11 Jan 2012

Repair It Yourself

9 Jan 2012

Truth Hurts

Sure, having an iPhone is pretty cool, but there are a couple of catches to it. Nico Ordozgoiti's designed these wallpapers to keep that in mind.

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5 Jan 2012

Infrared Hong Kong

Hong Kong-based designer Yiu Yu Hoi turns his fast-paced city into a slow moving dream with the use of infrared photography. He first learned about this technique from photography forums which got him "totally fascinated" with how shockingly different he could make his city scenes appear.

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3 Jan 2012

Top Ten: Music Artists 2011

According to my last.fm stats, these are the my most listened to artists of the last 12 months. Its also a pretty accurate representation of my favourite albums of the past year.

1 Cut Copy - 330 plays
2 Metronomy - 264 plays
3 Tame Impala - 239 plays
4 Daft Punk - 234 plays
5 The Chemical Brothers - 233 plays
7 LCD Soundsystem - 183 plays
7 Caribou - 183 plays
8 Radiohead - 182 plays
9 Arctic Monkeys - 152 plays
10 Chromeo - 142 plays

With the below being my most listened to track of the year:

 

20 Dec 2011

Lego Production Factory in Billund, Denmark » Design You Trust – Design and Beyond!

1239 Lego Production Factory in Billund, Denmark

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.

2117 Lego Production Factory in Billund, Denmark

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

393 Lego Production Factory in Billund, Denmark

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6 Dec 2011

Hydro Power Project

 Hydro Project plots the  the construction of dams in Ethiopia and China. The series by photographer  Rüdiger Nehmzow, portrays the relationships between nature and how human endeavour can control it for its own benefit. I find the scale of everything really mind blowing.

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29 Nov 2011

Sexy, Simple Sony: The TR-1825 Radio

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.

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Sony Design's History page states,

"Released in 1970, when Sony had become the first Japanese company to list shares on the New York Stock Exchange. Sliding the faces on this cubic radio reveals a speaker in front and controls on top, a unique design at the time. One version of its packaging commemorates the World Expo in Osaka, held in March that year, and many expo-goers picked up the radio as a gift"

 

12 Oct 2011

A reason to go to Blackpool?

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

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29 Sep 2011

ready steady bang

Cute little pixel iphone game, reminds a bit in styling and simplicity of canabalt.com.

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Download the game from the App store: itunes.apple.com/​gb/​app/​ready-steady-bang/​id447588618

Or for more information go to facebook.com/​readysteadybang

 

20 Sep 2011

Bare Essentials

A nice joint project from de Groot and Dennis Nalden, reducing the best known characters to simple geometric shapes and colours. The series entitled "Bare Essentials" features 50 illustrations.

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Ben Topliss's Posterous


// Urban Nerd
// Designer at TBWA\Manchester
// T-shirt maker
// DJ as NEONFEEDBACK

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