30 Days of Timelapse, about 80,000 photos combined. 1500GB of Project files. Route was from Red Sea — Gulf of Aden — Indian Ocean — Colombo — Malacca Strait — Singapore — South East China Sea — Hong Kong…(Read…)
Computers store text (or, at least, English text) as eight bits per character. There are plenty of more efficient ways that could work: so why don’t we use them? And how can we fit more text into less space? Let’s talk about Huffman coding, Huffman trees, and Will Smith…(Read…)
Apple officially introduces the iPhone 8 and the most talked about device this year, the iPhone X. It features a new 5.8-inch TrueTone OLED Super Retina display and stainless-steel side bands, 25% louder speakers with deeper bass, a new processor called the A11 Bionic with a six-core CPU, and a three core Apple-designed GPU. Other features include a 12MP camera with f/1.8 and f/2.4 apertures, dual optical image stabilization, Quad-LED flash, an A11 Bionic chip, an improved touch system, wireless QI charging, Bluetooth 5.0, and fast charging. iPhone X will start at $999 and will go on sale for pre-orders on October 27th and releases on November 3rd…(Read…)
An Honest Trailer for ‘The Mummy’ (2017)..(Read…)
“One of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. You may never meet the people, shake their hands, hear their story or tell yours, but somehow in the act……
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I’ve seen flexible wallets made from leather, canvas, denim, plastic, tyvek, and even the odd paper wallet. Today we add wood to that list of materials. Wood isn’t known to be as flexible as leather or regular fabrics, but John Webber’s fascination for the material didn’t stop him from making a bi-fold made out of wood. In order to make it flexible, he fragmented it by laser cutting it into tiny individual pieces that were then fused to a flexible tyvek base. The result is a wallet that is made out of wood, but bends just like any fabric you’ve seen.
Available in a choice of Ebony (Pine), Walnut, Cherry, and Maple, the Arbor Wallets look absolutely unique, giving the impression of being a fabric wallet with a wood-grain print, but actually being made of real wood. To make sure the wood lasts long, it’s hand-coated with a specially formulated oil that gives it water-resistant properties, making sure that accidental spills don’t damage the thin layer of wood while even bestowing upon it a fragrance with distinct wooden notes, making your wallet both look and smell great out of the box!
Designer: John Webber (Carved)
No product has captured the heart of an industrial designer quite like the iPhone. Arguably one of the most talked about products of our lifetimes, the phone completed 10 years today and the anniversary edition (named the iPhone X) may not just set a standard for the future of technology, but pretty much determines the future of industrial design too.
The iPhone X’s physical design is more and more adopting Dieter Rams’ good design principle of Less is More, giving larger emphasis to virtual than physical. The evolution of the phone increasingly shows a stagnation or rather a standardization of its physical design as the Industrial Design team led by Jonathan Ive get left with little to nothing to do on the phone’s design front, while most of the laudable features of the phone, like the Face ID, the Augmented Reality capabilities, Animated Emoji, or the camera’s Portrait Mode involve R&D, software, and hardware engineering teams, rather than classical industrial designers. It becomes challenging to create something that looks groundbreakingly new when the new technological requirements end up influencing most of the design decisions. What we get left with is a phone that waved goodbye to the 3.5mm headphone jack last year and the Home Button this year… and said hello to a glass back (for wireless charging) and a new color variant to stop people from confusing it with the iPhone 6 and 7 (and even 8).
The iPhone X marks a shift in the vision of an Industrial Designer as products in the consumer electronics department (the smartphone department in particular) move towards creating a larger playground for not design details but features and strategies (it also doesn’t help that phones grow increasingly thinner each subsequent year). A phone designer’s skill set and required tool set goes beyond the traditional sketching and alcohol marker renders. It now involves recognizing the needs of a consumer, which now have become so diverse that Industrial Design cannot solve it alone, and that the screen now stands at the heart of (and occupies 90% of the front of) a phone. The screen shifts between apps and interfaces, allowing the phone to be a shopping portal, a social network, a photo and video recording and viewing tool (a marvelous one), etc… pretty much going to show that industrial design needs to intermingle with hardware design, interaction design, and human-centered design, and industrial designers need to do the same. The video above shows Jonathan Ive talking less about the actual design of the phone and more about its features… in a way mirroring the future of Industrial Design, that now requires embracing different disciplines and skill sets.
It’s therefore a senseless endeavor to look at the iPhone X from a purely industrial design point of view. That view is too narrow and limiting. To truly appreciate the iPhone X (and understand the future of industrial design), one needs to widen one’s approach, and appreciate it not as a marvel of design, but of hardware and software technology, R&D, strategy, and a whole bunch of approaches and decisions that marry themselves with design that’s as little design as possible…
So yes, the iPhone looks pretty much the same as last year’s phone, which in turn looks a lot like the phone from 2 years back; and yes, buttons and ports, details that we industrial designers pretty much live for, will continue disappearing, because the future of Industrial Design is much more than just Industrial Design.
Designer: Apple
Having trouble reading? The answer may just be in your keychain, because ThinOPTICS literally managed to squeeze a pair of reading glasses into a keychain that can slide into any pocket!
The keychain features a case for the specs that’s no more larger than the size of both your thumbs put together. The case comes with a slider that when pushed, pops out two lenses interconnected by a bridge made of a titanium alloy called Nitinol, known for its spring-like properties aside from being extremely durable. The moment the specs are pushed out of their case, they open up into their spectacle form and can be placed on the bridge of your nose, where they balance without difficulty. Once done, they can be folded back into the case, stashed away in your pocket till they’re needed next. Convenient, isn’t it? Plus, since they’re paired with your keys, there’s a much lower chance of you forgetting to carry or losing them!
Designer: ThinOPTICS
POSITION SUMMARY The Jr. Industrial Designer will be part of an in-house industrial design team with specific tasks including: product research, ideation/sketching, brainstorming, 3D rendering, presentation preparation, U.I. design, product graphics support As part of the Design team, the Junior Industrial Designer will work closely with Marketing, R & D and Engineering to create innovative new ideas in all aspects of design including new product development from concept to product release.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
