Hasta La Ideas

In case you haven’t heard, two of our favorite brands have teamed up for a special collaboration: Kidrobot for Swatch. The vinyl toy and art purveyors Kidrobot reached out to 8 iconic American artists to create original work for Swatch. Each of the Swatch watches comes with a matching artist Dunny—or for those with a true collector’s sensibility, you can scoop up the special Kidrobot limited edition set featuring all eight watches and corresponding 3-inch Dunnys AND a 20-inch tall Frank Kozik mustachio’d white Dunny (see below)! Each of the 300 Kidrobot limited edition sets come numbered and presented in a special carrying-case.

Artist watches featured for this debut collection include legendary rock poster artist Frank Kozik’s Ski Instructor, Vinyl Will Kill author Jeremyville’s The So Far Away, toy designer and illustrator MAD’s Shout Out, graffiti artist Tilt’s Love Song, 3-eyed Space Kitty artist Tara McPherson’s The Eyes are Watching, graphic artist SSUR’s Tic Tic Boom, illustrator Gary Baseman’s Midnight Magi and graphic apparel artist Joe Ledbetter’s Bengali.

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As a recent battle-scarred victim of the Internet TV vs. Cable quagmire, it came to my immediate attention a serious void in comprehensive hardwares solutions for our increasingly connected TV-watching options. Between all the content options—digital cable, AppleTV, Hulu, Netflix streaming, Roku and the expanse of the Internet—making a decision about how to manage the bulk of remotes, keyboards, mice and peripherals can be a frustrating experience.

Today, Carbon Design Group announced an elegant solution for today’s TV. Toggle is an innovative remote using capacitative touch technologies without the expensive overhead of a touch screen. Points on the remote’s surface are mapped to specific keys and functions with four modes that can be personalized by individual users.

Explains Peter Bristol, Industrial Designer with Carbon:

The top half of Toggle includes a masked grid which reveals different interfaces when shifted into the different positions. Shifts are accomplished via sliding tracks in the four corners of the bottom half. Each mode is only a four millimeter shift from the home position.

The keyboard and touchpad are paired to make it easy to shift back-and-forth between text entry and navigation. The exposed graphics are backlit with side-firing LEDs for use in dim lighting.

The circuit board with the capacitive touch technology built-in is the main structure of the device. The batter is extremely thin, the radio is just a chip on the board, and the back surface is a rubber part so Toggle naturally lends itself to be light and extremely thin.

Check out the full video demo of Toggle, learn design insights on the product development from Peter Bristol and view more pics of the remote after the jump!

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Every time I see a spy movie where a character removes an object hidden inside cut-out book pages, I think “I gotta get a scroll saw and try making one of those.” Artist Kara Witham is way ahead of me: She runs SecretSafeBooks out of Chicago, selling a variety of books with hidden storage through an Etsy account. (Check out our post earlier this week about BookBook, a “bookcover” for your MacBook.)

Witham, a former security guard at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Arts, talks about how she managed to ditch the flashlight and start up her own business in this Etsy feature article:

I was never comfortable with my art, which was figurative and based upon memories of people in my life. Recently it dawned upon me why I’ve always enjoyed drawing in a sketchbook so much. A sketchbook can be closed, which is much less terrifying to me. One night I was aimlessly wandering the corners of the Internet when I ran across some images of hollow books. It just clicked with me. A book. A safe. A secret spot. So I researched methods to do it myself, starting out with an X-Acto blade. Later, Santa brought me a scroll saw. Eventually I started making cutouts in books for flasks, which tickles my funny-bone.

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