These days people are catching onto the idea of tiny minimalist homes. In the country of Austria where amazing alps abound, a family commissioned designer Peter Jungmann to create a house that provided ample views of the spectacular mountains yet gave minimal impact to the existing environment. The result was the “UFOgel”, a fusion of UFO and Vogel, which means bird in German. [Read more...]
Design Around the Lines: Barcodes Don’t Have to Be Boring
We love the idea of taking overlooked design elements and making them beautiful. The barcode is a good example of this. It’s on nearly everything we buy – from your latest iPad purchase to a Snickers bar at the market – just a bunch of lines and numbers with very little (if any) thought put in to how it looks. We’ve covered Steve Simpson’s remixes before, and now we’ve run across D-Barcode, a Japanese design firm that’s been steadily revamping this oft overlooked element. [Read more...]
How Creatives Work: The Visual Playground of Charles and Ray Eames
Charles and Ray Eames were more than just designers. One of the visual arts most famous and influential married couples, they redefined much of the world that now surrounds us. They also touched multiple disciplines, leaving their mark on architecture, furniture design, interior design, exhibition design, toy design, fine art, photography, and film. They saw themselves as educators and they were definitely innovators. [Read more...]
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12 Crazy Christmas Decorated Cars
Tis the season to be jolly and decorate like crazy, right? In our neighborhoods during the holiday season, there is always that one neighbor who goes above and beyond the common Christmas decor standards and makes their local utility company very happy. Well, what about cars? [Read more...]
TED Talks: Meeting of the Minds [Infographic]
When it comes to world changing projects, it’s hard to get any better than TED. With a mission to share “Ideas worth spreading” the talks have become a household name and a go-to for inspiration, peaks at cutting edge innovation and thinking… all explained in a maximum of 18 minutes per talk. Notable speakers have been Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Richard Dawkins, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners. [Read more...]
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The Word From The Streets Is… Noramoji
The city is a typeface jungle, and three Japanese friends venture far and wide to find and recreate the most unique specimens. Scouring the streets for noramoji – or “stray text” – Rintaro Shimohama, Naoki Nishimura and Shinya Wakaoka locate quirky letterforms on charming corner stores, retro barber shops, and old-school local haunts. Analyzing the shape, scale, and weight of the letters they encounter, they then create a full digital set of characters that capture the distinct personalities of the found text. [Read more...]
The Wonderfully Designed Offices of Dropbox in San Francisco
In the midst of thousands of companies in the city of San Francisco, some particularly stand out with their workspace design – and Dropbox is definitely one of them. When the cloud-computing provider moved offices from the financial district to the SoMA district last year, they hired interior design firm Geremia Design to create something wonderful for their current 350 employees. In collaboration with architecture firm Boor Bridges, the team went to work. [Read more...]
Drum Pants: the Drum Kit That You Wear
If you think about it, most of us have been playing drums our whole lives. Yeah, we might not have drum kits, but our legs and bodies work pretty well. Just a good song can get us slapping our thighs and feeling the beat. That’s why the new product DrumPants is so incredibly perfect: it’s a wearable sensor kit that attaches to your clothing, letting you play music or even control smartphone apps with the ease of drumming your body like you always do. [Read more...]
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Impossible Yet Awesome Architecture by Victor Enrich
Sometimes the most amazing things to see are the ones that don’t exist in “real life.” Photoshop, in the hands of a gifted digital artist, has brought us some of the most magnificent things like a baby fruit ninja and of course, dogbirds AKA dirds, and now Barcelona-based artist and photographer Victor Enrich brings us buildings that could never be- at least not on Earth. Since just about everything imaginable is likely to exist somewhere in this vast universe, perhaps there is a planet where sideways, or spiral, floating buildings could be the norm and it appears Enrich is tapping into that planet in this surreal series. [Read more...]
Whooz iz it? Vinyl Labels for Your iDevice Chargers
In families and shared households where most members are technologically savvy, there are often many white cords lying around. With iPods, iPads, and iPhones, USB chargers often seem to disappear and most of us have scooped up someone else’s by mistake only to realize it’s not ours when have discovered our original. You can avoid this problem forever with Whooz Iz It identification labels. The vinyl stickers transform your mundane white chargers into “little characters with big personalities.” Each set of Whooz comes with four different designs. In the iPod/iPhone collection, which comes with labels for the charger base, ear buds, and both sides of the USB cord. Choose from the Domesticated set where the characters are your favorite pets (shown here), the Freaks set with monsters, a skeleton, and a vampire, Superheroes, basic caricatures, or solid colors. [Read more...]
