Four Letter Words consists of four units, each capable of displaying all 26 letters of the alphabet with an arrangement of fluorescent lights. The piece displays an algorithmically generated word sequence, derived from a word association database developed by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. The algorithms take into account word meaning, rhyme, letter sequencing, and association. Made by Rob Seward. Love the engineering of the mechanical/moving parts to it. Rob also kept a blog to detailing the process love it.

MTV Móvel, created by Brazilian motion studio Animatorio. The contrast between the simple illustrative style and the quirky, intricacy of the motion is beautifully done.

An interesting article that I just finished reading, UK design industry insights published by The Design Council. The numbers are very interesting to say the least. Here are some of the key findings.

Numbers of designers have grown nearly a third since 2005, are 60% male, 93% white and most likely to be 38 years old. 232,000 designers employed in the UK. Astonishingly, this is up 29% on 2005, the date of the last survey. The number of freelancers is up nearly a third and now represents 65,900 individuals. 82,500 designers work in consultanices and 83,600 work in-house.
There are now 10,800 UK design consultancies (a decrease of 13% compared to 2005).

The financial figures reveal just how small most design businesses are in the UK. An astonishing 49% of all UK design businesses are described by the Design Council as having ‘a fee income/budget of less than £50k’ per year. A further 24% earn between £50k and £100k – so that’s 73% earning under £100k a year. Only 3% earn £1 million or more.

And design studios are small in terms of numbers too. Almost 90% have 10 or fewer designers. 70% employ between one and four designers. Businesses are also quite young – 37% have been going three years or less. 60% six years or less.

Demographically, designers are 60% male, 93% white and, on average, 38 years old. The survey compares these figures to architects, software professionals and ‘artists & literary professionals’. In gender terms, design doesn’t come off badly – 84% of architects and 86% of software professionals are male. Ethnically it is worse though – 11% or architects are from an ethnic minority, 16% or software professionals and 9% of ‘artists & literary professionals’. However, according to the last UK census (2001) the country is 92% white, so design is only slightly off the average.

In terms of where the work is coming from, just under half of UK design businesses do some work within the public sector, which, on the surface, rather goes against the oft-heard accusation that designers have overwhelmingly become tools of consumerism. However, this figure only tells us that they do some work in that sector, it doesn’t tell us what proportion of their overall work it represents. Only 7% do work for clients outside the UK but 69% claim they are facing increased competition from overseas.

Would love to see the stats on the U.S./Australian design scene. The number that stood out for me was the 55,310 under grad students, that is alot of students who will inturn will all be looking for a job simultaneously when they finish the course. I’d hate to be a kid straight out of school trying to find a job. I question the educational institutes that are providing the course and how selective they really are, do they give them a harsh reality check? about their talents or are they just accepting the enrollment to boost the programs numbers? hmmmm.

Clive Wilkinson Architects the architecture that is the flavour of the month and VCU contracted Spirit of Space to film the newly designed VCU BRANDCENTER. Through student, board member, director, and architect perspectives, the film highlights the catalytic bringing together of the old and new, student and faculty, academia and practice. The film features the success of the adaptive open communication spaces as it focuses on the student’s experience. Gorgeous love the conceptual idea of the space.

F***k the Segway and the GM EN-V, who needs them when I can get one of these.

When we think of GM vehicles today, images of tire-shredding Camaros and Corvettes, mom-mobile Suburbans, sedate Malibus, or ballin’ Escalades. However, in the future, it may not be feasible to drive such vehicles in highly congested urban city centers. As a result, GM has unveiled three new concept vehicles that aim to transport people with minimal waste, and with a small footprint. The three Electric Networked-Vehicle (EN-V) concepts showcase what may be needed by the year 2030 when an estimated 60 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. The vehicles ride on two wheels and leverage technology gleaned from the folks at Segway. Will probably get 7 different colours for the different days of the week. (post from dailytech)

One of my favourite illustrators and designers today Jean Jullien has some updated works, love the video above for Niwouinwouin’s Catastrophe Ep, long live the art of craft, scissors, paper and markers.

This is classic, if you haven’t heard of chatroulette check out the link, if you have check out the video, the guy deserves his own sitcom. Your host, Merton, a freestyling in real-time with random strangers on Chat Roulette. No piano lessons, Merton is self-taught. Not Ben Folds. Seriously. Ben is a much better pianist, and listen to the voice on the “Man in the Dark” part – totally not his voice at all. Besides, wouldn’t Ben cover more of his face to disguise his identity?

Ha! great name for a design studio… ChevyChase work is amazing not to mention their site. Would love to hear their reasoning fior the name of the studio? Bloody beautiful!

One of my fav aussie studios Rinzen agian doing some bloody good work, Identity for Frankly! event in Brisbane Australia.

Enigmatica is a work in progress exploring new concepts in combining light, sound and space to create multi-dimensional synesthetic environments. The work experiments with spatial segmentation, illusory oddities and aural expression, freely shifting from order to disconnection and sweeping through the spectrum of colours from softly subtle to psychedelic. By constantly reforming the dynamics within the space, the installation demonstrates the potential for creating new forms of digital sculpture. Work by aussie mate Kit Webster.

Great use of clean typography, nice balance of white space, great colour palette all supporting of what the actual content is. Beautiful. Designed by Ruiz+Company for Spanish chocolate company Chocolat Factory.

Just been going through my archives, and found this competition that was held a while back. “Design Driven – Maserati’s search for the finest architectural garages”. Overlooking western Los Angeles, Schubert’s winning design has a setting more akin to an art gallery than a garage. Accessed by a separate driveway bridge, the sustainable structure allows the car to remain the focal point of the airy elevated garage. The white walls are insulated with natural cotton fiber, hosting large windows that allow for maximum daylight while the twilight hours offer the perfect setting for the car’s image to reflect on the walls. Electric screens are used on exterior walls for climate control purposes along with 47 solar panels on the roof. Boasting a small kitchen, library and living area, when housing a Maserati the garage becomes the epitome of luxury.

Ginza – Tokyo’s Fifth Avenue, Oxford Street, main drag…whatever label you give it, Ginza is the commercial heart of Tokyo, even of Japan. It is also the byword for luxury and class. In?recent years, flagship stores of global luxury brands have been sprouting all along the Ginza, including Louis Vuitton, Prada, Hermes, Dior, Tiffanys, Apple and Chanel. And now there is Uniqlo – Japan’s most famous casual clothing brand. These buildings function essentially as walk-in advertisements. They conjure desirable images to wrap around their products, aiming to grab attention and admiration (and sales). Walking down the Ginza is like strolling through a glossy magazine – and these buildings are the ads. These brand images are largely communicated through the facades, which increasingly resemble screens. The Chanel store uses a facade composed of hundreds of thousands of LEDs – a high-res building-sized video screen.

Uniqlo is an exception to the high end brands in Ginza – having built its brand providing basic clothing at reasonable prices. So in contrast to the sleekness of the other facades, our approach at Uniqlo Ginza was to go simple and basic. If facades are now screens, our Uniqlo facade is a pixilated “electro-retro” version. It is made up of a matrix of one thousand illuminated cells, whose luminosity can be individually controlled to produce chunky Tetris-style patterns on the facade. A mirror-finish stainless steel grid placed over this screen has the effect of breaking up and blurring off its sharp edges. The four-square Uniqlo logo shines through all, lit up with a bright LED array. Luxury, at low-res.

Uniqlo, usually sells through warehouse outlets – functional shed-like spaces in the suburbs. Ginza demands a warmer, more differentiated treatment. Each floor displays different products for distinct target markets, and are distinguished by colour – from gallery-white on the entry level for sharp promotions and campaigns, through magnolia and cinnamon, to deep chocolate at casual menswear. We also devised a flexible, modular display and rack system, comprising a “pergola” element and stackable “low tables”. These bring a sense of domestic scale and comfort to the Ginza glitz. Just bloody amazing wow! great concept, great execution, great brand, great architects, great vision! by Klein Dytham

Designed back when Zapf Dingbats were the only symbols in font form, the FF Dingbats package was the first to illustrate modern communication, with some 800 images and icons of faxes, ISDN, disks, and keyboards. But the face of the tech world has changed significantly since the early ’90s. Floppy disks and cassette tapes have gone the way of the dinosaurs. So Johannes Erler and Henning Skibbe have revisited FF Dingbats, redesigning it for the new modern age of flat panels and iPhones®. The style and finish of the pictograms is now consistent with today’s stylistic vocabulary. Arrow and number fonts have been reworked and extended. All symbols have been sorted into clear categories and the font “Strong Forms” font includes the most needed symbols with simpler, bolder lines. Telephone vs. Mobile, Tape-Deck vs. Ipod, Letter vs. Email, Typewriter vs. Laptop. Beautiful!

The warm color tones and textures makes this identity for LaStrada pleasingly cozy. Work by Transformer Studio.

Watched food inc. last night the opening title sequence is pretty sweet created by Bigstar Motion Design out of NY. The movie is pretty shocking def worth watching.

logorama is a short film by the french collective H5, which visualizes and explores the way that logos are increasingly embedded in our existence. ‘logorama presents us with an over-marketed world built only from logos and real trademarks that are destroyed by a series of natural disasters (beginning with a hurricane, cyclone, tidal wave…). logotypes are used to describe an alarming universe (similar to the one that we are living in) with all the graphic signs that accompany us everyday in our lives. this over-organized universe is violently transformed by the cataclysm becoming fantastic and absurd. it shows the victory of the creative against the rational, where nature and human fantasy triumph.’

Miles Newlyn created the latest Skittles logo. “Candy brands are some of the most enduring brands in the market. Skittles have the excellent & long standing tag line ‘Taste the Rainbow’, for which the the new ‘tongue’ icon has been designed”, interesting.

The brand story is great, nice rational, nice insights but the actual result of the identity seems a little weak. I highly respect Marque the studio who created the work but it just looks like it’s gone through too many client-hands, a identity that has a great concept to a look that is some what disappointing.

In competitive sport, measurement, timing and results are everything. Of course there are the personalities, the emotion, the thrill, the elation and the disappointment. But when it comes to those medals it’s a matter of who jumps the highest, throws the longest, runs the fastest, scores the most goals, wins the most points, lifts the heaviest weight, swims the strongest. During every event and at the end of every event, there is always time, data and measurement. This was the inspiration for the creative expression of the  Glasgow 2014 brand: a data visualisation of numerical elements integral to competitive sport and Glasgow 2014.

I’m not really a fan of Karim Rashid’s style, but he recently designed the Bobble the concept is amazing. A stylish, patented water bottle that filters water as you drink. Bobble’s ingenious design removes chlorine and organic contaminants from municipal tap water. In doing so, bobble replicates the experience of drinking crisp, clean portable water without incurring the significant costs – environmental and monetary – associated with plastic water bottles. Bobble is reusable. It is intended to be an everyday accessory rather than an impulse decision. single bobble filter equates to at least 300 water bottles, which lessens the environmental impact that single-serve bottled water imposes. Great idea, hope it takes off as much as water bottles did in the late 90′s.

Your local corner (blue collar) butcher transformed into a boutique (stuck up) butcher. In the well-established (Woolhara, Sydney Australia) suburb, tree-lined streets offer a perfect enclave for cafes and boutiques, and for that most unlikely of things, a supremely cool butcher shop. Victor Churchill is the first, and so far the only, butcher shop established by Vic and Anthony Puharich, the father and son duo behind Vic’s Premium Quality Meat, the leading meat supplier to some of the finest restaurants in Australia, China and Singapore. The store boasts so many unique, custom-designed and exclusive features that the only way to absorb it all is a real-life visit. The features provoke, intrigue and amuse the customer – starting with the façade with its double-glazed, refrigerated vitrine for viewing the ever-changing array of hanging meat and poultry, plus selections displayed on custom-made copper and glass shelving. (post from CH)

Technology startup modu partnered with LUNAR to lead the design of the world’s first modular mobile phone. Goal: create unforgettable, symbolic design, for this mini modular. The result: is the modu – a tiny sophisticated mobile phone that can be slipped into a wide variety of modu jackets, stylishly designed phone enclosures that enables users to create a new look or design provide added functionality – and modu mates – modu enabled consumer electronics. Love everything about the concept “moudular” whether it’s a modular book-case (vistoe), modular homes (re4a) love the idea of “flexible arrangement”

“Notput” is an interactive music table with tangible notes, that combines all three senses of hearing, sight and touch to make learning the classical notation of music for children and pupils more easy and interesting. All basic clefs, note values and accidentals exist as single wood elements. Whole, half, quarter and eighth notes differ not only in their form, but also in their weight: Long note values are heavier than short ones.

The table has two modes: A standard mode, where you can place notes on the table in a playful and experimental way and explore the related music outcome. And an excercise mode, where excercises and tutorials sort by topic and difficulty have to be mastered. To activate “Noteput”, simply put the treble clef on the table. As soon as a note is placed on the staves, the respective sound is heard. That serves as a kind of preview and an orientation while putting the notes. If several notes are on the table, you can hit the play button and listen to the notes in relation to each other and considering note values. In addition to piano other instruments like guitar, flute, vibraphon or e-piano can be chosen. It is also possible to play the notes in a loop. That way it is easy to compare how the current note sequence sounds like and how changes of the notation immediatly influence the music.The best way to learn is to mak eit fun and enjoyable right? amazing.

Just in time for the World Cup, Ogilvy & Mather Japan has built a machine capable of taking the most powerful free kicks on record. Check out the video, ball clocked at 208km/hr yeah… Ogilvy created the machine for BP Castrol Japan to tie in with its World Cup sponsorship. The idea was  “To merge engine oil and football together by developing a giant machine kicking the fastest free kick in the world, with a motor engine being its power source”. They called it, snappily, “Engine Driven Free Kick Machine, Castrol Ichi-GO Project” (“Castrol Ichi-GO” means “Castrol One”)

Would have been “nicer” if the robot, rather than just kicking the ball with such ferocity that you can loose a leg, wish they actually used a litlle more physics say bending the ball aka Mr. Beckham.

Amazing what you can do if you get the right talent (and idea) – Anthony Burill for Dutch Bank SNS. Changing a stuffy brand like a bank and actually making it some what hip… hmmmm

Al Fresco is a gelato and bistro establishment. Hand crafted ice cream and detailed attention in your food preparation from pizzas elaborated in a wood oven to paninis and sandwiches with the finest ingredients. High quality products at affordable prices in a kind and family oriented place. The work consisted in interpreting the company business plan, transmitting the message of a committed to deliver excellent quality foods brand maintaining affordable prices. To communicate the established values, a hand-crafted illustration language was developed. This language was based on light laid traces achieving value accentuation on the kindness of the brand. The aesthetic counterpoint of elegant tones, sepia and golden colors was manipulated to help and allow the quality inherent to the foods to stand out.

It was important to allow the brand to have a sufficiently elastic language to expand it to other areas. Even though the restaurant has not been open for a long time, it has become a reference for other gelato establishments around the city. Nice rational for the brand by Anaagrama.

Been a huge fan of Joe Duffy for a long long time, have admired his studio’s work and thinking. A caption from an article that I just read last week which really hit a note.”What is design? It begins with ideas–ideas based in purpose. It requires a plan or a process. It yields innovation, invention or creation. It is successful if it elicits response–attention, desire, interaction or purchase. Design is as much a process as it is an end product. The process should be simple”.

Imagine, Design, Activate. Sums up design perfectly to me.

The work of Vincent Fournier is offering a photographic journey around the most representative utopia of the XX century. From the images of “Tour operator” revealing an ironic and aesthetic vision of our global world with its domesticated landscape to the retro futuristic space odyssey of the “Space Project”, and more recently the upcoming project “Underworld” his photographs are allegories of our childhood dreams where reality is mixing with science fiction.

Penguin UK unveiled a peek at its upcoming plans for iPad formatted e-books…bloody fantastic it might actually make me read the crazy books I was forced to read in high-school (Shakespeare in Latin), ha….