Random Ramblings...

Minifigure heads on the Lego production line in Billund, Denmark, where two million Lego pieces are made every hour. This machine, one of several similar ones in the factory, can paint different expressions on each side of the heads.

The Billund factory’s ‘Cathedral’ warehouse, which is ‘manned’ by eight robots and 15 automatic cranes.

It's quite a feat of industrial design to produce something in 1970 that still looks contemporary 41 years later. Sony handily achieved that feat with their TR-1825 radio, a modernist cube that you slid open to expose the speaker on the front face while simultaneously revealing the controls up top.

[Photos from Flickr user afghtiga's excellent "Design Icons" photoset]

Sony Design's History page states,

For me, the most interesting thing about the Comedy Carpet (one of the UK’s biggest ever pieces of public art which opened yesterday), is the typography and its actual production.

Collaborative artist, Gordon Young was inspired and supported in researching the content for the carpet by Blackpool-based comedy expert, Barry Band and historian and writer Graham Mccann, and on the typography and layout by graphic designer Andy Altmann of why not associates.

image: blackpool council

Production
Five years in the making: one of the most complex pieces of public art ever commissioned at first sight, the comedy carpet looks as if the text is painted, but in fact each of the 160,000+ letters has been individually cut from 30mm solid granite or cobalt blue concrete, arranged into over 300 slabs and then cast into high quality, gleaming white concrete panels. The letters range in size from a  few centimetres to over a metre so viewers can enjoy it both close up and from the  glass viewing platform in the blackpool tower eye.

The scale and incredibly complex nature of the work meant that comedy carpet team even had to set up its own bespoke studio to make the artwork. after several months of research with input from chemists and engineers the comedy carpet team devised new techniques and recipes for production including a special mix to produce the hardest and whitest of concrete and the perfect blue that won’t fade. The process of making each of the 320 slabs involved many complex stages from cutting, sorting, fettling, and laying out each of the letters, to a 3-stage casting process, curing, trimming, grinding and polishing. and that’s before it was transported to Blackpool for the installation on the headland.

gordon young selects letters for a part of the comedy carpet
image: blackpool council