Four L-shaped pieces, interlocking, to create just about anything you need. Fascinating. Apparently they are as stable as a solid cube, but with just 20 per cent of the volume.
Check out the writeup on CoolHunting or the designer’s website.
These drink coasters are scale-models of the standard Euro-zone wooden palettes and would be excellent for that upscale-but-warehouse-themed bar you dream of opening in the industrial district, near downtown.
Shut up, you know you do.
I’m sorry, but I will try to type through all the drool on my keyboard. FastCo Design has a post up on this gorgeous Scrabble board:
A-1 Scrabble, a concept by Andrew Capener, who graduated from BYU last year, has pieces that eschew Scrabble’s standard News Gothic-y look altogether in favor of a big medley of typefaces. So while you’re spelling out “highjack” (28 points, FTW!), you can really nerd things up by relishing in the visual alchemy of a Helvetica “C” alongside a Courier New “z” — all on a stately walnut board that comes in a beautifully minimal birch box. Or you can buy the game with a single typeface, then snap up extra pieces in different typefaces, through Scrabble’s website, whenever you feel like something new. Capener tells us his motivation was simple: “I set out to… create a scrabble set that a designer would dream of.”
There are many more pictures up at FastCo. Bee-yooo-tee-full.
(via @lindseywiebe)
Say what you will about “grammar Nazis” but I think we can agree that the Germans in World War 2 had a strong brand identity. They are still so completely associated with the stark image of a swastika that it’s impossible to use one today — despite the symbol’s innocent origins.
When you think about it, that’s kind of amazing. The Japanese had a strong “rising sun” logo, too — and I’m not talking about the red circle on the white flag, which is too generic to forever taint, but the “sunburst” style used by the navy that had red rays streaming out from the (off-centre) circle to the edge. That’s a stark, easily identifiable image, and yet it’s used in graphic design everywhere these days (check the background of ads and posters for the distinctive sunburst style).
Swastika? Not so much.
Steven Heller, a designer who is working on a book about the “brand” of 20th century totalitarianism (attention: people looking for my next Christmas gift!) has an interesting post on Design Observer about a legendary “design standards manual” for the Nazis that might explain some of their rigid — and successful — brand identity.
After hearing about people who had never seen it — but who always had a friend who had — Heller managed to find one, as he says, “under his nose.”
First he had to sort out the different bureaucracies — the Nazi party identity was different from the country of Germany’s identity, for example. But then he found it. It’s 550 pages, bound in red cloth, and explains everything about the Nazi “look.” Writes Heller:
The policing of all things Swastika was the responsibility of Dr. Robert Ley, the head of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) and the Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, KdF) …. It is not exactly clear how much Dr. Ley (who hanged himself after the war) was personally involved, although his introduction is in the volume. Perhaps he did not know the difference between typefaces, or even what graphic design was. But it was his office that determined the standards of stationery, enamel signs, flags and pennants, awards and badges, party uniforms and all things involving the swastika and ancillary symbols. So someone in Dr. Ley’s office knew what he was doing, though received no credit.
Published in 1936, The Organizationsbuch der NSDAP (with subsequent annual editions), detailed all aspects of party bureaucracy, typeset tightly in German Blackletter. What interested me, however, were the over 70 full-page, full-color plates (on heavy paper) that provide examples of virtually every Nazi flag, insignia, patterns for official Nazi Party office signs, special armbands for the Reichsparteitag (Reichs Party Day), and Honor Badges. The book “over-explains the obvious” and leaves no Nazi Party organization question, regardless of how minute, unanswered.
If you’re interested, and can read German, a full pdf scan of the book was unearthed in the comments. It exists at archive.org.
Here are another couple of photos from the book, as posted by Heller. His full post is worth reading.
(via Coudal)
Buy … Eat …. Beauty ….
Clever work called “Operators Are Standing By” by Jean Bevier at Dominican University.
Once seen, cannot be unseen. Sort of like the lie in belief: belief.
(via tdw)
Sorry for the title, but I can’t actually teach you how to design in three dimensions. Although I have a basic grasp of design theory, I’m not that good at design practice, and even simple isometric projections are out of my repertoire.
That’s why I was so intrigued to read about this book, “Principles of Three-Dimensional Design” in this post on Grain Edit.
Wucius Wong’s 1976 release, Principles of Three-Dimensional Design, is an educational book aimed at helping designers and artists wrap their heads around the physical space of objects. Concentrating on the use of simple planes and lines in geometric constructions combined with a thorough breakdown of our understanding of three-dimensional objects, Wong demonstrates how seemingly complex configurations can be easy to plan and construct.
In the Grain Edit post, there are some really cool inside page scans of 3D models. Looks cool!
I am both enthralled by this art project, and saddened that it’s come to this — we need an ati-billboard to remind us that the natural environment is worth looking at.
My friend and co-worker Colleen pointed me towards this piece in the Design Observer:
Out in Washington State, Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han, of Seattle’s Lead Pencil Studio, recently put up a piece along the Canadian border that is stop-you-in-your-tracks beautiful. [[there is] a story about it in the new issue of Icon.] To counter the visual clutter along the road into the United States—countless billboards of garish, cheesy advertising fouling a once pristine landscape — they’ve created their own billboard, a negative billboard that frames the ever-changing sky. The structure itself is an evanescent thicket of steel rods, left incomplete along the top edge so your mind can fill in the shape.
Giant billboards are some of the most invasive forms of advertising, especially when you consider that they are strictly visual and mostly stationary. They’re just so huge!
What an interesting way, then, to make an artistic statement: to make the viewer mentally erase one of those billboards by providing, instead, a frame, and filling it with the natural vista behind. It reminds me of the artwork in Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo,’ which showcased photos from which all the advertising had been erased — leaving blank circles, squares and ovals where ads and logos had been.
Instead of just blank gray spaces, though, this one gives the viewer a great gaping hole, something to look through and see what would otherwise be hidden.
I like it.
This staircase looks almost like a bookcase, doesn’t it?
I love it — I love the way it is jarring and dissonant, and yet there’s nothing really all that wrong with it. The stairs would be perfectly functional. You just would have no option about whether you wanted to go right-foot-first or left-foot-first.
Each stair riser is double height, and the left is offset from the right, so they don’t look normal stairs, but when you see both sides together, it’s obvious what they are.
The whole effect is one of pleasant disorientation — “This is … different,” says your brain, “but not necessarily wrong.”
If you take a close look at the top of the staircase in this picture, you’ll see that the top stair on the left is “half-height” (or, “normal height”) and I kind of wonder what it looks like in real life.
But it also looks set back from the top stair on the right, so it appears that the floor wraps around the top, where I assume there’s a railing. I’ll bet it’s pretty functional.
This is exactly the type of do-a-double-take architectural feature that I would love to have in my house — I just wish I had an attic that needed new stairs.
It’s got the right amount of whimsy for a kid’s loft, too, if you had the right kind of kid.
The photo was taken by Foster Huntington, who blogs at A Restless Transplant, and the stairs live in his grandfather’s Wisconsin farm house.
Don’t like the idea of shelving your books atop the mantelpiece of a traditional fireplace? Combine the two concepts in this delightful, Christmassy doohickey!
Yes, it’s a floating shelf with a tiny little gas flame fireplace built in. And if you don’t like the tres-mod swoopiness of this shelf, well, I dunno, build your own, now that you’ve learned the concept.
But if you don’t happen to have your gas-fitters ticket, then I guess you’re stuck buying this one — for the princely sum of $4,755.
I don’t care, I’m worth it.
Well … that’s funny!
That’s the package you’ll get it you order a T-shirt from Ballet Cats. Frankly, I like it.
Warning: Sometimes the Ballet Cats website has music that starts auto-playing. I hate that. But their packaging is still funny.
(from Lost at E Minor)
There is not a single one of these movies that I would not watch. Also, damn if I don’t not love double negatives!
The posters are by Matt Ranzetta, and I think he’s still making them, so check out his site.
My sister and her husband recently welcomed a son into the world. It’s their first child and they’re thrilled. But I’m sure they’re very busy. So I thought I would help out as best I could by helping find them a suitable birth announcement card.
(via copyranter and comunicadores)
This image of Darth Vader’s iconic head (technically, his mask) has been created out of the script of the original “Star Wars” movie, which is pretty cool.
I think this new drawing-in-text fad is kind of cool — it’s the new pointillism — but doomed to be a fad.
Still, the creator of this piece, David Johns, is offering very large poster prints for ya.
(via Geekologie)
Talk about a solution in search of a problem! These glasses, available for $20 for a set of two (currently out of stock) are too clever by half, in my opinion.
Sure, sometimes I want a shot with a beer chaser, but the whole idea is that once you’re done the shot, the beer is right there. Who wants to slam their shot glass down and then calmly pour themselves a pint?
Also, who wants to alternate hard liquor and beer dripping onto the table or bar as they flip a glass upside down over and over again?
Also, have the designers behind this glass never done a drop shot?
(via Gizmodo)
Single-serving coffee seems to be all the rage these days, with Starbucks’ VIA being the prime example.
Iced coffee, too, is a popular product, so it follows that single-serve pouches of iced coffee powder would be a natural. And they are.
But check this out:
It’s a single-serve pouch … and a straw!
Oh! So! Clever!
You can even see if in action, in a video:
Caution: Not yet a real product, just a very cool idea.
(via Yanko)