Hasta La Ideas

Ever wonder how they deboss artwork onto the cover of those custom Moleskine notebooks? (Don’t feel bad if you haven’t ever wondered that, it just means you’re a Philistine.) The answer is, a combination of CNC and good ol’ human hands:

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I did a double-take when I learned that acclaimed Korean director Park Chan-wook (Old Boy) shot his latest 30-minute short entirely on an iPhone 4. That this little black rectangle could capture something that will be seen in actual cinemas is surprising to me, though it’s probably no big deal to the younger generation or in tech-hungry Asia.

For comparison’s sake, I looked up some old-school portable movie cameras. Placing the form factors next to an iPhone, if you didn’t know better you would not assume these devices had any functionality in common. Let’s take a quick look at a few:

First off, as a reference point here’s a non-portable studio camera. This is Charlie Chaplin’s Bell & Howell 2709 camera, which Christie’s auctioned off a few years ago:

Bell & Howell also released this Filmo Sportster model, which was vastly smaller, at least for the 1930s; it was reportedly popular among private eyes at the time, as they could hardly lug around the 2709.

Another surveillance model was this 16mm camera manufactured by a company called Keystone:

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Eindhoven grad Nathalie Stampfli’s brilliant Soap Flakes dispensers use bar soap while taking cues from cheese graters and peppermills. As you can see in the photos, the user inserts a bar into the devices–one design is wall-mounted, the other handheld–and it then dispenses soap flakes.

Why make something like this? As Stampfli explains,

Today, most of the soap we use is liquid soap, which contains a lot of water. Block soap instead is more concentrated and therefore has some ecological benefits: You don’t transport unnecessary water around. In place of plastic bottles you can simply use paper for packaging. The solid blocks can easily be piled and allow a greater space efficiency in a truck.

But what about the usage of soap bars? I don’t like the weird slippery feeling when I use them. It gives me goose bumps. And under the shower, it always slides out of your fingers. Hand soap also often gets dirty and accumulates bacteria when more than one person is using it.

via kottke

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Those of you running your own ID firms or working as freelancers know the recession’s been tough; you’ve probably submitted some obscenely low bids just to get work. But what was the impact of the economic crunch on a well-known designer near the top of a corporate structure, commanding an army of designers responsible for global product? CoolHunting’s got an interview up with J Mays, Ford’s Global Design Veep and Chief Creative Officer, and what he had to say was interesting. An excerpt:

J Mays: We’ve gone from being seven brands with 360,000 people in the company to two brands essentially–really one brand with a small domestic brand, Lincoln–with about 170,000 people. We’re not developing three Focuses anymore, we’re developing one.

…You can imagine the amount of money that we save there, it allows you to put more into the car that allows the customer to have surprise and delight.

…I used to describe my job as an inch deep and a mile wide because I’d just go around and sort of sprinkle fairy dust on stuff and never have time to really delve into it. Now that everybody is focusing on Ford globally, it allows me to be an inch wide and a mile deep.

The rest of the interview focuses on more meat-and-potatoes design questions, so be sure to check it out.

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Saw this a few months ago, forgot to blog it, and am now disappointed to see the project may have died in the meanwhile. It’s a clever blend of art, protest, and marketing called the Heatball.

“Heatball” is what German engineer Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law are calling regular ol’ 75- and 100-watt incandescent light bulbs. Why? Because the EU has banned incandescents that exceed 60 watts, giving everyone no recourse but to buy CFLs, which contain mercury. Rotthaeuser’s clever way of getting around the ban was to market the bulbs as “small heating devices” rather than light sources. As Reuters explained it,

Rotthaeuser studied EU legislation and realized that because the inefficient old bulbs produce more warmth than light — he calculated heat makes up 95 percent of their output, and light just 5 percent — they could be sold legally as heaters.

…The two engineers describe the heatballs as “action art” and as “resistance against legislation which is implemented without recourse to democratic and parliamentary processes.”

The unamused government has since cracked down. Rotthaeuser sold out of his entire inventory of the 75- and 100-watt bulbs he was able to import under the Heatball ruse, but now customs is holding his second batch in a sort of light bulb Guantanamo.

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