 | In celebration of Valentines Day, and in an effort to not be overly sappy, we’ve decided to find five ways to show help show your festive side with pieces that can still be stylish after! A pop of red or pink is a great way to show your appreciation for this holiday of love, and by steering away from lacy hearts and anything too girly and sweet, we’re able to still wear many of these V-pieces even after today!
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SmartPlanet’s got an interview up with Pattie Moore, one of the mothers of Universal Design. Most of us that have gone through ID programs learned that way back in 1979, when product design was a lot less enlightened as a field than it is now, Moore began disguising herself as an elderly woman and traveling the country to learn firsthand about the challenges she’d face as a result of poor design. A resultant Reader’s Digest article and Today Show coverage put her three-year project on the map and added an important element to the industrial design profession, most famously encapsulated in the Smart-Design-designed Good Grips line of products for Oxo.
Today Moore runs MooreDesign Associates, and in addition to doing research and consulting, she lectures at schools all around the world.
Here’s a snippet from the interview:
What makes good functional design?
Design can’t just be about the technology, the material science, the widgets and wow factors. It has to be holistic, it has to be human, it has to speak to us. We know the perfect little black dress when we see it. Everyone’s in search of the perfect mattress and has their special favorite cup. Things become an extension of what we’re able to do.
So design is a combination of technology and know-how and sensitivity and know-why. It’s like pornography–you can’t really define it, but you know it when you see it.
Read the rest here.
London designer Moritz Waldemeyer created the laser effects for pop star Ellie Goulding‘s music video Lights.
The video features Goulding among an array of programmed LED wands and lasers.
It was filmed in ‘bullet time’ with cameras positioned in an arc to capture the performer’s image among 3D graphics.
More about Moritz Waldemeyer on Dezeen »
Here’s a little more information from Waldemeyer:
This dazzling new music video for Ellie Goulding is one of my latest pieces.
A combination of laser drumsticks, dance table and magically programmed LED wands were used on the video shoot for her latest single “Lights”.
Using 50 Olympus EP1 cameras on a time slice rig we were able to capture Ellie within a world of 3D graphical designs.
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| Bono’s Laser Stage Suit by Moritz Waldemeyer | Guitars for OK Go by Moritz Waldemeyer | OK Go stage costumes by Moritz Waldemeyer |
This fireplace is inspired by those natural pheonomena that are a source of enourmous energy: volcanoes. The Magma fireplace will be a source of energ..
Voici le nouveau spot Nike, conçu par Wieden Kennedy Portland autour des exploits de sportifs dans les domaines tels que le basket, le rugby ou la danse. Un hommage aux athlètes avec ces performances de plusieurs univers, dans cette campagne intitulée “Throwdown”.
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San Francisco-based designer Steve Hoefner created this brilliant set of Valentine’s Day cards for the maker in your life. Taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office, they’re a funny twist on this holiday of chocolates and roses. Check the full set after the jump and download them directly from Hoefner’s website here!
We’re just going to press on our March issue which will include a rather nice edition of Monograph featuring the pictograms of Gerd Arntz (proofs shown above)
Arntz’s career as both a collaborator with Otto Neurath on the Isotype project and as a politically-engaged imagemaker in his own right will be explored by the RCA’s David Crowley in a lengthy profile in the issue (coinciding with this excellent book on Arntz). In addition, subscribers will be able to enjoy a selection of Arntz’s beautifully-drawn pictograms in our Monograph booklet.
You can only get Monograph, our 20-page A5 booklet which comes with CR every month, if you are a subscriber. If you haven’t yet subscribed and would like the Arntz Monograph, it’s not too late. You can subscribe here and will receive March (including the Arntz Monograph) as your first issue.
Monograph (current issue shown below) won a Silver at the 2008 Art Directors Club Awards and has also been featured in the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year show.
Now this is a stool that gets the hardware fanatic in us very excitable. Charlie Heyward and Peter Bingham from the Steneby school at the University of Gothenburg collaborated to make this giant nut-and-bolt stool—that we can confirm actually works! Peter kindly gave us a demonstration.
Inside an Oregon clothing plant that’s reinventing “Made in the U.S.A.”
Just because a designer is local—whether in Austin, TX or Florence, Italy—doesn’t necessarily mean the garments were made there—or even in the same country. Thanks to fast fashion, there’s now a better-than-likely chance that even such smaller-batch production was outsourced to Asia. “Of course it’s deceptive, to say that clothes were made in the United States when they were really made in China,” said Britt Howard, founder and co-owner of the Portland Garment Factory. “Like clothes that say they’re made in Italy, when they’re only hand-finished there. Or they’ll sew the buttons on.”
Howard, a mother of two and sometime model, discovered this gap in the American indie production process in 2008 after trying and failing to find a local manufacturer for her line of baby clothing. She opened a tiny storefront to sew for Portland’s growing legion of independent designers (that includes three competitors and two winners of the reality show Project Runway) and two years, more than a few eighty-hour work weeks, and a business partner (Rosemary Robinson) later, PGF is now a booming enterprise. Today, the upstart completes orders for clients as far-flung as New York and Los Angeles in an airy new warehouse space in Portland’s bustling Montavilla neighborhood.
“It’s been like, zero to sixty for us,” Robinson described. “We’re thinking about opening another location, maybe in San Francisco or Austin. But we’d want to keep it personal, to be able to keep that close relationship with the people we work with.”
And being a local manufacturer does enable PGF to have a more involved relationship with their clients. As their motto says, “We got your back.” Unlike overseas manufacturers, they’ll produce lots of as small as twenty units as well as in the thousands. Along with an army of eager interns, the plant also provides design consulting services, and Howard often finds herself serving as a de facto business counselor. “Sometimes I feel like I’m giving a seminar everyday,” Howard said with a laugh. “This is your retail price, and this is your wholesale price.”
For small designers, PGF’s prices are comparable to—and the timeframe infinitely friendlier than—sending garments halfway around the world. That’s in addition to higher-quality craftsmanship, as well as the assurance that it’s sewn with pride by workers who are treated well. Leanne Marshall’s graceful, ballet-inspired collections and Paloma Soledad’s sultry gowns are only two of the many lines that are turning to the Factory—proof that just maybe that “Made in the U.S.A.” label will stand for something once again.
Don Lehman just launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce an ingenious idea — a Stylus Cap that turns a standard pen or marker into a touchscreen stylus. The MORE/REAL Stylus Cap turns a Sharpie, a Bic, or a Pilot Fineliner into a touchscreen stylus that works with any capacitive touch screen. You get all the benefits of an marker that can write on paper with a stylus that gives you superior control to sketch and take notes on touchscreens such as the iPad. Read more about his project after the jump and donate here!
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.
