Category Archives: DESIGN

Spherikal, an animated experiment by Ion Lucin


This is a small animation a did as an exercise to experiment and explore all the graphical possibilities of representing the idea of the SPHERE, always thinking in searching Gestalt and form. Its all done in 3d, but i was more interested in the graphical interest, flatten the surfaces, and only two colors, why more.The most difficult was to achieve the transitions between the different type of representation of the sphere, the morphing and metamorphosing.

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Union Restaurant by Aurélie Blanchard

Situated in the heart of Kleinbasel, UNION restaurant is a new hotspot of this multicultural neighbourhood where immigrants, expats, students and creative industries coexist. Jérome Beurret and Stefan Grieder, owners of the well-known Rhyschaenzli in Basel, along with their new partner Pascal Salathe, appointed the architect Aurélie Blanchard to design their new restaurant.

The architecture aims to capture the spirit of a traditional American kitchen with fine Eastern influences. At UNION rustic meals such as burgers and ribs are revisited with contemporary touches. The design intends to create a warm dining environment with a vibrant metropolitan bar for both evening and daytime.

The dark green dining room with its oversized oak tables engages with the street whilst the dark envelope creates an intimate environment despite the room’s size. Basel’s traditional painted wooden doors inspired the room’s colour. Copper globes suspended above the tables cast warm islands of light between the diners who sit in clusters around these large communal dining tables. Domestic bliss of home-cooked meals and candle-lit dining atmosphere finally tie the room together.

The bar in contrast is a precious copper niche that opens onto the dark green dining room at the back. Shelves and standing tables emerge from the copper walls; masking the room surfaces with a seamless copper coat. The oversized standing table and new bar are an extension of the wooden floor, finished with a thick copper plate. Rounded corners, solid copper elements and cast glass lamps evoke metropolitan industrial times.

Throughout the space, a dark wooden floor unifies the restaurant and bar. Touches of copper jump into the green room through the folded bar, globe lamps and vintage copper vases.
Next to the bar, the existing courtyard is a lush and fresh space where the green of the plants echoes the Basel green of the restaurant.

Address: UNION restaurant – 95 Klybeckstrasse 4057 Basel
Clients: Jérome Beurret, Stefan Grieder, Pascal Salathe
Architect: Aurélie Blanchard
Graphic design: Ludovic Balland
Completion: March 2012
Area: 200 sqm

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The Space We Live In



A visual feast of outer space.

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Kanye West VOYR: Just Don

Just Don (Kanye West’s manager)

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Sony SmartWatch

I don’t know too much about this gadget but I’m investigating how functional it will be with an iPhone. This is what they had to say –

Sony has announced that its popular SmartWatch has arrived in the US. A huge success internationally, the watch which works in unison with a variety of smartphones allows wearers the ability to stay connected and conduct vital business without having to forage into your pockets for your phone. In a minimal style, the 1.3-inch display features the ability to read social updates, text messages and email, manage calls with a simple touch and swipe, personalize apps downloaded from Google Play, and control music. Additional bands are available in pink, white, mint, grey and blue. SmartWatch from Sony connects to Android smartphones via Bluetooth and will be available at select US retailers for $150 USD.

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Illustrations by Patrick Seymour

Line-art illustrations by Patrick Seymour, an art director based in Montreal, Canada.

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Nike Roshe Run ‘Iguana’

I’m lovin the new Roshe Run sneaker by Nike. Heaps of cool colour ways and a clean design that can be dressed up or down.

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Carhartt X 5boro Tour 2011


Check out the new collab between Carhartt and New York City’s 5boro Skateboards. Some nice pieces and the film and print campaign is really cool.

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Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out

I don’t fully agree with this article, but it’s a good read.

New York Magazine Article –

Facebook, a company with a potential market cap worth five or six moon landings, is spending one of its many billions of dollars to buy Instagram, a tiny company dedicated to helping Thai beauty queens share photos of their fingernails. Many people have critical opinions on this subject, ranging from “this will ruin Instagram” to “$1 billion is too much.” And for many Instagram users it’s discomfiting to see a giant company they distrust purchase a tiny company they adore — like if Coldplay acquired Dirty Projectors, or a Gang of Four reunion was sponsored by Foxconn.

So what’s going on here?

First, to understand this deal it’s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work.

Now consider Instagram. If Facebook is a sprawling, intertextual garden of forking pokes, Instagram is no more complex than a chapbook of poetry: It lets you share pictures with your friends and keep track of strangers who post interesting pictures. It barely has a website; all the action happens on mobile devices. Thirty million people use it to pass time in the bathroom. You can add some fairly silly filters to the photos to make the pictures look like they were taken in the seventies, but that’s more of a novelty than a requirement. So that’s Instagram. It’s not a site, or an app. What it is, really, is a product.

It used to be that web people “published websites” — like the site you’re reading now. But today people who work on the web “manage products.” I’m not sure when that changed, but clearly a memo went around. At one time, in the nineties, everyone was a “webmaster,” then for a while they were “site editors” or “site managers” and now they’re “product managers.” A website — even one as simple as Twitter — is no longer a singular thing; it’s a multitude of things from all over the place.

See what happened? On the web, “product” has gone meta. Companies once made sleds or dreamcatchers or software, but that’s all outsourced; an Internet product is very often a thing that lets other people make things — a kind of metaproduct — and you can get 30 million people working for you, for free, if you do a good job of it.

Facebook, for example, is dozens of these products at once — chat, walls, feeds, calendars, and so forth. Thousands of people work on building these products — including plenty of product managers (they’re looking to hire even more). All of those products together are worth some billions. But that’s only if you take them together. And if you take them separately, there’s an awful lot of them — even if you don’t include all the Mafia Wars plugins and Scrabble ripoffs. From a certain angle, Facebook runs the risk of becoming like Apple before Steve Jobs returned — too many products, each with teams sworn to defend them.

Then along comes Instagram. Instagram has as many employees as you can count on your fingers (if you have polydactyly) and does a sum total of onething. It’s beloved and hip, two things Facebook is not, and plus the company is pure nerd candy. It uses open-source software named after a jazz musician (Django!); uses the language Python, which is as beloved as PHP is loathed; andposts about its technical exploits over on Tumblr (which, fun fact, recently announced its 20 billionth blog post — on Twitter). Instagram does everything “right,” for a value of right that matters to nerds, and it does it with one product. When it needs to add a million users in a day — as it did with the release of its application for Android — it just brings up a ton of fresh web servers and keeps on trucking. And that’s how stuff goes now, in the cloud. If you need a thousand web servers tomorrow I can get them for you, no problem.

Remember what the iPod was to Apple? That’s how Instagram might look to Facebook: an artfully designed product that does one thing perfectly. Sure, you might say, but Instagram doesn’t have any revenue. Have you ever run an ad on Facebook? The ad manager is a revelation — as perfectly organized and tidy as the rest of Facebook is sprawling and messy. Spend $50 and try to sell something — there it is, UX at its most organized and majestic, a key to all of the other products at once.

To some users, this looks like a sellout. And that’s because it is. You might think the people crabbing about how Instagram is going to suck now are just being naïve, but I don’t think that’s true. Small product companies put forth that the user is a sacred being, and that community is all-important. That the money to pay for the service comes from venture capital, which seeks a specific return on investment over a period of time, is between the company and the venture capitalists; the relationship between the user and the product is holy, or is supposed to be.

So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes. You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It’s like the monolith in the movie 2001appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said “NO CANDY FOR YOU.”

When people write critically about Facebook, they often say that “you are the product being sold,” but I think that by now we all get that. The digital substance of our friendships belongs to these companies, and they are loath to share it with others. So we build our little content farms within, friending and upthumbing, learning to accept that our new landlords are people who grew up on Power Rangers. This is, after all, the way of our new product-based civilization — in order to participate as a citizen of the social web, you must yourself manufacture content. Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor. Tens of millions of people made a decision to spend their time with the simple, mobile photo-sharing application that was not Facebook because they liked its subtle interface and little filters. And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.

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Exclusive Look at How an iPad is Made at Foxconn

Marketplace Shanghai Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz is only the second reporter ever to gain access to visit the factory floor at Apple’s Chinese producer Foxconn. See highlights from his tour of the assembly line and the Foxconn facilities and connect to his full audio reports on your public radio station and at http://www.marketplace.org. Marketplace is produced and distributed by American Public Media.

Source Credit – American Public Media’s ‘Marketplace’.
Reporter Credit – Rob Schmitz, Shanghai Bureau Chief

Broadcast Rights:
A high-res broadcast ready version of the video is available for television. If you are interested in gaining access, contact tschlosser@americanpublicmedia.org.

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TAT7 iPhone Scuba Case

The TAT7 can be submerged in water up to 100 feet deep. Check out the site for purchasing information. A must have for this summer.

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The Adidas adiPure Adapt

Fresh from the innovative adidas adiPure line, the German athletic apparel purveyor and shoemaker presents the super lightweight Adapt model. Made to harness the body’s natural mechanics, this technologically-advanced design offers minimal cushioning between the wearer and the ground, forcing your legs and feet to experience the subtle changes in impact. This in turn will influence the wearer to run on his or her mid or fore-foot, providing a more natural run. A simple yet ingenious vision, the adiPure Adapt is further constructed from the finest materials available, producing a form-fitting mold that weighs in at 4.5 ounces, making it lighter than even Nike’s recently revealed FlyKnit. The adiPure Adapt is available now in Europe, Japan and China with a release set for June in the United States.

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Caine’s Arcade

A 9 year old boy – who built an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad’s used auto part store – is about to have the best day of his life. This story really moved me.

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Passenger Portraits: Craig Redman


The new Turkish Airlines ad campaign titled “Passenger Portraits” is a series of works created by New York-based artist Craig Redman. He has created a total of 12 portraits: five Manchester United players; Rooney, Chicharito, Ferdinand, Nani and Giggs; five FC Barcelona players; Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Pique and Puyol; and two world-class athletes; Kobe Bryant and Caroline Wozniacki. The portraits will be shown all over the world in places like Istanbul, Barcelona, Manchester, London, New York, Cape Town, Bangkok, Dubai, Australia, Tokyo and China. Special-edition prints, colored in by the artists themselves, will be auctioned off by the charitable organizations of both fútbol clubs as well.

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A.P.C. + Aesop Post-Poo Drops

This clever little product will mask your unwanted post-”number two” odors with a disinfecting and anti-bacterial citrusy floral aroma. Available at A.P.C. and Aesop retail locations.

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ON and OFF Royksöpp: So Easy

Short film and unofficial music video for Royksöpp – So Easy . It started as an experimental-animation test, and it ended as an hypnotic short.

Direction – Emmanuelle Walker

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Doggie Fountain

The Doggie Fountain is a cool solution for keeping your dogs water supply safe, fresh and readily available.

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Drake featuring Rihanna: Take Care

Yoanne Lemoine-directed single.

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Jason Dill + VANS Syndicate Snakeskin Edition

I wants a pair of these badboys.

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JP Auclair Street Segment (from All.I.Can.)


This is by far one of the best videos I’ve seen!

…An unparalleled cinematic experience: All.I.Can is a stunning exploratory essay that compares the challenges of big mountain skiing to the challenges of global climate change. Shot on 6 continents over 2 years, the world’s best skiers deliver inspirational performances while ground-breaking cinematography expands our vision of the natural world.

Journey through Morocco’s majestic desert peaks, Greenland’s icy fjords, Chile’s volcanic craters, Alaskan spine walls, and more. Join the revolution and experience one of the most spectacular, captivating, and thought-provoking films ever created in the action sports genre.

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