we had to avoid any kind of preaching at all costs, having the added constraint of not being able to use language helped us rule out trying to be persuasive. We couldn’t tell so we had to show, which funnily enough is what I always say to clients, but barely ever do myself.”

The duo looked at other recent design films, including Helvetica, Urbanized and Press Pause Play. They also found influence in films from the past, including Why Man Creates by Saul Bass, and “pretty much every educational/informational film made for IBM in the 60s and 70s”, says Burnett. In the end it was Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten that proved most useful. “Powers of Ten did offer the eventual breakthrough but conceptually rather than visually,” says Burnett. “Eventually the only thing that made sense was to zoom out and not make design the subject, but have it instead as the invisible catalyst in the story. Once we realised that then a lot of the early ideas found their way into the story which we just made nice and simple – a day in the life where the changes that are happening around us all the time are made visible.”

Burnett admits to some anxiety at releasing the project, particularly in relation to his peers in design. “Trying to make sense of your industry to people who don’t get it, you suddenly feel all your peers tutting and shaking their heads,” he says. “And all of it is very counter-intuitive to how we usually communicate professionally. Even on the website we’ve framed design by context rather than subject, so the whole thing is turned on it’s head as we usually start with what we do – I design websites, I design spoons, I design light fixtures for cars.

“So i’m still nervous about launching it into the world, but having shown it to a group of 10-16 year olds a few weeks ago, a lot less so. The general response was that they never thought about how much work goes into the things around them, and that they never thought about design like that before. One girl even said it had made her thankful for the nice things she has in her life. I couldn’t have scripted their responses better.

“The thing we realised along the journey was that we were making a tool as much as a film. A way to start and frame a conversation that can then be carried on. This led to the idea for the website and an education programme. We’re hoping that this keeps developing and also that other people find ways to use the film. To open up a conversation about what they do and why it’s worth thinking about.”

makeshapechange.com

Milan 2014: London design duo Glithero will present a range of textiles that have been woven using organ punch cards in Milan next week (+ slideshow).

Commissioned by the Zuiderzee Museum and the Textiel Museum in the Netherlands, Glithero‘s Woven Song project creates fabric using punch cards that would normally feed music through a mechanical organ.

“The music is on a punch card called an organ music book,” the studio told Dezeen. “A Jacquard loom is also fed information using a punch card so the music code from the organ music book is directly translated onto a punch card compatible with a Jacquard Loom. This new punch card is then used to weave the fabric.”

The book music is made from sheets of perforated thick cardboard lengths, which usually specify the notes to be played on the organ. Air passing through these holes determines the notes generated from the organ pipes.

When the sheets are fed in to the mechanical loom, hooks drop through the holes to change the direction of the threads and create a pattern that is determined by the song.

The studio worked with weaver Wil van den Broek and master organ maker Leon van Leeuwen to produce the fabrics. The hues and type of yarn were chosen by Glithero and the colours reference the craftsmen’s workshops.

Glithero will present the fabrics and a film installation of the weaving process in an exhibition entitled Made to Measure in Milan next week, situated at Via Privata Cletto Arrighi 19 in the Ventura Lambrate design district.

Photography is by Petr Krejčí.

The post Glithero patterns fabric
using organ music appeared first on Dezeen.

True Facts About The Octopus by Ze Frank..(Read…)