Hasta La Ideas

There’s something intensely pleasing about seeing a box of fetishistically organized woodworking tools arranged perfectly in a custom-made wooden cabinet.

The Toolbox Book: A Craftsman’s Guide to Tool Chests, Cabinets, and Storage Systems by Jim Tolpin is a fantastic resource for any woodworker looking for ideas on how to store and organize woodworking tools. In addition to providing a number of designs for a variety of different tool cabinets and totes, it also provides helpful tips to efficiently store tools.

If you want to lose the next hour of your life looking at some amazing pictures of custom-made tool cabinets online, check out the entries that have already been posted in Fine Woodworking’s Tool Chest Contest. We particularly like the inside of this hanging cabinet, submitted by one of their community members:

In a campaign to promote the Editoras Online bookshop, DDB Brasil created a book that regularly updates its content.

The book, which is available exclusively from Editoras Online, features a series of QR codes. Using a mobile phone, the reader can decode them to reveal messages about love and hate that have been posted on Twitter.

This video explains how it works

While this video shows it in testing

Every time someone who is following the campaign’s Twitter profile tweets a phrase containing either the words ‘love’ or ‘hate’, that phrase is captured and linked to one of the QR codes in the book. Tiago Marcondes, who created the campaign, explains that they would have liked to pull in phrases from all over Twitter but lawyers advised that only those of people following the campaign could be used.

To promote the book, before it was launched DDB posted 4000 stickers bearing 200 different QR codes around São Paulo. Each sticker says “Here’s a moment of love” or “hate” and has a QR code below. As with the book pages, those with QR-enabled phones can decode the graphic to reveal a phrase from Twitter. All the stickers and the QR codes in the book are updated with new phrases every 7 days.

More pictures can be found here

The campaign website is here, with info in English here

In other, more positive news, we pose a question to you, dear reader: when you think of the terms “design” and “architecture” together, who is the first person that comes to mind? If you said “Babs” then you are absolutely correct. Barbara Streisand has announced that she is currently penning a memoir that will spend a lot of time focusing on her love of both topics, particularly in regard to her spending the last half-decade designing a building her dream home in California. First person in line to buy the book? We’re thinking other well-known celebrity architecture buff Brad Pitt. Or maybe even the lesser-known celebrity architecture buff Paris Hilton? Here’s a bit:

The singer, director and actress has reached an agreement with Viking for A Passion for Design, an illustrated book scheduled for fall 2010 that includes photos of the Malibu, Calif., oceanfront compound she worked on for more than five years, and of other residences, back to her early years in New York.

Can we say, because the book won’t be released until next year, that someone please come up with a better title than A Passion for Design? Come on. Even a pun based around one of her songs or movies would be better than that. Mantl anyone? It could all be centered around her designing her mantel and then move around the house from there.

Brighten the Corners‘ second venture into making books illustrated entirely from type has just been published. In it, Stanley returns home after some time away to find that his sister has had a baby, his brother-in-law has a moustache and his dog, Marvin, doesn’t get walked anymore…

Written and illustrated by BTC’s Billy Kiosoglou, with typography from the studio’s Frank Philippin, Stanley & Marvin uses type in the same way as their previous effort, Victor & Susie (that we wrote about here).

“We like to reduce things to their most basic elements when we design and we have kept to this principle with our story,” explains Kiosoglou. “We like every mark to ‘do a job’ on the page rather than just decorate it.”

Stanley & Marvin deals with the inevitability of change – parents grow old, brother-in-laws can sprout silly facial hair – but reassures younger readers of the importance of friendships which last, as shown in Stanley’s love for his typographic pooch Marvin. Aaaah.

The 80-page pocket book (8x13cm) costs £5 plus p&p and is available from the Brighten the Corners shop.

The next speaker in the David H. Liu Lecture Series in Design at Stanford is Alex Wipperfürth.

The talk will be at 8:00pm on Thursday, May 21st, 2009. It will be in (Braun Hall, Building 320) in Room 105 at Stanford University. Hope to see you there!

Wipperfürth is a partner at Dial House in San Francisco. He is the author of Brand Hijack, and upcoming books, The Co-Creation Myth and The Fringe Manifesto. Dial House is part think-tank and part creative hot shop. The client list is diverse: from fringe (Napster, Doc Martens, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Jones Soda, Red Stripe, Altoids) to cutting edge (Current TV, New Yorker Magazine) to blue chip (Diageo, IBM, P&G/Clorox, Toyota, Coca-Cola). Projects range from innovative strategy, innovative research, meaningful creative expressions with DIY production to brand innovation. In earlier work, Wipperfürth had interviewed actual cult members and people in "consumer cults" (like Apple or Harley-Davidson fanatics) and made fascinating insights about their similarities.