Posts tagged design

Little Printer is, well, a little printer that automatically prints out tiny personalized “newspapers” that can be assembled from a wide range of internet sources.  It’s wasteful, clever, anachronistic, endearing, and wholly unnecessary. I very much want one.

It seems like everyone is falling all over themselves today declaring that Nest, a “learning thermostat” is next best thing since sliced bread.

The idea is interesting, and the design is quite attractive. Heck, I kind of want one.  So what’s my beef?

I think it’s more than a little disingenuous to claim that this device will have any significant impact on overall energy consumption in the US.  A thermostat can be had for under $20.00.  Nest costs $250.00. The price virtually guarantees that it will live mostly in the domain of gadget / design enthusiasts.  

If the Nest team was really interested in making a dent in energy consumption, they would be aiming for a much lower price to make sure it gets into as many homes as possible. Instead, they’re putting out a premium product at a premium price in order to make money. There’s nothing wrong with that, but spare me the “we’re going to save the planet” speech.

Created for the 125th anniversary of Coke by Turner Duckworth.

Want.

Excellent typographic work by Brandon Rike.

Ridiculously good chalk lettering from Dana Tanamachi.  It makes me want to chalkboard paint the hell out of my new home office to practice my chalking skillz.

While I’m not part of the demographic (physically anyway), the iPad magazine for children Timbuktu caught my eye for several reasons.  The design is clean, minimal, and engaging with a Paul Rand / Saul Bass kind of feel and the focus is on the content, not the “chrome”.

The other reason it interested me is that I’m about to start on a similar project, and it looks like we came to the same conclusion.  HTML5 is the way to go for these types of publications, not dumping jpegs out of Indesign.

We just received our copy of the Big Book of Packaging, which features an interview of Chris Fasan and I for the Macadamia Natural Oil packaging we designed.  I’ve had my work featured featured in a few books now, but this is the biggest feature by far, and it’s pretty exciting to see it in print.

Instead of slapping a DVD in a case, Rhett Dashwood decided to take a more DIY approach to packaging a showreel.  He found vintage books, stenciled and sprayed the covers, and carved out the interiors to hold a DVD or thumb drive. Filed under awesome ideas.

Mark Pilgrim, creator of the indispensable Dive Into HTML5 is at again, this time collecting various ampersands from open source web fonts, and stripping them down to a single character font.  Great for the next time you need that perfect ampersand.

Some beautiful design and illustration work by Mark Brooks.

In an example of web concepts making their way into the real world, the book “Traumgedanken” from Maria Fischer uses threads running from page to page to create physical hyperlinks between like ideas. Mind = blown.

When I first stumble across the site of Postmammal (AKA Robert Murdock), my first reaction was “I hate this guy’s guts”.  His portfolio is just that good.  Check it out.