Accidents Waiting to Happen Thanks to Design, Early PlayStation Logo Concepts and the World's Most Popular Car Colors

The Core77 team spends time combing through the news so you don’t have to. Here’s a weekly roundup of our favorite finds from the World Wide Web:

This infographic shows the most popular car colors, by world region.

“Skyscrapers are not ‘long’, they’re tall.”

Just a few casual accidents waiting to happen.

BHQFU on how to run a free art school with the “worst” business model.

A pretty incredible remodel that inverts the notion of a Victorian house.

There are 2 types of horror game players.

Winners of the 2017 International Bicycle Design Competition.

Man creates “passive-aggressive art gallery” for his roommate’s mess.

Well, this is comforting.

The most Finnish product design of all time: A dish-drying storage cabinet.

A Panda Mansion designed by Bjarke Ingels Group.

The new 1 pound coin in UK was designed by a 15 year old high school student!

A laser cut bust of Vin Diesel made of ham and cheese by @crabsandscience. That is all.

This is what you daydream of when you’re stuck in the Holland Tunnel.

An interview with Darby Barber, 23-year-old auto designer for GM.

Bicycle pizza cutter (both wheels do the cutting).

Early PlayStation logo concepts by Manabu Sakamoto. Which one is your favorite?

Hot Tip: Check out more blazin’ hot Internet finds on our Twitter page.

Baselworld 2017: Five Well-Designed Women's Watches: Various timepieces, across multiple price points, that are more than just pretty

Baselworld 2017: Five Well-Designed Women's Watches


More often than not, women’s watches tend to condescend to the consumer base—throwing in a delicate or funky colorway or adding some gemstones atop a fairly normal timepiece without much to its core. With the amount of innovation and craftsmanship……

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Tranquili-tea!

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There’s a difference in personalities of tea and coffee drinkers. At least the quintessential ones. Coffee drinkers crave the energy, tea drinkers admire the tranquility. Imbue, in that regard makes for quite a tranquil drinking experience. The Imbue (aptly named) is a tea infuser with a calm aesthetic synonymous with Muji products. It serves as an infuser as well as a sipping glass.

The clear tumbler holds the water or milk and a sleeve around it makes holding the Imbue comfortable when the liquid inside is piping hot. An infuser sieve sits on the mouth of the tumbler, holding the leaves. The wooden cap on top does something interesting by including three magnets that snap up the metal infuser when the cap is screwed onto the Imbue’s tumbler base. Once unscrewed, the infuser sieve automatically lifts up, straining out the tea leaves, leaving you with a perfectly glistening golden brew to kick off your day!

Designer: Ashkon Nima

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Design Experience that Matters: How to Create a Killer Design Portfolio

Building a portfolio is one of the most challenging parts of pursuing a career in design. On one hand, there’s no strict formula and no defined requirements, but on the other hand, we’re creatives. Isn’t that supposed to be where we thrive? In six months, I’ve had the opportunity to see both sides of this portfolio enigma—first in assembling my own portfolio and applying for positions, and more recently reviewing others’ portfolios with DtM CEO Tim Prestero to find a good fit for the company. This puts me in a unique position: I can still clearly remember the dozens of questions I had at the outset of my job search, but now I’m equipped with the context to give answers! 

The best advice I can give is this: Design your portfolio as well as the projects it contains. Who is your audience, what are they looking for, and what’s the most effective way to deliver it to them?

Who is your audience?

Before you even open InDesign, do some research. What is the standard for portfolios in your design niche? Furniture designers have vastly different portfolios from medical designers. Use this standard as a starting block. If you have a specific company in mind, you can look up the current employees. How do the staff members talk about their work? What skills do they most emphasize? This is a great place to start, but don’t stop there! Design portfolios needs a unique, well-considered approach to properly communicate.

As a student, it’s important to realize that teachers are a very different audience from employers. More often than not, I see people simply transfer class deliverables into a PDF, and presume the portfolio done. In a pinch, this may get the job done, but it can lead to a portfolio that doesn’t communicate anything more than technical skills. We’ve all seen the beautiful page of drawings photoshopped onto a moleskine notebook entitled “SKETCHES.” Employer Malory wants to know WHY you did those sketches. Were you thinking through closure details, or looking for a form that is consistent with a brand language? Most importantly, do your best to communicate your intentions succinctly — preferably in the page title.

What are they looking for?

Or in other words, what purpose does my portfolio serve? Student Malory would have told you that a portfolio is to show people your work, explain how you tackle problems and show the happy clients you’ve worked with. Now, employer Malory says that a portfolio’s main purpose is to substantiate the skills you claim to have. The shift in this thinking came from reviewing resumes. “Proficient with solidworks” can mean vastly different things from different applicants. Show me the results of paying attention in your CAD classes and it will set you apart from the other candidate who says the same thing but slid by. This goes beyond just technical skills, use pictures and stories to show me how you think!

As a student, one of the most common questions is how to present group work. There’s a duality of advice given about this subject. One school of thought says, “You will rarely work by yourself in the professional world, so show us that you can excel on a team of designers.” The other says, “Group work in a portfolio is never safe. How am I to gauge your skills when I don’t know how involved you were in this project?” There is still no clear answer, and every employer will tell you something different. The most I can offer is this: Be transparent about your contribution to the project. If someone else created the 3d model and render that shows your design concept, be sure to clearly call that out on the picture.

What’s the most effective way to deliver your portfolio?

As students, we’re tempted to ask for a blueprint. How many pages should my portfolio be? How many projects? What’s the best format, PDF or website? The answers are never consistent, but that’s because they are beside the point. Instead of asking, “How many pages?” think “How long will it take to review?” The problem with page count is that someone hears “three pages per project,” and then they populate those three pages with so much content that it becomes too busy to communicate anything. Take time to simplify the points of your project, dedicating a page to each point and designing the page to communicate that point as clearly and visually as possible.

Website and PDF portfolios have their applications. Ideally you should be ready to go with both. I remember thinking as a student that website portfolios were so cool and professional. Employer Malory still thinks that’s true, but the challenge is that websites are impersonal. For a job application, personalized touches set you apart faster than anything else. Pick the most relevant projects for the company you’re applying to and use those to populate your portfolio application. That being said, there are ways to be personable with a website: instead of sending an employer to your site’s homepage, consider linking them to a specific project within your website and explain why that project is relevant.

Evaluate your portfolio after it’s done.

Like any design, your portfolio needs to be tested. Sleep on it, then skim it. What does your portfolio communicate when you only read the titles and look at the pictures? Is that on message? Present your portfolio to someone, and take note of their questions. Look for points that require the most verbal explanation. This indicates a problem with either the story, or the communication of the page.

Your portfolio can be a powerful advocate for your work if you want it to be. Take as much effort to design your portfolio as you have the projects inside of it. It will show!

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This “Design Experience that Matters” series is provided courtesy of Timothy Prestero and the team at Design that Matters (DtM). As a nonprofit, DtM collaborates with leading social entrepreneurs and hundreds of volunteers to design new medical technologies for the poor in developing countries. DtM’s Firefly infant phototherapy device is treating thousands of newborns in 21 counties from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. In 2012, DtM was named the winner of the National Design Award.

Link About It: Mexico City's Penis Seat For Men

Mexico City's Penis Seat For Men


Sometimes the most effective lessons are hard-earned. Mexico City transit took that quite literally with their new PSA: a sculptural installation of a man’s torso and penis embedded onto a train chair reserved for men only. Having any part of a stranger……

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Build your own Bose!

I’ve heard of making music, but the BOSEbuild wireless speaker takes it literally! This badboy is a hi-fi audio speaker, but it comes absolutely disassembled, like an IKEA piece of furniture. Designed to be put together from scratch, this speaker aims at educating youngsters on the basic principles of sound and speaker design. The speaker comes as a kit, containing everything from the inner circuitry to the audio driver, cables, and even a transparent cube-shaped speaker body that can be easily assembled without the need for power tools of any kind.

The transparent design of the speaker really separates it from most of Bose’s products, however keeping true to its cause of being an educational gadget. Rather than settling for the premium aesthetic, the BOSEbuild works towards building curiosity in children with its transparent body, allowing kids to stare right into the heart of the speaker at the circuitry and the audio driver moving back and forth to deliver rich sound.

All the parts and components on the BOSEbuild are designed specifically keeping children in mind. Parts are made rugged and resilient, cords are colored in visible vibrant hues, and circuit boards are labeled clearly, so that children can easily and effectively put the speaker together. The BOSEbuild comes with an app that that guides children through the process of making the speaker from scratch while even going the distance to explain to them what they are doing and the principles of physics behind how the speaker produces sound.

What an incredible initiative to get children engaged on a completely different level with the technology around them! The BOSEbuild truly delivers on audio, as expected by Bose, but it also gives children the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes from being able to say that they actually built a wireless audio speaker from scratch!

Designer: Bose

BUY IT HERE: $149.00

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MINDCRAFT Exhibition in Milan Will Explore Notions of Time

An arguably refreshing aspect of Milan Design Week’s smaller contender shows are their concentration on the importance of spontaneity and experimentation—Salone offshoots such as Ventura Lambrate and Rosanna Orlandi embrace the unconventional, giving way to a new understanding of designers’ processes and research. 

A view of MINDCRAFT’s 2015 exhibition

In the latest installment of MINDCRAFT at Salone, the affinity for thoughtful and conceptual origins is no different. MINDCRAFT is an annual exhibit that highlights works from emerging Danish Designers. For their 2017 show, MINDCRAFT veers from the conventional by recruiting Danish fashion designer and quasi-surrealist Henrik Vibskov to curate the latest collection of objects on display. Entitled “TIME”, the inspiration behind the exhibit derives, for one, from its setting: the ancient San Simpliciano cloister. 

2017 MINDCRAFT curator, Danish fashion designer Henrik Vibskov

In the show’s press release, Vibskov notes that “time has a strong presence at the exhibition site,” which is precisely what the show hopes to react to in the displayed objects. Each of the 18 participating designers will “explore how time can help explain what makes us tick, for example with regard to the rhythms and rituals of life, but also how time affects the the creative process—from the drying time of a ceramic glaze to considerations about when or for how long an object will be used.”

The theme sparks a few ideas that stem from a poetic intent—designer Isabel Berglund’s piece called “Spinning Time Machine” essentially operates through material and form as a visualization of time and the movement associated with it (you’re also free to throw in a proper “fabric of time” pun right in here). 

“Spinning Time Machine” by Isabel Berglund

For other designers, this theme strikes a clear note relating to topics like sustainability and industry. Carl Emil Jacobsen’s ‘Powder Variations’ is a series of sculptures mean to comment on the standardization of color through industrial processes. Jacobsen creates his own colors from scratch using materials like fieldstones, tiles and bricks to pigment these one-off objects. 

A powder variation sculpture by Carl Emil Jacobsen

And for the staunch designers out there, don’t worry—there are also some more straightforward furniture pieces included in the show exploring concepts of time through material and process.

“Plinth” by designers Emil Kroeyer & Mads Sætter Lassen
“Bricks of Time” by MBADV

MINDCRAFT kicks off next Tuesday, April 3 at Chiostro Minore di San Simpliciano, Piazza Paolo VI 6, 20121 in Milan and will run until Sunday, April 9.

ListenUp: Young Dreams: Sinner (I'm Sorry)

Young Dreams: Sinner (I'm Sorry)


With their latest release, “Sinner (I’m Sorry),” Norwegian electropop unit Young Dreams wraps heady lyrics within buoyant melodies. A shimmering, summery orchestration lifts the track from its depths, occasionally veering into psychedelia. “Sinner……

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Brake Free Smart Helmet Attachment

Brake Free is a one-of-a-kind smart, high-visibility helmet accessory that commands attention>”Brake Free is an ultra bright smart LED brake light that instantly improves a motorcycle’s visibility. It mounts on the back of the helmet you already own and its sensors work automatically to let others know whenever you slow down–braking, engine braking, or downshifting. No need for a wired installation or connected apps. Brake Free is simply a smarter way to be seen.”You can pre-order now from Indiegogo…(Read…)

The Best News Bloopers of March 2017

News Be Funny presents a roundup of the funny moments that happened during live local news broadcasts in the month of March 2017…(Read…)