Kinetic sign for the Victoria & Albert Museum. The V&A commissioned TROIKA to create a permanent sign for the V&A entrance leading from the South Kensington tube station to the Museum. Troika responded to this brief with ‘Palindrome’, a kinetic sign that recognises the rich collection of the V&A as one of the worlds most fascinating treasure homes collecting over 3,000 years worth of cultural artefacts from the world’s most established cultures.
Drawing inspiration from this fabulous and tremendously diverse mix of artefacts representative of a multitude of periods and design styles, we created an object that embodies this spirit, intricately crafted, eclectic and memorable. At its centre the iconic V&A monogram, originally designed by Alan Fletcher, is made of three independently revolving parts. The logo de-contructs and reconnects itself with each half turn forming a playful palindrome legible from either side while the wheels produce a gentle ticking sound reminiscent of a Victorian Automaton clockwork. It’s delicate ensemble of 85 stand-alone hand-crafted elements, Troika’s Palindrome has been designed with heritage materials, not unfamiliar to those found on show in the museum. From simple fasteners to the large gears driving the letters, the design refers to the museum’s rich collection of intricate brass ornaments, jewellery, textile patterns and beautifully crafted display boxes. The Palindrome was designed and assembled in-house, and finally installed in the arch above the V&A entrance on the 8th of July 2010. Would love to see this in person nice…
100%SAP is a project about the power of natural color. Vegetables are transformed to a natural ink to feed a new printing process. The process enables the viewer to watch the posters print slightly grow. A 3-D ingredient returns as 2-D icon. Love it!
Timothy Goodman was recently asked to make an artistic contribution to the Ace Hotel. And what he came up with is a thoughtful, interactive piece that encourages discovery.
“While brainstorming in the weeks before, it was important to ask some larger questions before I started my sketch: What’s its relevancy? What’s its importance? Can it become engaging or participatory? Having an idea for a mural that’s both relative to the space it exists in and reflective of the culture around it is not an easy task to accomplish. However, I felt it was something I had to account for. With those questions in mind, I hand drew 99 picture frames to create a dense wall of “discovery” about NYC that could be passed to the common tourist staying in the room. Each frame contains a different fact / love / tidbit / thing of interest / or shout-out to a place I dig in the city. At roughly 120 square feet, the art was drawn imprecisely to capture the spontaneity and grit of the city. I used paint markers and opaque black paint to help this technique excel. Consequently, it became a labor of love, an act of obsessiveness that was pleasantly grueling.
Publicis Mojo, Sydney, in collaboration with production company Exit Films, has just released three short films, Ride, Playground, and Peepshow, to kick off a new integrated campaign for Coca Cola’s energy drink, Burn. Each film showcases the talents of real-life characters from the skate, music and snowboarding communities – and there isn’t a ‘drink this to make you awesome’ claim anywhere to be seen.
Playground, directed by Glendyn Ivin, focuses on a young Philadelphia rapper who’s speciality is creating beats by hitting and beating objects around him – desks, street signs, bins, pipes – literally anything he can hit to make a sound… “The crux of our approach was to involve pre-existing communities in the creation and distribution of the key campaign assets –rather than the brand launching it on its own’, explains Micah Walker, executive creative director of Mojo Sydney. “Burn’s most influential audience are in large part creators themselves – performers, writers, documenters, editors and publishers within the communities we want to communicate with – so it was critical our films were the kinds of things they could appreciate. They had to be fresh.” Nice way to put it.. Coke as always trying to get their hands into everything culture, art , film etc etc etc….
San Francisco-based band Boy In Static have just released a new music video for their song “Toy Baby Grand.” The video was created using Apple’s TextEdit with nothing but freely available animated GIFs and some brightly colored type.
Seems like Umbro is becoming the Uniqlo of football shoes. Umbro’s fastest boot and coming in at 238grams, it’s also their lightest ever. Aimed at the younger end of the market it comes in both a white/orange and a black/lime colourway. A shared ambition with Umbro to produce a global execution that shied away from the typical OTT CGI stuff you see knocking around. So we went the other way and said ’speed’ with cardboard, fishing wire, double-sided sticky tape and glue. The pop art inspiration behind this was partly to do with the fast-consumerism, instant everything-ness of modern youth and partly to do with the ‘pop’ colours of the boot itself. Illustration by Chris Gray and Rob Bailey of Toy and photography by Tom Van Schelven. (from Love)
Probably have done the photographs an injustice by placing two images on top of each other here. Loving the series of shots taken by Laurent Nivalle for the Le Mans Classic 2010.
Sam Songailo’s complex and dynamic paintings are built from blocks of vivid colour woven into vibrant arrangements, the mass of interconnected shapes producing works that are pulsing and electric. The crowd of elements surge and stream along the surface of the canvas, tracing out paths that might depict flows of traffic through an urban building block or the colour-coded criss-crossings of an underground transport system. Songailo notes that the elements he employs – hard-edged abstraction, the use of high-contrast, often fluorescent colours – are part of a visual vocabulary we associate with futuristic stylings. They elicit thoughts of modern technologies and science fiction, looking like schemata of electric currents through a motherboard or synapses of the brain. This futuristic world is laden with associations of its own, and is one that Songailo finds “simultaneously appealing and unsettling”. He sees his representations “both as cold, confusing, hopeless visions of the future and also as places of beauty, an exotic new world to look into and imagine the possibilities”.
Having studied Visual Communication at the University of South Australia and worked as a freelance graphic designer and art magazine editor, Songailo’s background is in design. As such, much of his aesthetic is influenced by design, as seen in the works’ composition and graphic qualities. Yet it is at the same time a reaction against it, an attempt to explore not only the message of the surface but the deeper truths for which that superficial expression stands. Here, the interaction of the overlaid elements and the complexity of the resulting structures represents Songailo’s world view. Believing that “experience is a complex phenomenon”, the very processes of building up the interrelated pieces echo and illustrate Songailo’s belief as to the world’s inherent complexity and interconnectedness.
Top Shelf is a newly-established bookbindery that specialises in creating products uniting traditional bookbinding methods with modern flair. The client requested a bespoke identity that communicated the same care and attention to detail demonstrated by their products. Designed by another aussie Ben Jennings.
Yves Behar is at it again. The collaboration between GE Ecomagination and fuseproject has led to the GE WattStation, an electric vehicle charging station that is designed for public and private spaces. Fuseproject’s vision for the WattStation is an electric-car-charger design that is as durable as street furniture, as visible as a light beacon, and as beautiful as street greenery. The WattStation design needed to break all paradigms of the typical large scale, angular and brash “gas pump”. To achieve our goal, a new soft and distinctive friendly icon is expressed through a cylindrical body that flares toward the top and becomes the circular interface. The UI screen faces the user at a “service angle” for optimized ergonomic comfort, and its surround lens houses a useful and informational graphic interface. The LED light ring indicates to the driver whether the WattStation is available (white), fully charged (green), charging (red), or out of order (yellow).
The WattStation comes imbedded with GE’s Smart Grid technology which enables the station to charge a vehicle in 4-8 hours compared to the typical 12-18. By communicating wirelessly with digital platforms and mobile devices, users will be able to remotely locate, operate and monitor the unit. The WattStation is also the very first charging station with a self-retractable charging cable, keeping streets tidy while protecting the cable from weather elements. All of these innovations are jammed tight into a compact metal shell, which is solidly constructed to withstand any harsh weather and usage conditions. It even has a built-in heater to defrost the snow! The WattStation will be planted all over the US, as well as Europe and Asia. It will promote the deployment of renewable energy for electric vehicles worldwide.
Gorgeous interior, Smart, simple, and sustainable is the design mandate of Atlanta-based Square Feet Studio, which recently designed the interiors for Abattoir restaurant in the city’s westside neighborhood, most notable for its contemporary galleries and warehouses. Housed in an old meat-packing plant, Abattoir is a modern-day chop house based on “whole animal cuisine”. love it (post Remodelista)
First solo museum exhibition of my fav of Brooklyn-based artist and designer Brian Donnelly, a.k.a. KAWS. I’m still dying to get one of his 4ft tall companions.
How handy would this apron be in the kitchen? Numeric conversions, cooking times for vegetables, roasting times for birds, freezing instructions, defrosting times, a cooking glossary and more are all printed on the front, making useful information available right at your fingertips. By John Caswell.
This is a great short on motorcycle purist Shinya Kimura who, after 25 years in the motorcycle world, moved to Azusa California to launch Chabott Engineering. This vignette directed by Henrik Hansen, is a poetic look into the man and his oneness with machine and speed.
Gerd Arntz designed around 4000 signs, which symbolized key data from industry, demographics, politics and economy, for the visual language Isotype. The International System Of TYpographic Picture Education was developed by the Viennese social scientist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945) as a method for visual statistics. Gerd Arntz was the designer tasked with making Isotype’s pictograms and visual signs. Eventually, Arntz designed around 4000 such signs, which symbolized keydata from industry, demographics, politics and economy. Otto Neurath saw that the proletariat, which until then had been virtually illiterate, were emancipating, stimulated by socialism. For their advancement, they needed knowledge of the world around them. This knowledge should not be shrined in opaque scientific language, but directly illustrated in straightforward images and a clear structure, also for people who could not, or hardly, read. Another outspoken goal of this method of visual statistics was to overcome barriers of language and culture, and to be universally understood. The pictograms designed by Arntz were systematically employed, in combination with stylized maps and diagrams. Neurath and Arntz made extensive collections of visual statistics in this manner, and their system became a world-wide emulated example of what we now term: infographics. Beautiful
A hybrid novel can be seen as a hybrid image-text novel where written text & graphic devices such as illustration, photography, information graphics or typographic treatments may interject in order to hold a readers’ interest, adding interactiveness to the book and also giving the printed page a multidimensional visual surface. It is a kind of book that requires the readers’ actions and also to be handled and experienced. This remediation of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde tries, by adding playful graphic devices to the original novel, to engage readers in a more dynamic narrative experience and help them at the same time to understand the story more easily. Just plain beautiful!…
A folding bike that actually does not look geeky.IF-Mode is a rolling, folding work of art and a bike collector’s dream machine. The clean and striking IF Mode is aimed at commuters of the mobile generation who, until now, may have not considered cycling or folding bikes to be an option. IF Mode avoids oily chains, complex tubes with hidden dirt traps, and the clutter of traditional bike features. Meant for city commuters rather than bicycle warriors, it looks at home folded up on a subway or in an office, like other well designed accessories in your life. It also performs on the street like any lightweight, well-balanced full size bike. Nice explanation of the concept from the designer Mark Sanders ” Most people prefer large wheeled bikes, in part due to ease of pedaling. So when I designed the IF-Mode, I thought about combining the benefits of small folders with full size bicycles, keeping in mind the innovation and value people expect from their personal tools. The IF Mode combines large wheels, ease of near instant folding, compactness, and clean design. Like luggage, it rolls anywhere. Its monoblade wheel mountings, enclosed transmission and uncluttered aesthetic offer a radical new image of what a bicycle can be”.
Nothing new and different but still nice to see “automobiles” being suspended here and there. “Cosmic Thing”, Ortega disassembles a 1983 Volkswagen Beetle car and then reassembles it, piece by piece, but this time suspended from wire in mid-air. As a symbol of Westernization to Mexico, the native country of Ortega, the installation hoped to show the mass produced vehicle in a new light. Revealing how all these small objects come together to form the classic VW Bug, Ortega makes us appreciate small details while reminding us how objects can rust and waste away.
Four adjustable legs and a tabletop: perludi’s versatile new CASPAR table that grows with your kids.Pursuing its philosophy of ergonomic, versatile and environment-friendly children’s furniture, perludi has again produced a winner: Colourful legs that are simply placed into the four holes in the hand-crafted solid-wood tabletop and secured at the desired height with o-rings made from natural rubber. To adjust the top’s height and inclination, or to balance out an uneven floor, simply slide the infinitely adjustable legs up or down individually within their holes. To transport the table, the legs can be pulled out and placed in the generously sized storage shelf under the tabletop. Light-weight, simple in design and environment-friendly, CASPAR is made in Austria from locally grown spruce wood, with an eye on renewable resources and short transport routes for a low carbon footprint. Love the simplicity and the great time based functionality.
A floating display that reinterprets weather information via hovering patterns and flowing movements. The user is invited to create patterns and sequences using either an iPhone interface or a sequencing program. Made with: 30 airbed pumps, a lightuino, max msp, c74 app. Nice to see how the idea has evolved from the original video to the actual physical concept. A little noisy tho. A project by Richard Harvey
Tool of North America and Domani Studios teamed up to bring 4 interactive stories to the iPad. By touching, shaking and turning your iPad, you can navigate, unlock and reveal unexpected variations in each of these stories. Shot by 5 different directors, these interactive, live-action, short stories evolve storytelling in ways that haven’t been done before on the iPad.
Jon Contino, Alphastructaesthetitologist. Born and raised in New York, Jon Contino a designer, illustrator, and typographer. Steadily developing a reputation for his hand-lettering, Jon continues to blur the boundaries between traditional and digital design methods. Beautiful stuff love the modern take on monograms.
Could easily be faked but I’m guessing they were doing it for the “art” sakes of doing it. Matt & Tom are back at it again with HP sponsored promo video.
This amazing piece of machinery was the last of the purebred 50cc Suzuki racebikes built in 1967. And it’s a technological as well as aesthetic masterpiece: the engine was tuned to an extraordinary 350hp per liter. The RK67 motor was a two-stroke, water-cooled parallel twin, and the Japanese factory managed to squeeze a remarkable 17.5hp out of it, with a redline of 17,300rpm. To keep the bike in its extremely narrow power band, Suzuki fitted the bike with a 14-speed gearbox. The RK67 also sported an aluminum frame, and tipped the scales at a skinny 58kg (128lbs): in the hands of Suzuki’s three factory riders, top speed was a healthy 176kph (109mph).
The 50cc class was first run in 1962, with Suzuki immediately setting the pace. But strong competition from Honda during the mid 60s forced Suzuki to develop micro-masterpieces like the RK67. In 1967, German rider Hans-Georg Anscheidt won the 50cc World Championship aboard the RK67, and with teammates Yoshimi Katayama and Stuart Graham, helped Suzuki lift the manufacturer’s crown too. Then the FIM announced in 1967 that it planned to limit future 50cc racing engines to a single cylinder and six transmission speeds. So Suzuki stopped the development of its next model, the 3-cylinder RP68, and withdrew from the World Championship at the end of 1967. However, Anscheidt ran the RK67 in the 50cc class in 1968, as a privateer—and once again won the Championship. A fitting swansong to one of the most remarkable racing motorcycles of all time. (from BIKEEXIF) Love the paint scheme.
