Hasta La Ideas

With all of the bad news going on in Japan today, I thought I’d take a minute to show random clips of some of the remarkable and quirky creativity that Japan has become known for.

This first video was posted to YouTube just one day before the disastrous earthquake. An ad for DoCoMo’s beautiful Touch Wood phone shot by creative firm Drill Inc., it shows a massive xylophone constructed in the forest (from scrap wood), keyed to play Bach’s “Cantata 147” by means of a rolling wooden ball:

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Our sister site Coroflot hosts portfolios from every variety of artist and designer from student to established professional, and we’re always looking to send some love their way.

While Dwayne Vance certainly falls on the latter end of the spectrum—he’s the founder of his own design consultancy, FutureElements—his Kickstarter project, “The Hot Rod Art book: Masters of Chicken Scratch Vol 2,” his second anthology of hot rod designs marks a very respectable attempt at reaching out to the next generation of designers.

The designs are alternately classic, vintage, retro, modern or futuristic and every permutation of these adjectives. In fact, even non-gearheads can appreciate the illustrations from the well-rounded selection of 15 artists: the visuals are pure eye-candy, from stylized concepts to tautly-rendered full-color pen & marker drawings.

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The Davis family in North Carolina has run their own furniture company for four generations, and while that implies an adherence to tradition, their current designs are anything but old-school. Davis Furniture produces (among other things) conference tables with an intelligent and attractive way to accommodate modern power needs, integrating it into the design rather than trying to hide it. A series of slits and sliding panels reveal outlets as needed. See more of their work after the jump.

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One of the most useful items I’ve carried on backpacking trips, whether urban or outdoors, is a bungie cord. You can use it to tie luggage down in teeth-rattling transport, hang dry sink-washed laundry, and quickly secure a day pack to a cafe chair to stymie the urban snatch-and-dash.

The latest Quirky project to catch our eye is similar: Bandits are a bungie cord with a polypropylene hook attached. We found it interesting because it’s not so much an innovation of design—bungie cords with hooks have been around forever—but more an innovation of scale and bundling.

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The American cowboy has a lot of gear to wrangle, from horse harnesses and saddles to pistol holsters and belts. All of that stuff needs to be tough, which is why leather is the material of choice. And stitching up the thicknesses required calls for a particularly bad-ass machine, one that uses mechanical principles different from the standard needle-pierce sewing machine.

Thus we have the Campbell Lockstitch Sewing Machine, a “needle & awl” machine designed in the 1880s and still in use today (albeit with an electric motor added) to process heavy leather:

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