Comedian Thomas “TomSka” Ridgewell and animator Ben Smallman are back with the 10th installment of their bizarre but hilarious animated dark comedy series, “asdfmovie.”..(Read…)

Thanks to all our readers, commenters and advertisers for making March 2017 our best ever month! We topped 10 million page views for the first time, received almost 3,000 comments, and became one of the 7,000 most-visited websites in the world – our highest position yet.

We broke records across every metric, with over five million sessions on our website and over 2.7 million unique visitors. Traffic so far this year is up over 15 percent on 2016.

These results further enhanced our position as the most popular design website in the world according to ranking organisation Alexa, beating the previous high we achieved in December last year.

We also cemented our position as the world’s most-commented design website, rising even higher up the Comment1000 list of the sites with the most active reader comments.

At a time when rivals are abandoning their comment sections, we are now among the 750 most-commented sites on the planet. Catch up on all the latest comments here.

March also saw record growth and activity on our social media platforms. We topped one million Instagram followers and achieved just under nine million video plays on Facebook, where we hit 750,000 likes just before the start of the month.

The month was also our most successful for ad sales and recruitment bookings on www.dezeenjobs.com, with over 500 job ads placed for the first time.

Big thanks to everyone who clicked on a story, watched a video, placed an ad, wrote a comment… and huge congratulations to the amazing Dezeen team!

The post Dezeen breaks all records for traffic and comments in March appeared first on Dezeen.

Seattle firm Coates Design has completed a home in Washington‘s Cascade mountain range that serves as a hub for members of a large extended family.

Tumble Creek Cabin is a vacation home designed to provide generous communal spaces for family gatherings, as well as more intimate spaces for members to be alone.

“The retreat provides ample nooks for those seeking a peaceful hideaway – and warm, light-filled spaces for lively groups,” according to the studio.

The residence’s main volume contains two bedrooms, a bunk room, and the home’s social areas. These sleeping quarters are laid out on a longitudinal corridor, and their windows face north.

An open-concept kitchen, living, and dining room occupies the eastern portion of the home. This double-height space opens out onto a terrace, which is sheltered by the roof’s dramatic overhang.

“Vaulted ceilings in the main living and dining area are supported by exposed steel and wood structural elements, and floor-to-ceiling windows look out on the landscape beyond,” said the firm.

A board-formed concrete hearth sits in the centre of the living room. According to the architects, this feature “commands attention as the focal point of the main living area”.

“This solid mass, along with areas of concrete floor, serve as a thermal heat sink to help maintain a stable and comfortable temperature inside,” they explained.

Additional guests can be accommodated in a pavilion that lies just south of the main part of the home. Here, the architects included a games room and guest bedroom on the ground floor, and more bunk beds for children upstairs.

Wooden cladding covers the sides of the home, and echoes the interior finishes. Accent materials such as weathering steel and concrete were used in certain areas.

Other projects in the vicinity of Seattle include a floating home that allows residents to go for a swim from their bedroom and a home hidden amongst the trees, deliberately concealing its best lakefront views in order to accentuate their effect.

The post Steel beams support dramatic roof overhangs at Washington state retreat by Coates Design appeared first on Dezeen.

British designer Jasper Morrison will debut a collection of deceptively simple-looking seating and tables for American furniture brand Emeco at Milan design week.

Called 1 Inch, the collection includes a chair, armchair and stools in three heights as well as cafe and bar tables. Each piece features a simple frame made from a recycled, one-inch-square extruded aluminium tube that was selected for its strength-to-weight ratio.

In keeping with Morrison‘s typically utilitarian style, the frames feature gently rounded edges and slightly splayed legs. Seats and backs are available in fabric or leather, sustainably sourced walnut or ash plywood, or one of seven colours of polypropylene.

Describing the chair as “probably one of the most complicated chairs I’ve designed”, Morrison created the 1 Inch collection to suit a range of different environments.

“I’m more and more interested in working towards designs which take part in everyday life as naturally as possible,” explained Morrison. “The 1 Inch chair, though far from spectacular, is intended to be an updated Emeco solution to a wide variety of situations where something strong and less flashy is required.”

“The design of the chair seemed basic enough and we were not expecting much trouble in developing it, but we underestimated the complication of bending square aluminium tube in more than one plane simultaneously,” he continued.

“It took Emeco several months of experimentation and false starts and it took us uncountable revisions to the drawing before we found the way to do it.”

The 1 Inch collection is Morrison’s second collaboration with Emeco following on from the Alfi collection, a range of seating made of reclaimed post-industrial waste, that was launched in 2015.

Morrison, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s best industrial designers, set up his Office for Design in London in 1986. Over the course of his career he has worked with brands such as Muji, Samsung, Ideal Standard and Camper, and is currently art director of Swiss electronics company Punkt.

In 2006 he popularised his self-coined term “super normal” to describe the ideal of unobtrusive but atmospheric design, and in 2015 a touring retrospective exhibition called Thingness was accompanied by a new monograph called A Book of Things.

Last year, he introduced his first industrially produced kitchen for Italian manufacturers Schiffini, and also unveiled a collection of super-normal furniture designed for Swiss brand Vitra during Milan design week 2016.

The 1 Inch collection will be displayed on the Emeco stand, Hall 20 Stand E29, at the Salone del Mobile from 4 to 9 April during Milan design week. Other products launching during Milan design week include the final furniture collection by the late Japanese designer Shigeru Uchida, a minimalist screwdriver set by Oregon-based designer Erdem Selek, and a series of jellyfish-inspired silicone vases by Nendo.

The post Jasper Morrison creates “one of the most complicated chairs” of his career for Emeco appeared first on Dezeen.

Forging a Damascus Steel Chisel

The aptly-named Andy Steele is an enthusiastic, improbably-young-looking 21st-Century blacksmith and the latest addition to our Makers Roundup. Here he forges Damascus steel into a Japanese-style chisel for The Samurai Carpenter:

How to Make a Large Bluetooth Scoreboard

Bob Clagett walks you through how he made this Arduino-based remote-controlled scoreboard. Along the way he runs into a couple of issues and solves them on the fly:

The GluBot, and a Discount

Ron Paulk runs down his favorite glue bottle, his sponsor FastCap’s GluBot, and also offers a discount code:

Concrete Passive Speaker Cube

Linn from Darbin Orvar creates a no-electricity-required passive speaker for her phone out of concrete and wood:

Mini Tabletop Workbench

Laura Kampf builds a nifty benchtop mini workbench, complete with dog holes and a tailvise:

Drill Press Depth Stop And Key Holder

This one reminds me of prototyping class at ID school. Here John Heisz creates a more ergonomic depth stop and chuck key holder for his drill press: