Hasta La Ideas

Walk into any skate shop, and you’ll see a plethora of shoes with every color under the sun. Blue, red, black, gray, green, all mixed together in a variety of high tops, low tops, slip ons, lace-ups and what have you. But walk into any skater’s house, and you’ll see that same variety of shoes, piled up on top of each other. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just mix all the elements together yourself and own fewer shoes?

Urshuz makes that part a little easier for you. Marketed as “modular shoes,” they’re available in a wide variety of styles and colors, marked for different types of events and purposes. Take a basic sole—in any color you want—and then select what types of shoes you need. That could range from flip flops to boots, all interchangeable and workable using the company’s “patented looping system.”

In a world of unlimited choice, the most popular shoe is… a white sneaker with gray sole.

According to their web site, designer Grant Delgatty modeled the shoes after the beloved Legos: “Grant thought it would be cool if people could enjoy playing with options and being creative with their own shoes, just as he has been able to for the past fifteen years in his design work. He wanted the consumer to have that same youthful feeling of inspiration and limitless possibility.”

There’s a sustainability angle to this, too. The soles, which no doubt receive the most wear and tear, are made of thermo-plastic rubber, a recyclable material. Simply return the soles to Urshuz for a discount on your next soles. You’l be able to continue mixing and matching the tops you’ve already purchased. This hopefully means less waste overall, and perhaps more comfortable shoes that are molded to your feet over time.

The biggest surprise? Despite all the customizabiltity, the company’s top three designs end up along the usual spectrum of white, black and brown. But the best part is that if you want more variety, you can just make the shoes yourself.

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At barbecues, I’d swear that guests use the bottle opener once and then throw it in the bushes; at some point at every social function it seems to go missing, resulting in a roundabout game of Operator meets “Dude have you seen the bottle opener?” while your unopened IPA sits there and sweats rather than fulfilling its destiny.

Seattle-based Spanish teacher Jared Fiorillo does jewelry-scale metalworking when he’s not slinging prepositions, and his self-produced Ring Bottle Opener ensures you’ll always have one on hand, or on-finger. (This would’ve made a nice entry for Hahn Academy.)

Fiorillo provides no photos of how it works, but we assume you keep the thing on and just knuckle the cap right off of the bottle. He sells them for sixteen bucks on Etsy and they even come with this fee-ancy little white box:

I propose we drink some beers

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If we had to choose one awards trophy to rule them all, we’d be hard pressed (no pun intended) to go with anything besides our own: after all, the beautifully-machined mold has a teach-a-man-to-fish concept that appeals to both our designerly and egalitarian sensibilities (and while we’re on the topic, we’d like to congratulate those recently-announced winners who will soon be enjoying trophies of their very own). But all else equal, we’re pretty impressed with the medals that UK’s Neil Conley has designed for the recent New Designers Award.

The 2012 awards package is a balance of two underlying themes; the notion of consistency and quality of message, and the celebration of design during London’s Olympic year… Throughout the decades, Olympic design has often been a measure of the successes and universal pertinence of contemporary design. From Munich to Vancouver, a resolute stance on execution and clarity has set the precedent for considered, consistent, and beautiful design responses.

Designed as an alternative resolution to the London 2012 design concept, the New Designers Awards hopes to reinstate these themes during one of the world’s premier graduate design events: A culmination of the best amateur talent across multiple disciplines, contributing to an event of great quality.

Manufactured from oak, cherry and walnut, the body of the trophy reflects the skills and materials associated with the disciplines of traditional furniture making and architecture.

An understated palette of woods has been selected to differentiate between the awards given for ‘New Designer of the Year, Runner-Up and the remaining awards, produced in walnut, cherry and oak respectively.

The main focus of the trophy, the brass medallion is the most literal reference to the Olympic theme.

The minimalist design is in keeping with the understated aesthetic of Conley’s previous work, which emphasizes quality through material. A perennial favorite in the international design show circuit, Conley has won a New Designers award himself. While the object speaks for itself, the designer has provided plenty of documentation and a boatload of beautiful photos capturing the the entire awards package, intended as an “homage to Otl Aicher’s visual communication of the Olympic Games in Munich 1972.”

The Munich design package aimed to create a multi-cultural and multi-lingual communication for the event, through a distinct framework of rules and principles: The printing of all communications was limited to a palette of colours selected from Munich’s Bavarian landscape (with each coming to represent different services and sectors for the games) and the generation of pictograms was so successful that it soon became an industry standard. Aicher was also responsible for imposing a standardised grid structure for all printed media, which was strictly adhered to, with only subtle variations in format to differentiate between the sporting and cultural Olympiads. These principles were applied to everything produced for the games; from posters, certificates and tickets, to promotional pin badges, matchboxes and beer mats.

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This is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time, and your must-see video of the day. Singapore’s Changi Airport commissioned German “new media” firm ART+COM to design an art installation for their Departure Hall for Terminal 1. What they came up with is “Kinetic Rain,” this gorgeous, CNC-controlled moving sculpture made from 608 copper-clad aluminum raindrops suspended from the ceiling:

Aside from the sheer artistic beauty of “Kinetic Rain,” how cool would this thing be as a 3D display? It would admittedly be low-res, and you’d need to work out a way to increase the “pixel density,” but when I saw that airplane I was like man—mechanical hologram!

Here’s how it works:

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More on this contraption below…

I’ve got your standard steel liquor flask, the one you’d draw if given the word FLASK in Pictionary or Draw Something. I sometimes wish it was transparent so I could remember if I’d loaded it up with gin or Scotch.

Georgia-based Etsier Chris D’Adamo can’t make stainless steel clear, but he can (and does) shod flasks in a chalkboard-like material, allowing forgetful boozers to describe their poison with chalk scrawls.

He also offers up a surprisingly affordable series of flasks lined in oak, ash and cork.

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