Flotspotting: Priestmangoode’s Moving Platforms Keep the Motion in Locomotion

Flotspotting-EgorChupryna-Priestmangoode-MovingPlatforms-1.jpg

Egor Chupryna‘s transportation renderings caught my eye a few weeks ago, shortly after he posted them to his portfolio, but it didn’t occur to me to investigate any further, thinking that the images were just sleek eye candy and nothing more. However, with all of this Mag-Lev talk in the past week, I thought to revisit Chupryna’s work, clicking through to the demo video to discover that “Moving Platforms” was a speculative transportation project by none other than London’s Priestmangoode, where Chupryna works as a Visualizer.

The concept, brilliantly brought to life by Chupryna, is quite clever, if still highly speculative for its infrastructural prerequisites (or lack thereof): local transportation systems travel on loops that are partially parallel to commuter or high-speed transit lines, such that the trains can connect, airlock-style, for transfers without stopping (though I imagine they’d have to slow down quite a bit to line up properly). This does away with what Paul Priestman deems the 18th-century baggage of the train station, streamlining transit both within conurbations and between them.

Flotspotting-EgorChupryna-Priestmangoode-MovingPlatforms-3.jpg

(more…)


Flotspotting: Joe MacCarthy’s Book of Dreams

If his frequent updates are any indication, Oakland, California’s Joe MacCarthy has been as busy as ever, cranking out fantastic new work even as he’s finished designing and editing his first book through Blurb.

JoeMacCarthy-Book-00.jpg

Don’t Wake Up… You Are about to Start Dreaming is a comprehensive collection of MacCarthy’s inimitable renderings from the past two years. Over the course of 160 pages, the bona fide “Creative Genius” demonstrates his mastery of jaw-dropping, eye-popping concept art, often including his process work along with the finished products.

JoeMacCarthy-Book-0.jpg

JoeMacCarthy-Book-1.jpg

This book features the first two ground-breaking years of Concept Art from Joe MacCarthy. Included are various works that range from character design, gaming design, footwear design and vehicle concepts. This is a great book to sink your brain into for the budding artist, industrial designer or dreamer. With 242 images and 160 pages you just can’t pass this up. The book features finished renderings as well as numerous process images to show the steps taken to get to the final result.

Joe MacCarthy is currently the Industrial Design Manager of Preschool Toys at Leapfrog in Emeryville, CA. He moonlights as an Concept Artist for the Gaming and Movie Industry.

JoeMacCarthy-Book-3.jpg

JoeMacCarthy-Book-2.jpg

(more…)


Flotspotting: Silas Beebe’s Ideation for Oregon Manifest

Flotspotting-SilasBeebe-OMPortrait.jpgSilas Beebe (left) and Rob Tsunehiro; photo courtesy of Oregon Manifest

At risk of beating the topic to death, at least one of the 33 entries in the 2011 Oregon Manifest has a portfolio on Coroflot, and it just happens to be second place winner Silas Beebe, who collaborated with framebuilder Rob Tsunehiro on a refined city bike with Portland flavor.

The freelance Senior Industrial Designer explains his background and inspiration:

As a fifth generation Oregonian, I want to make this bike a tribute to the importance of local craft and practicality.

I want to use Oregon materials as much as possible: local leather; Douglas Fir, the Oregon state tree, from family timber land; components from local companies like Blaq Bags and Chris King; and, of course, the design and build talent of our team.

Flotspotting-SilasBeebe-CafeRacer.jpg

Café Classic Ideation: This design combines some of the best features of both classic American cruisers and European city bikes, but improves upon them with thoughtful and practical integration of cargo and passenger capacity.

Flotspotting-SilasBeebe-Chart.jpg

From a purely aesthetic perspective, the bike simply has classic lines and details alongside upscale upholstery; the custom reflective paint has a practical purpose as well.

Flotspotting-SilasBeebe-Reflective.jpg

(more…)


Flotspotting: Modo Dresses Otherwise Obsolete Media in Sweet Packaging

ModoPackaging-0.jpg

Modo—short for komodo, as in the dragon, judging by their logo—is responsible for some of the more unorthodox CD, DVD and vinyl packaging out there these days, serving a broad range of clients from their offices in Los Angeles, London, Brighton and China (no exact location given). It seems that some musicians still stubbornly insist on producing a physical document of their work despite the best efforts of iTunes, Spotify, etc.; Modo takes these ideas to the next level with everything from digipaks to flash drives, from traditional print and packaging to bespoke, injection-molded deluxe cases.

ModoPackaging-1.jpg

ModoPackaging-2.jpg

Thankfully, Modo’s designs won’t end up in landfills any time soon: each of their projects is a showpiece, fit to display on a bookshelf or mantle (assuming that the same people who buy box sets also buy books, picture frames, moose heads, etc.).

ModoPackaging-3.jpg

ModoPackaging-4.jpg

(more…)


Flotspotting: George Yoo Is in Good Form

Flotspotting-GeorgeYoo-1.jpg

It’s a quickie today: California-based industrial designer George Yoo has taken a theme and run absolutely wild with it, creating some of the most amazing chiaroscuro grayscale renderings we’ve come across.

Flotspotting-GeorgeYoo-2.jpg

(more…)


Flotspotting: Respect da Spec – Recent Art Direction Highlights

Flotspotting-Ads-Lead.jpg

In this edition of Flotspotting Friday, we have a few art direction standouts from the endlessly gifted creatives on Coroflot.

Flotspotting-Ads-GloriaGonzalez.jpg

Gloria Gonzalez (a.k.a. Glogo Designs) did a great job superimposing a splash of soda onto a flamenco dancer for her entry for a recent Coca-Cola contest.

Flotspotting-Ads-InesSilveiro.jpg

Inês Silveiro’s ad for Edições do Gosto, a National Congress of Professional Cooking event, is simple and eye-catching. (I’m also getting an AT&T vibe, though the imagery is strong enough to transcend the telecommunications allusion.)

Flotspotting-Ads-JennaJosepher-1.jpg

I couldn’t help but smile when I came across Jenna Josepher‘s campaign for “Winosaur – Aged but Not Petrified,” a fictitious wine company. Josepher went so far as to mock-up a subway ad with my favorite piece from the campaign, a riff on Whistler’s mother:

Flotspotting-Ads-JennaJosepher-2.jpg

(more…)


Flotspotting: Jose Rivera’s "Ice Cream" Concept Bike

Industrial design student Jose Rivera still has one more year to go before he completes his degree at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies. Young though he may be, his work under the moniker Carousel—which, according to Rivera, captures the “playful and simple, qualities I try to put in my work”—was a featured at the FORM Design Show this year, and his work merits a feature on Core as well.

Jose Rivera - Ice Cream Bike

Rivera’s “Ice Cream,” a concept bike project from November 2010, recently caught my eye, both for its unconventional construction and eye-catching colorway. In fact, these were main objectives:

The goal of this project was to design an affordable, practical and stylish bicycle for the urban commuter… The bike is made entirely out of repurposed or salvaged parts and materials, making it both affordable and sustainable.

Jose Rivera - Ice Cream Bike

Jose Rivera - Ice Cream Bike

Well, it’s one thing to salvage old bicycles and reuse the parts, but Rivera is proposing a more radical approach to framebuilding. Most bikes—whether they’re made out of steel or aluminum, carbon fiber or bamboo—are made from tubes, arranged in a diamond shape to form the unmistakable silhouette of a bicycle (though we’ve seen a fair share of exceptions). Rivera’s concept forgoes “traditional tubes and welded joints” for a “flat bolted frame”:

The frame is made from sheets of recycled aluminum that have been cut with a water jet. The seat, front tube, and bottom bracket are then secured to the frame using tamper resistant bolts. This construction method requires a fraction of the time and labor to build compared to a traditional bike.

The absence of any welds on the frame means the bike can be broken down by hand with a screwdriver, making shipping, storing and customizing the bike much easier and efficient for the user.

In other words, Rivera’s bicycle concept combines the build-it-yourself philosophy of IKEA with the sustainable tenet of upcycling raw materials.

Jose Rivera - Ice Cream Bike

(more…)


Flotspotting: "Shrine Shoe Rack" Brings Hip Sneaker Boutique Chic to Your Humble Abode

Shrine

San Francisco-based product designer Fernando A. Robert launched his first shoe accessory / storage solution, the “Shrine Sneaker Rack,” two years ago. From its concept to its name and marketing, the “Shrine Sneaker Rack” is a rather shameless fixture for shameless sneakerheads:

Each stainless steel rack displays your obsessions like no other. The intention of the Shrine Sneaker Rack is to highlight the very best details of your perfectly preserved footwear… All Shrine Racks are made in the US and include the mounting hardware for proudly creating your place of worship.

Shrine

Shrine

Robert is back with another, more versatile footwear storage design, the second product he’s designed for his independent venture studioFAR. Like the sneaker rack, the “Shrine Shoe Rack” is also designed to display of one’s most coveted footwear—up to three pairs—on a wall. “It was designed to support all types of footwear like sneakers (both hi-tops and low tops), along with women’s high heels and flats. This shoe rack is ideal for small city apartments, it gets your shoes off the floor and neatly on the wall.”

Shrine

(more…)


Flotspotting: Kelvin Chang’s Concrete Office Supplies Look Cool, Actually Do Many Things

KelvinChang-all01.jpg
Kelvin (Sung-Ching) Chang just completed his MA in Product Design at the Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, and he chose to address the “boredom and pressure” of your average white-collar desk jockey with “REconstruction,” a “concrete interactive accessory for office.”

REconstruction can transform the workers’ emotion to more pleasant with some feedbacks from products. There are four products stapler, calculator, tape dispenser and pen holder which are designed like building in a kit. Therefore, workers could organise whole products of kit what they prefer on the base like people build their own city. Concrete is a perfect material to present architecture and urban feeling. In this project, it is contrast thinking between concrete products and users. They will feel cold and unexciting at first sight with concrete accessories and then after use, they would understand how interesting inside the products with interaction.

KelvinChang-all02.jpg

In other words, the uninviting material belies a different interactive twist behind each item. It’s something like a quasi-brutalist subversion of Michael Roopenian’s “Engrain” keyboard… or, alternately, a playful counterpart to Shmuel Linski’s concrete speakers.

Where Philip de Los Reyes’ “Drafting Tools” are still in the glossy render phase, the office supplies of “REconstruction” practically beg to be used. Details after the jump…

(more…)


Flotspotting: "Eat Play Grow" by Ruth Vatcher

Flotspotting-RuthVatcher-EatPlayGrow-1.jpg

We’ve seen at least a few domestic garden concepts on Coroflot in the past—from Ori Mishkal’s artsy take on a plantable table to Igor Lobanov’s “Sprout Pen”—but Ruth Vatcher‘s concept is somewhat more practical.

Flotspotting-RuthVatcher-EatPlayGrow-2.jpg

I can’t pretend to be an expert on the category, but “Eat Play Grow” table is easily one of the most interesting articles of educational childrens’ furniture I’ve come across.

The growing table is designed to encourage children to grow their own food. The simple yet functional design is aimed at being placed in an interior setting such as a kitchen or a bedroom. The child is encouraged to grow herbs or vegetables as well as prepare the food. Simple storage solutions such as the use of felt allow the child to store tools discretely. The table is designed to be simple and subtle, integrating healthy living into a child’s life from a young age. It is designed to educate children and promote healthy living.

The combination of materials was chosen so that the product remains versatile and timeless, easily becoming part of a child’s daily life. Functions of the table include; a herb sprouting tray, a chopping board for food preparation, a watering pot and felt storage system. The storage system reduces storage space and keeps the material usage to a minimum. It is designed to store tools and acts as an alternative to drawers and trays.

Flotspotting-RuthVatcher-EatPlayGrow-3.jpg

(more…)