pimg src=http://www.productdose.com/images/products/draft_5179.gif alt= //ppThe bulkiness of this laptop work station sort of defeats the purpose of having a laptop. But it’s perfect for using your computer on a long flight. Beats setting up on the seat-tray, which I’ve never managed to keep my beverage in place while trying to work at the same time, especially when the passenger in front of me has leaned their seat all the way back. |via a href=http://www.7gadgets.com/2009/02/13/my-place-cozy/95987Gadgets/a|br //p
It all started with a trusty 1984 Mercedes-Benz 300D. Out of innocent emissions, Further Soap was born, the first bio-diesel soap to come to the market. The result is a light, lingering product that disinfects and softens overworked hands&mdash perfect for cleansing after tinkering with a fuel tank or for daily use. If you didn’t know any better, it could pass for a sweet-smelling indulgence, rather than a bio-degradable feel good wash.
Further is a family-driven product that was born in a Pasadena, California home. Megan and Marshall Dostal dreamed up the concept when after mixing bio-diesel fuel in their garage for their beloved ’84 Mercedes diesel. The bio-fuel process creates an excess of glycerin, a byproduct of many hand soaps. Megan was reportedly alarmed with the excess.
Drawing on Megan’s savvy beauty sense as a former events planner for Vogue Magazine, she suggested they begin to tinker with essential oils such as bergamot, olive and exotic grasses to concoct a sustainable soap. To increase their supply source, Marshall approached Los Angeles restaurants for their cooking refuse and then refurbished the restaurants with delicately recycled grease. The rest is a clean sweep. Further retails for $19.
Perhaps former President George W. Bush is an avid UnBeige reader and when he learned the other day that Jimmy Carter was preparing to redo his presidential library, he was overcome with a “keeping up with the Jones” sort of mentality and decided that his own, still-in-the-planning library needed to be bigger, bigger, bigger! But even if our brain picture of that situation isn’t entirely correct (we figure Laura would read us more than George), such is the reality, as more details have been released about the new building, designed by Robert A.M. Stern on the Southern Methodist University campus. The library has now grown to a massive 207,000 square feet “akin to an average Wal-Mart Super Center” making it some two-thirds as large as it was originally planned for (the request for a much larger policy center is being stated as the primary cause). Here’s a bit about the growth of the plot of land the multi-story building will sit on:
Some faculty and church members have opposed what they say will be a highly partisan think tank on campus. Bush, who has referred to the center as the Freedom Institute, says it will focus on a broad range of topics, including the promotion of democracy abroad and education reforms.
Library organizers first proposed a 40,000-square-foot policy center and a separate 145,000-square-foot building for the library, museum and storage of Bush documents and artifacts. The National Archives will operate those areas, and the Bush Foundation will be housed in and run the policy center.
The policy institute area now figures at about 66,000 square feet, chiefly because of a larger auditorium and more conference and service space.
When people ask me what I do these days, I just tell them straight out: I make porn writes Gordon Comstock. Really it’s not that different to advertising I say, you still spend all day in a brightly lit room with someone you can barely stand, searching for variations on a creative act considered, up-to-now, unpalatable or just plain disgusting…
I get the same embarrassed look I used to, but I am spared the lecture on the ills of capitalism, inevitably delivered by people who work for the BBC, whose jobs are funded by large-scale theft.
And it’s true – not that I make porn, that’s a sociopathic lie – but advertising is porn’s disreputable cousin. They are both almost, but not quite, art. They are both driven by a desire for the curious that means they get weirder and weirder the longer they go on. And they both demanded much less of their practitioners for a much higher return in the 80s.
But those heady days are past. Neither porn studios nor ad agencies can afford to be complacent. Their dominance has been undermined by the diffusion of DIY technology.
In advertising we call this phenomenon ‘user-created content’, in porn they just call it ‘amateur porn’.
This is especially important for two industries so fundamentally concerned with truth. In this age when a professional studio can fake anything, people implicitly trust the amateur. Anyone with a webcam and access to genitals can make a rudimentary porno – and to make an ad, you don’t even need genitals.
Both industries have responded to the threat to their supremacy with assimilation. In porn they call this gonzo, in advertising, we don’t have a word for it yet, so for the sake of devilment, I’m going to call it gonzo.
The gonzo plot is the same every time. Pornstar stalks beach, approaches ‘real’ girl, confuses her with double entendres, girl agrees to anal sex. It’s just as fake as studio porn, but the frame is real – this is the gonzo innovation.
Gonzo advertising works in exactly the same way. ‘Real’ Londoners suddenly break into a dance routine, or are astonished when an arriving train releases a mass of helium balloons. The citizens of Miami are covered in thick white foam, and are, in perhaps a nod to bukkake films, apparently delighted. A huge beach ball is delivered onto a crowd in Dallas who mindlessly bat it around for five tedious, tedious minutes.
This, I’m afraid, is only the beginning.
Gonzo’s rise is assured, not because it’s good, but because its ideal consumer isn’t the consumer, it’s the brand manager. Showing the public loving an advert, within the advert, is the equivalent of the porn queen’s ooh-ya-do-it-to-me schtick. They might convince themselves they can tell when it’s fake, but when even reasonable people regularly fall for a lie, brand managers frankly don’t stand a chance.
It seems like the only way to resist this trend is to deliberately associate it with an unpleasant type of porn.
Gordon Comstock was, until recently, an advertising copywriter. He writes the Not Voodoo blog at notvoodoo.blogspot.com. This article appears in the Crit section of the CR March issue.
PLUS is a furniture element, characterized by a strong ornamental effect and it was designed aiming at developing shapes based on bidimensional elemen..
pimg src=http://www.productdose.com/images/products/draft_5178.gif alt= //ppHow much would the original Mona Lisa fetch on the open market? I’d say $150 million, give or take $20M. Good thing these chairs that double as framed pictures are only prints of the famous painting. The chairs when in frame mode can be hung on the walls to add a touch of the Renaissance to your interior, and when friends come over just flip them open and have a seat. I’m sure this is how Da Vinci envisioned his masterpiece would be appreciated. |via a href=http://monkeyzen.com/2009/02/monas-lisas-sentarse/Monkeyzen/a|br //p
Ah, beach weddings: the sunset, the sea breeze.. and, ugh, the sand. Whatever will you wear on your feet to capture the look of elegance without getting that pesky beach caught up in your heels? To be the ultimate beach bride, consider this alternative to those expensive white satin designer pumps: barefoot sandals. They’re bottomless, so they let you enjoy the soft, pillowy waterfront, but their enchanting charms adorn your feet in a special way that Cinderella’s slippers never could. Barefoot sandals are often also referred to as slave anklets, but there’s a special market for brides to be that are planning to say “I do” in the sand dunes. While some are simple, tailoring your toes in pretty beads, others sparkle to an extravagant extreme — all priced well below the standard full-foot-covering shoes! For all you beautiful beach brides, take a look at the slideshow for some fun and fancy footwear to make your feet as beautiful a sight as your ceremony’s locale!
What Nicole Miller’s Fall 2009 collection lacked in color choices, it more than made up for in creativity with cuts. This new line highlighted the designer’s excellence in creating atypical solutions to the structure of the common mini dress. Unique adaptations to sleeves and necklines were the stand-out elements of the almost-entirely-black collection, and and tribal-like patterns epitomized the art within the bold motif of dark colors and strategically-placed strips of bright color. While sleeve styles appeared in a variety of lengths on the runway, many of them were embellished with sheer and contrasting accents, and others were flared, Jetson-style. Asymmetry was well-played with the use of slits, zippers, stitching, and draping sashes, but not overdone to a space-aged extreme. The the line’s assortment of necklines were a feast to the eye as they introduced high, v, criss-crossed, and more uncommonly shaped necklines and curves in ways that have never looked so becoming. The collaboration of distinctly different fabrics together with these fresh, free forms of frocks epitomize the sleekness so signature to the Nicole Miller name.
Colors: black, plum, bold, red and blue accents Celeb Sightings: Natasha Henstridge
I was privileged to be interviewed by Steven Heller for piece just published on AIGA’s Voice called “To Design or Not to Design: A Conversation with Allan Chochinov. In the interview Steve and I talk about product design, design imperatives, and design education, and it was a great chance to flesh out some ideas around sustainability, responsibility, and pedagogy. Here’s my favorite exchange:
Heller: Students have the right to choose to be “citizen designers.” I believe my students should not be herded into a pen where all they do is follow the golden rule, but I believe I–we–have an obligation to teach them to design in a responsible manner for a realistic goal. I also believe that they must be taught to convince others of the rightness of what they are doing. Of course, this is a double-edged sword, so to speak: They can be too convincing and, like Bernie Madoff, be total scoundrels. How do we keep designers from pulling the wool over the client’s and the public’s eyes? I believe we must be diligent about our critiques and what we accept or not. Too often students are allowed to get away with things that would not be accepted by professionals, under the guise of allowing them to grow. Have you been affected by that conundrum?
Chochinov: This is something I talk a lot about in class, actually–the notion of what is “playing fair” and how these students have been manipulated and bullied by all the forces active in contemporary culture, and how they are now learning the skills to fight back, and how they can be used for good rather than evil. I don’t want to make too big a deal about this, but the art of design is very often the art of persuasion–whether it happens through a product or an ad campaign or a poster or a piece of interactive media. So preparing the practitioners of that art comes with an added responsibility–on top of the “training” and “educating” I alluded to before.
But when you offer that “too often students are allowed to get away with things that would not be accepted by professionals under the guise of allowing them to grow,” I’d like to propose a caution: Professionals are some of the worst offenders, of course, and preparing students for “professional practice” may be preparing them for the compromises, complicity and propagation of the same unsustainable values and outputs that we now understand to be the dark side of design, advertising, marketing and mass production. I think school is exactly the place where they should be getting away with an unbelievable amount–particularly grad school.
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.
