Hasta La Ideas

The Black Lives Matter movement has led to a shake-up of some of design’s oldest organisations and clubs. Such change is long overdue in coming, writes Patrick Burgoyne

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My husband is a photography enthusiast, which means I am well aware of the extensive and complicated world of camera accessories. He started out with a purist approach, using only his DSLR’s actual clicks and not editing beyond the basics to get his desired output, but that was before he got a good camera smartphone and the ease of usage added a new dimension to his process. Smartphone camera has become the principal factor in choosing our desired phone, with the functionalities the phone provides being taken for granted over the ever-growing need to capture, document, and share our lives with the world. Whether your passion is to click photos of your food, taking a selfie, documenting your travel, macro photography or even portrait photos, the accessories in this collection are the boost your setup needs to give your photos that professional edge!

The ShiftCam ProGrip comes with a universal gripping mechanism that allows you to clip any smartphone onto it and turn it into a pro-shooter. It features a Bluetooth shutter button that’s perfectly positioned so that you can click images with your index finger, and a grip that’s so inviting, you’re more likely to focus on photography rather than accidentally dropping your phone (it’s a real concern, believe me). The grip comes with a swivel joint that allows you to flip the phone over into portrait mode while you’re holding it in landscape, giving you varying degrees of freedom and the ability to shoot in a way that’s comfortable to you. Now that we’ve covered the basic stuff, let’s get to why the ShiftCam ProGrip stands out from brands like Pictar or Moment when it comes to providing the best DSLR-like experience.

Styled like most light-boxes, Iaroslav Neliubov’s Photon is a 5-sided cube that you can photograph products in. A canvas/backdrop hangs from the panel at the back to the base, giving you a clean background for your products – but what’s really exciting is the Photon’s light-setup. The Photon’s remaining panels are, in fact, entirely made up of LEDs from top to bottom covered with a frosted diffuser-surface. These LEDs, connected to a centrally-controlled source, can be triggered to give you drop-down and side-lighting. Depending on your product, its shape, size, orientation, and the quality of its surfaces, you can trigger different combination of light blocks, creating dynamic or uniformed lighting that mimics the versatility of having an entire light setup with 5-6 lamps. You can save lighting presets or access light presets from Photon’s library, and even animate the light blocks to really make product photography interesting!

Al Morrow & VERT Design’s BIGSOFTI comes with a universal clip that fits all leading smartphone, tablet and laptop brands. It also has a shoe mount with 1/4″-20 thread to fit all cameras, tripods and light stands. And lastly, if your needs revolve around webinars and zoom calls, then this handy light also has a 3M Adhesive Mount for computer monitors and other general surfaces. You won’t need two hands to hold your device because the light only weighs 75 grams which makes it portable without strain. Control your lighting angle by up to 45 degrees with the rotating barrel connector built into all accessory mounts. BIGSOFTI runs for 95 minutes at maximum brightness in one charge – portable AND powerful! Good lighting not only makes for the best selfies (hello quarantine dating) but it also makes you and your content look more professional. Be it for personal needs like a FaceTime/Zoom calls or for your videos YouTube/TikTok/Instagram; if they look better and you go viral, you will be thankful to BIGSOFTI!

Meet the Color Match Card… an innocuous-looking card with a grid of colored swatches and a hollow cutout in the middle. All you do is place the card on an object who’s color you want to scan and point your camera at it. The Pantone Connect app does the rest, automatically analyzing the color within the hollow cutout and giving you matching Pantone color values that you can either document or save within the Pantone Connect app or even send directly to a palette that you can access using Adobe’s suite of creative tools. The tech behind the Color Match card is pretty simple. The colorful swatches (and the tracking markers around it) help the Pantone app calibrate the way it captures colors, allowing you to accurately grab hues in all sorts of lighting conditions with great accuracy.

With the Foldio3, that tongue-tantalizing photograph is just literally a portfolio-case and 10 seconds away. While most traditional photo set-ups comprise a room-full of equipment and hours of setting up, the Foldio3’s innovative design puts all of that into a small flat-packed case that can fit right under your arm. Open it out and assemble it using the magnetic locks and you have yourself a studio-grade light box for your product photography. On the top of the box are 3 LED strips too, negating the need for those massive bulky studio lights. The Foldio3 comes with two backdrops too, black and white, depending on the kind of shot you need. You can even use your own green backdrop for those green-screen applications.

Literally the size of a collapsed selfie stick, the Lumapod by Martin Grabner comes with 3 incredibly small legs and a long pole that’s fortified by three Kevlar wires that keep the tripod upright. This arrangement not only allows the Lumapod to collapse down to an extremely tiny form factor, it also makes setting the tripod up easier and dramatically faster. As a profession or a hobby, photography is always highly time critical. The amount of time it takes for you to set your gear up can often cost you that perfect shot. The Lumapod’s design brings the tripod setup time from minutes to a mere 4 seconds, even verbally simplifying the process to three words. Twist, pull, set. Lumapod’s aluminum frame is both light and sturdy, and the Kevlar cords hold the tripod up using tensile strength.

Kodak’s Smartphone Photography Kit has everything you need to take stunning pictures. They add to your phone’s ability to create great images by giving you depth, lighting, and stability. The kit comes as a collective of three accessories (which can be bought separately too), namely a mini tripod specifically for smartphones, a portrait ring-light that clips onto your phone for great low-light selfies, and a set of 2 clip-on smartphone lenses to give your phone the ability to click ultra-wide and macro images, allowing you to either look at the bigger picture, or to zoom into minute details. With Kodak’s comprehensive smartphone photography kit, you can take that powerful camera in your pocket and click pictures that are incredibly stable, thanks to the tripod, or have a beautiful diffused glow, courtesy the ring light, or just explore the world through literally a different set of lenses! It’s a Kodak Comeback!

Developed around a proprietary technology called Weathershield, the jacket keeps water, dust, and snow out while still remaining breathable on the inside. While the build and the fabric allows photographers to overcome tough weather conditions, the design of the jacket itself only enhances that fact. On the outside, the jacket has four cargo pockets that can fit lenses as large as 200mm, while allowing you to holster your camera while you’re preparing yourself for a shot. The Langly also comes with a tether system that attaches to various accessories, like a memory-card holder with space for as many as 7 different memory cards, a DSLR battery pouch, as well as a separate battery pouch for your flash. Additionally, it even comes with a lens-cap holder (and even a lens wipe cloth), so you’re never rummaging around in your backpack to store/retrieve accessories. The jacket comes with an RFID lining around the pockets too, letting you store your wallet, cards or passport in easy-to-access spots that’s secure even from digital theft. With the Langly, every object is always at arm’s length, and can be accessed without as much as looking away from your viewfinder.

The VIEWPT (pronounced Viewpoint) VR180 NANO is a small, portable dual-lensed camera that was designed to mimic human eyes. With two identical 180° lenses placed a few calculated inches apart, the VIEWPT VR180 NANO captures a left and right channel just like your eyes do. Bring that into a VR headset and you don’t just see images, you see a point of view. The pictures and videos you capture using the VIEWPT NANO feel incredibly realistic because you actually perceive depth in them, something your iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone can’t do just yet. The most they can do is perform edge-detection to create a foreground and background, but the VIEWPT NANO’s images are in real, cinema-grade stereoscopic 3D. The fisheye lenses cover most of human peripheral vision, allowing you, as a consumer or a content creator, to explore a format that is still reserved for professionals rather than consumers. The VIEWPT NANO sits right on your smartphone, letting you film video just the way you would with your phone’s camera.

Defox’s 3D printed Periscope case does a pretty neat thing. It repositions your camera so you can look down at your phone while record what’s happening ahead of you. Essentially, you’re not pointing your phone’s camera at the subject being shot, but rather, are filming or shooting imagery with your phone in a much more natural manner. This interesting deviation allows your phone to become an even more accessible device because now your phone’s literally an action camera! You can mount your phone on handlebars or even place it on your car’s dashboard and the phone’s case uses a 45° mirror to film things that are located at a 90° angle. The case lets you capture your ride handsfree, because you don’t need to hold your phone in position anymore.

This smartphone concept has curves where you wouldn’t expect!

Say hello to the Harman Kardon Harmony, a conceptual smartphone created by James Tsai that says “Hold my beer” to the camera bump. The Harmony, on the other hand, comes with a pretty pronounced protrusion on its rear, owing to the presence of a powerful 360° speaker on the back of the smartphone. Styled to match Harman Kardon’s other speakers, the Harmony smartphone concept sports a 45° grille sitting under a transparent clad that helps guide airflow to maximize sound output while also protecting the smartphone itself, almost like a case would.

Speakers are arguably more complicated than cameras, because a relatively less powerful camera can be made better by using computational photography, but that same advantage can’t be extended to less-powerful speakers… which explains the Harmony’s massive speaker-bump. That being said, I would assume the Harmony would be fitted with one of Harman’s finest audio drivers, resulting in a sound that rivals most smart speakers. There’s a single-lens camera on the back, but honestly, a person who buys the Harmony wouldn’t be buying it for the camera. Dual hole-punch cameras on the front, however, help sweeten the deal.

Clearly the Harmony is just a fan-made conceptual render, in part because Harman Kardon is owned by Samsung (which wouldn’t want to compete with itself), and also in part because it seems the interface running on the phone belongs to iOS. It’s still a fun exercise to look at companies and extend their technology and visual language/branding onto a product that they would arguably never make. Personally, I like the idea of a smartphone with better speakers, being an audiophile myself. Plus a smartphone that’s actually thicker and more grippy? Bring it on!

Designer: James Tsai

There’s intent, and there’s execution, and while most things are created with good intent, their execution may not necessarily reflect it. The Shuzon, a now-canceled product on Kickstarter is a great example of a good idea that wasn’t perhaps taken to its real potential. Created by 26-year old Ariel Zaksenberg, the Shuzon is a shoe-sanitizing doormat that coats the sole of your shoes with disinfectant when you stand on it. Great idea, no? I thought so too, but the more time I spend looking at this design, the more I feel like maybe the doormat’s design isn’t entirely foolproof.

The Shuzon is a two-part doormat that disinfects your feet as you step on it. A soft foam layer helps evenly distribute disinfectant on the base of your shoes, so you don’t accidentally bring any germs into the house/office/hospital/shop when you enter. That’s the Shuzon’s intent, and given the circumstances, it’s a pretty great design brief and a wonderful alternative to those wasteful shoe-covers that people wear. However, where the Shuzon slightly falls apart is in its execution of that intent. Let me explain.

The Shuzon is a regular-sized doormat with two halves… a pink one, and a blue one. One of those halves dispenses the sanitizer, the other one absorbs any excess. Which one’s which? I wish I knew. The foam on the doormat unfortunately only showcases the branding, so it isn’t entirely clear which foam block I’m supposed to step on first; and that’s just one small problem – here’s the bigger one. The Shuzon is a regular doormat split in two, right down the middle. The average person wouldn’t stand on one half of the doormat, they would probably have one foot in each square (nobody occupies a corner of the doormat when they’re at the door). Unless explicitly explained to, most people would probably end up sanitizing just the one foot that happened to be in the right foam block. The third problem is the horizontal orientation of the Shuzon. Nobody side-steps when they walk into a house. People walk forwards, so it would only make sense to design the doormat in a way where the disinfecting block was kept BEFORE the drying block, and not BESIDE it.

Other minor problems in Shuzon’s design would probably be not considering what happens when pets step on it, or when there’s a group of people standing at your door (and nobody is really standing on the doormat), or when someone leaves a parcel on your doormat and gets its base soggy, or even when the liquid disinfectant at its bottom runs out but you never know. The Shuzon is a product with great intention, but to be honest, it’s a few design tweaks away from being perfect. I hope to see a future iteration from the design community that makes this product better, because heaven knows we really need it!

Designer: Ariel Zaksenberg

With more than 200 idiosyncratic images and the stories behind each, Wally Koval’s hardcover Accidentally Wes Anderson book is an authorized homage to the style of the beloved auteur. Koval created the @AccidentallyWesAnderson Instagram handle in 2017 and since more than one million people have followed along. In the book, the same magical style unites photographs from all over the world. It’s available for pre-order now, though the book comes out in October 2020.