This skinny house in Japan is almost 30-feet-high but not quite seven-feet-wide. Hopefully all of its occupants are short and small, because at its most svelte point, you could almost touch two opposite walls at once. More »
Transforming furniture is the closest thing to a gadget that a chair or table can get. But more than just shifting to serve multiple purposes, there’s a cleverness to how that functionality is achieved. Intricate designs. Complicated moving parts. Fun ideas. More »
I don’t remember exactly when I started obsessing about The Starry Night, but needless to say that this is one painting that I find unforgettable, especially when it comes to the swirling wind patterns in the sky. I guess I’m not the only one because one artist decided to recreate tan intricate version of the image using paper as her medium.
Susan Myers uses quilling, a paper filigree art form that involves countless hours of folding and shaping in order to recreate Van Gogh’s Starry Night. She used a white colored pencil to draw a template. Then she quilled, cut, rolled and glued thousands of colorful card stock pieces to reimagine the famous painting. Her canvas measures 36″ × 24″.
The Starry Night has been recreated countless of times, but this is the first papercraft recreation I’ve ever seen. I like it. She recently sold the piece through her Etsy site.
[via Wave Avenue]
Those who cover the gadget and technology universe in news know that Microsoft is more than ready for a face change – they’re ready for a whole nip and tuck age reduction. With the logo they’ve released today, they’ve made it clear that they’re willing to make their way into the post-PC age – or perhaps the mobile age, if you want to call it that. While many companies flounder with fabulous software and hardware because they don’t want to see their precious graphic design change, Microsoft has hired Pentagram to make it work.
With the new logo, Microsoft takes their lovely equilateral square grid and flattens it out, letting you know that they’re not messing around with frills here in 2012. The logo that came before this one had a faux-3D effect to it with the same flag, extra shadows, and a logotype addition below – and sometimes beside – with italics and a chip taken out of the mark. It was a very well-traveled mess.
Back when it was introduced, of course, it was a masterpiece. With a bit of help from Neatorama you’ll see that the first Micro-Soft logo had them working in the Atari age with lots and lots of lines. Another iteration that existed for just about 12 years had the company keeping with the strange love of shutter-lines in the center O and cutting out the junk in the rest of the now-lovely simple letters.
Then came the italics and the chip – the chip was added by designer Scott Baker who has been reported quite a few times as having added it so it would look like Pac-man. We’ve since evolved way, way past simple silly cuts such as that. Microsoft’s new design will look like a “I could have done that with Photoshop” sort of situation, but it’s no joke.
Machines are getting more and more complex as they’re getting smaller, more portable, and more powerful. We do not see the complexities, we only see the simplicity and the effortless implementation that manufacturers and developers across the board are pushing as their representation to the world. We have as few steps as we’ve ever had now between our wallet and the final product.
Watch the company evolve now perfectly in-sync with their renewed brand power. We’re glad to see this legend in the software business keep up with the times behind the scenes as well as on the surface.
Microsoft’s logo update tells us they’re ready for new era is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
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You think your beach towel is just some colorful barrier between your ass and the sand? Wrong. That water-wicking blanket is actually an intricately designed instrument, fine-tuned to provide you with the best possible poolside experience. And here’s the thing: It’s entirely possible that you’ve been using it wrong all along. More »
Given it’s been so important to our development, it’s no surprise mankind has a love affair with fire. Deep down we’re all arsonists in our own little way: lighting candles, stoking campfires, or curling up near a fireplace. We all love watching things bur—right, guys? right—and that desire can be kept in check with this Nerone cityscape fireplace that’s a better alternative to wanton acts of arson. More »
Logos are usually boring and quite bad, but they’re things we’re forced to look at every single day, so let’s care about them. In particular, let’s care about Microsoft’s—which just got its first makeover since 1987. More »
There’s no shortage of great, well-designed headphones—but if you have a small face and are slight of build, finding a pair that doesn’t give you a terrible headache after a few songs can be difficult. Earbuds are light and easy, but then you’re left with all that ambiant noise. And many other headphones geared toward the female customer look more like they were designed for someone’s kid sister. Alas! More »
This tractor in the shape of a triceratops looks pretty sweet. Now that I’ve seen this one, I want to see a whole fleet of them. Then I want to see them race and fight in the mud.
This army green 309 triceratops tractor will have dinosaur loving geeks drooling as it goes by. It looks like it is fully constructed out of metal and fully functional. The head even moves around in a neat way. It was spotted recently on the streets of Shoreditch, London. There isn’t much info on this awesome ride, but I want one. Check out the video to see the triceratops tractor up close:
Dinosaur themed cars and trucks are pretty awesome. I’d settle for a VW Stegosaurus, though. I’m not hard to please.
[via Obvious Winner]
The Pianocade is the embodiment of chiptune music. It’s a synthesizer that looks and works like an arcade controller, down to the analog joystick and token buttons.
But the Pianocade’s gamer theme isn’t just skin deep. It’s open source, hacker-friendly synthesizer board is based on the NES and Game Boy sound hardware, so it makes the monophonic pings and blips out of the box. Here’s a demo of the Pianocade’s features:
And here’s the Pianocade being used by Shaun Hatton aka Megashaun to play live:
Portmanteau Devices is selling one- and two-octave variants of the Pianocade; the former costs about $250 (USD) and the latter is about $350. You can also pre-order just the electronics for about $100.
Portmanteau Devices said that they will try to make the Pianocade also work as a USB game controller out of the box, but that’s not their priority right now. They did say that they might release a firmware update later on if they can’t do it by the time the device is released. Perhaps one of you clever hackers will even do the job for them.
[via Engadget]
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