Hasta La Ideas

Did you get that clever joke in the title?? Did you??

This little piece of magic, called Making Weather, puts a spin on the quantum levitation speakers we’ve been seeing in the past year. Making Weather isn’t really a levitating speaker as much as it’s an awe-inspiring piece of art. The hyperrealistic cumulus cloud hovers over a magnetic plate. Beneath its fluffy exterior lies a pretty darn powerful wireless speaker. Just to add some dramatic effect, the speaker cloud also comes with concealed lighting that pulsates to the tune of your audio, generating a pretty neat looking music-synchronized lighting flashes. What a wonderfully literal way to have booming, thunderous audio!

Designers: Richard Clarkson & Crealev.

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Matty Matheson visits the Munchies Test Kitchen in Brooklyn, NY to make a lobster roll to end all lobster rolls…(Read…)

EU students are deferring or cancelling their offers from UK design schools over Brexit with major implications for the future of the sector, according to London Design Festival co-founder and UAL governor Ben Evans.

Evans said that EU applicants who had been offered places at the University of the Arts London (UAL) accounted for 17 per cent of the intake of students, but that a number had cancelled or deferred their entry since the results of the EU Referendum.

“There’s no material change to their circumstances at this point, but it is a point about them feeling less welcome in our city, and insecure about coming and taking up a three-year degree course in London,” he said.

“That’s a disaster, because the reputation and the prosperity of our sector depends on the steady intake of talent, particularly from the EU.”

Access to creative talent at risk

UAL is an umbrella institution that includes many of London’s best-known creative schools, including Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London College of Communication and London College of Fashion.

Alumni include designers like Terence Conran, James Dyson, Neville Brody, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, Mary Katrantzou, Roksanda Illincic and Ricardo Tisci.

Many are major employers of British designers and graduates. A significant number moved to London from other countries to study, and have stayed and based their businesses in the UK.

But Evans warned this could change if restrictions were placed on how long graduates could stay in the UK after their studies.

“Students outside the EU used to have a two-year window after graduation when they were able to stay and live and work in the UK. That got chopped a few years ago, so you graduate and you’re out straight away,” he said. “If that applies to EU students as well, we’re in trouble.”

Leading architects and designers that attended Dezeen’s Brexit design summit in June said that overseas staff accounted for up to 70 per cent of their staff and were important for communicating with overseas clients, creating a diverse creative culture within the workplace and plugging skills gaps.

More realistic entry criteria necessary

Evans said that existing visa requirements for creative talent were already harsher than in many other UK sectors, despite a clear need for skilled staff from overseas.

“In some categories they’re absurd,” Evans said. “I mean you’ve literally got to be nominated for an Oscar to be of a sufficient creative standard to come in. This is the Home Office closing in, rather than opening out.”

“If we could propose a set of entry criteria that was much more realistic about the skills base that we so urgently need, I think that would be helpful, not just to us but to the politicians,” he said.

Evans was talking as part of a Brexit event organised by London’s Design Museum during London Design Festival, which he co-founded in 2003 with John Sorrell.

The panel also included 100% Design director William Knight, Louise Jury, who is spokeswoman for the John Sorrell-founded Creative Industries Federation, and Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs.

A live stream of the Design and Brexit discussion was broadcast on Dezeen’s Facebook page and is still available to watch. The video is embedded below.

London could lose creative capital status

Speaking to Dezeen after the panel discussion, Evans said that London risked losing its status as a creative capital for Europe.

“We are already charging significant fees when most European design schools are free or extremely cheap,” he said. “Reputation is everything. If London starts to lose its reputation it will change very, very quickly.”

“Berlin is one of many cities that sense opportunity here,” he added. “The golden era that we’ve been enjoying for many years will quite dramatically come to a close.”

Evans is one of the backers of Dezeen’s Brexit Design Manifesto – a statement about the cultural and economic importance of design and architecture to the UK and a call on government to address key issues that will impact on its post-Brexit future.

The manifesto has attracted over 250 signatures from major names in British design and architecture, including Richard Rogers, Conran, David Adjaye, Ilse Crawford and Jasper Morrison.

Evans said that designers needed to present a loud, unified voice around Brexit and campaign to protect the future of the sector.

“We need to become quite political,” he said. “It’s very important that we don’t let this happen to us.”

“It’s extremely important that we all come together, because our voice will be so much more powerful if we can offer a collective view.”

Read more about the manifesto and find out how to sign »

The post Brexit’s impact on education is a disaster for design says Ben Evans appeared first on Dezeen.

International font company Monotype has worked with Google to create one typeface that can be used by everyone in the world, writing in any language (+ movie).

The two companies describe the font family – named Noto – as one of the biggest typography projects ever undertaken.

The result of more than five years’ work, Noto covers more than 800 languages and 100 written scripts. And work on it will continue into the future to add scripts that are currently incompatible with computers.

Numbers, emoji, symbols and musical notation are also included in the typeface, which comes in multiple serif and sans-serif styles of up to eight weights.

Noto is designed to eliminate “tofu” – the square boxes that appear in place of text when a font is not available on the device, so-called because they look like blocks of bean curd.

The typeface is said to realise Google’s dream of seeing “no more tofu”.

Google and Monotype claim Noto will not only help people to communicate across the world, it will assist to preserve information written in endangered languages.

“Even though we prioritise widely used languages, we still want to support other languages, even if there are no people still speaking them,” said Google product manager Xiangye Xiao. “There are some characters you can only see on stones.”

“If you don’t move them to the web, over time those stones will become sand and we’ll never be able to recover those drawings or that writing.”

Google and Monotype are sharing Noto under an open font licence, meaning it is free to use, modify and distribute. Designers and developers are invited to adapt the typeface.

Work on Noto will be ongoing to keep up with updates to the Unicode Standard – the computing industry standard for encoding text so that it can be read consistently across machines.

When Google and Monotype began their project in 2011, Unicode 6.0 had just been released. The standard is now up to version 9.0, and the companies will continue to work together to add scripts from each new standard to the Noto library.

“I feel that looking into the future of digital communications, Google Noto is going to be the go-to design for people to be using to communicate across multiple cultures and societies,” said Monotype’s creative type director, Steve Matteson.

Monotype, one of the world’s biggest type foundries, has previously worked on high-profile projects like a digital-friendly update to the London Tube’s 100-year-old typeface.

While Google provided design direction, Monotype is responsible for the look of Noto. The company worked with designers and linguists from around the world to create the characters in Noto’s library.

Google’s vast resources funded the project, making extensive testing and review possible. The release of Noto continues a big week for the company, which launched a new smartphone, connected home device and virtual reality headset on Tuesday.

The post Google and Monotype collaborate on font that spans all written language appeared first on Dezeen.