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From Robur Hand Grip
Robur great accessory by Art Lebedev Studio for you to your fitness room ;-), just throw away your mouse for a minute and exercise that. Robur exerciser is shaped like a Mobius loop that’s famous for having just one surface though it looks like it’s got to have at least two. (more…)
From Materialogical’s Sexy Syllabus
The next time you’re sitting in your portfolio class and your professor’s critiques don’t seem to be making sense, consult his or her syllabus to figure out if you should take them with a grain of salt.
Incorporating slick presentation skills, Matthew Hoey, Instructor of the Materials 2 Course for the department of Product Design at Parsons School of Design, has just raised the bar of expectations for both student and teacher.
Using a combination of simple presentation software and an interactive learning system called Blackboard, Howey has structured the class to be an eco-friendly course on materials. With the goal of being paperless and interactive, students will receive and submit assignments via the electronic drop boxes, while compiling powerful learning content using a variety of Web-based tools.
To that effect, Hoey also designed the accompanying website Materialogical, which will eventually feature more than 100 examples of materials that the students will maintain and build upon during the semester, thus creating a package so tight, we want to fling it across the room like a rubber band.
The site’s planned launch is on 9/16 for the start of the ‘NATURALS’ class.
Image: Matthew Hoey & Savannah Enright
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From Rome Snowboards is seeking a Product Designer in Vermont
Product
Designer
Rome Snowboard Design Syndicate
Waterbury, Vermont
As part of the Product Design Team, you will be responsible for applying your strong design skills and innovative thinking to create new products for the snowboard Boot, Binding and Softgoods categories. Partnering with each individual category manager, this position will assist in defining aspects of style, fit and function for said categories. The ideal candidate will possess a high level of self motivation as well as a balance of aesthetic sensitivity and mechanical aptitude.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
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From Life is Sweet
Heat exhaustion might be enough to lure you to this show. The promise of clear Northern landscapes, dark interior views, and pale, un-sweaty people sounds like heaven in the midst of Tokyo’s cruelest month, and heaven it is to plunge into the air conditioning through the faux-marble archway marking the entry to NAC’s special exhibition room.
All of these paintings are on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the gallery has been transformed into something that loosely evokes European halls of culture: deep paint colors on the walls, large flower arrangements, and waltzes playing in the gift shop. Still you won’t find much English here, aside from the plaques identifying each painting, so those interested should borrow the audio guide.
The show is loosely organized around different strains of still-life painting, a primarily Dutch pursuit although painters of other nationalities are represented. The focus is partly on the historical development of the genre, but the curators also emphasize the importance of allegory and visual shorthand: a rose is not just a rose but also a symbol of romance, youth, and beauty.
A skull is also not just a skull: the exhibition’s first grouping includes a series of vanitas paintings, variations on the theme of mortality and life’s fleeting pleasures. While the Japanese celebrate a similar concept by getting drunk under the cherry trees, these dour Northerners get at the idea a bit more literally with skulls, hourglasses and other reminders of the grave. By far the best executed of these works is Peter Gerritsz van Roestraten’s Vanitas Painting, in which shelled walnuts stand in for the human brain while other objects—a metal chalice, a violin—glimmer in the murky background.
The Allegory of Vanity by Antonio de Pereda y Salgado belongs to the same group, but here the subject has more to do with the pride of empires than that of individual man. In Salgado’s large canvas a winged goddess (Europa?) sits surrounded by the spoils of colonization: a globe, a clock, precious pearls and coins. But nearby are the tools on which that tribute depends – a rifle and a suit of armor – and the inevitable skull serves as a reminder that even national pride but shortly precedes a fall.
But wait, you say, we were promised pretty pictures of flowers and fruit! That is, after all, what still life is known for. Don’t despair; the archetypal images are here as well. The loveliest are probably Jan Anton van der Baren’s Vase of Roses and the better-known Jan van den Hecke’s Vase of Flowers. Hecke’s painting includes several of the exotic tulips that inspired such a frenzy of excess in mid-seventeenth-century Holland, when bulbs went for many times more than an average yearly salary. Once again the curators remind us that in art, a flower is never just a flower: the tulip is a symbol of luxury, an indicator of larger economic trends, and a product of international trade that had been only recently introduced from the Ottoman empire.
Similarly, in the many images of game birds and animals after the hunt, the emphasis is on aristocracy and its pursuits rather than on the hunt itself. But it makes little difference to the animals, and the painters take advantage of the opportunity to do some incredible nature studies. A jaw-droppingly gorgeous example is Jan Weenix’s Dead Hare of 1690, in which the textures are so lusciously rendered that the viewer almost doesn’t notice the macabre subject matter: a dead rabbit, strung up to drain, flanked by dead pheasants. In the distance, misty ruins recede into the forest. The peacefulness and beauty of the scene is almost enough to make anyone take up hunting.
The blockbuster artists of the show are reserved for the last section, “Genre Scenes, Portraiture and the Still Life,†which attempts to show how small still life scenes are inserted into larger paintings as “attributes†illustrating the character or social standing of the people depicted.
This is where you can find Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Visit to the Farm, a typically crisp Brueghel scene in shades of brown with pops of bright blue and red. Just steps away is Rubens’ Cimon and Iphigenia, a fantastically fleshy pile of nudes dozing in the heat of an early summer’s day. Jan Steen, that standard of every art-history textbook, is represented here by two paintings: Beware of Luxury, a preachy work showing the dangers of too much to drink and too little to do, and the similarly themed Peasant Wedding (The Deceived Bridegroom).
But the superstar of the show is Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Pink Dress. Like his famous Las Meninas, the subject is a child of the Spanish royal family. Here she is depicted alone except for a vase of flowers including a few marguerites – a play on the little girl’s name, while the roses in the bouquet echo her flushed chubby cheeks and the pattern on her pink dress.
Enjoy this piece and the opportunity to see Velázquez’s brushwork up close. But reserve some time to stroll across the room and peek at the show’s sleeper hit, Tiberio Tinelli’s Portrait of a Lady. A stunningly vertical painting, it shows a woman in dress so elaborate that it could almost constitute a still life in itself. The painter has put an incredible amount of observation and experimentation into getting the overlay of lace, tulle, and ribbon exactly right. Still-life is often thought of as conservative and traditional, but like all art forms, it was once new. This exhibition –full of tour de force paintings –reminds us of the continual inventiveness of the artist.
From New bottle for Elmer’s, and everyone else
Elmer’s Wood Glue, long a staple of wood shops here in the US (including the ones where we spent way too many of our ID school days and nights), is undergoing its first major packaging change in just about forever. The offset spout design, shown here next to the long-standing centered shape, makes laying down a long bead considerably easier and more precise, but posed a significant printing challenge. Enter Eastman Innovation Labs, whose Embrace resin films were able to shrink over the weird asymmetric shape, giving the bottles higher shelf visibility and more space to distinguish between types.
The Innovation Lab website offers an impressive assortment of other tricky materials, in this gallery, clearly aimed at the ID and packaging design set (they’re also partially responsible for the POM Wonderful bottles that the branding community swooned over a couple years back). If you’re planning to re-invent a wheel or glue bottle anytime soon, go take a look.
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Here at CR, we love a good typeface. And, as it goes, we’re big fans of playboy bunnies. So imagine our delight when we spotted a new print available from the Airside Shop that craftily combines both type and bunny-girls (albeit bunny girls with rabbit heads – you know, ancient Egyptian godess style)…
Alphabunnies, designed by Airside’s own Malika Favre is avialable from the Airside Shop as a 100×70cm poster, hand screenprinted on to high-grade 216g Astrolux paper in an edition of 100. Each print is signed and numbered by the designer and comes rolled with certificate of authenticity. Price: £45
Here’s some more detail of the characters. M is particularly provocative…
From New Practices New York 2008
From under the heavy skirts of big-shot builders emerge an illustrious few who might actually surprise you with a cool building or two. New Practices New York 2008, an exhibition designed by WSDIA and Corey Yurkovich, will feature 6 of NYC’s most notable emerging, innovative architecture firms that competed in this year’s NPNY AIANY competition. Opening night is Friday, September 5th with the exhibit running until January 3rd, 2009.
New Practices New York 2008
On View at the Center for Architecture:
September 5, 2008 - January 3, 2009
Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place
New York, NY 10012
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From Magma books?
Anyone ordered books from Magma? i did this at the start of the week and have had no books, no confirmation, no reply to my email asking if they got the order… Seems like pretty shoddy service.
Do You Matter? How great design will make people love your company certainly isn’t afraid to demand attention. All of the details — bright orange cover, too-tall proportions, monster san-serif titles, limited color-palate, grid-adherence so obsessive that even the cover format is the same as the pages within — just scream “I’ve been overdesigned to look simple!” Combined with the existentially accusatory title, it certainly succeeds in demanding audience participation, but it’s a book, not a graphic design experiment, and for it to matter to the audience, it needs to keep the reader’s attention too.
Robert Brunner, an industrial designer for some of Apple’s most iconic products, and Stewart Emery, author of Success Built to Last, pose a deceptively simple question: Do you (as a company) matter (to your customers)? Perhaps a more intuitive phrasing of their titular interrogative might be, “If you were gone tomorrow, would your customers miss you?” That’s nothing new in business circles. It’s just a retelling of product differentiation, a mainstay of marketing and competitive landscape analysis. The difference here is in the subtitle: “How great design will make people love your company,” and Brunner and Emery are here to explain the role design can play in the competitive arena.
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