Chances are you’ve looked at the work of Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones at least one time today. The type designers are behind many of the world’s most-loved fonts, like Gotham, made famous by Obama’s 2008 campaign. But according to a nasty legal document making the rounds today, the duo has parted ways
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It hasn’t been a great decade for air travel. And while crappily designed boarding passes aren’t at the very top of my list of axes to grind with the airline industry, they’re more important than you might think. Just take a look at this great version by UK designer Peter Smart for proof.
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Every year, the American Institute of Architects invites its members—some 83,000 licensed architects—to enter the buildings they’ve designed in the past five years for an award. It’s about as solid an award as an architect can receive, and this year’s winners were just made public.
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This gorgeous wooden table, designed by Ruben Beckers, is called kleinergleich5—which means "less than five"—because it weighs 4.5 kilos, just 10 pounds. What the hell?
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What’s classier than a tiki torch, tougher than a luminaria, but less commitment than a big ol’ backyard pit? Well hey, it’s this cool Fire Bucket. And whoa, it can do double duty as a planter. Neat!
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In 2010 a Dutch WWII bunker was sliced in half to create one of the most unique war memorials in the world. This video documents the transformation of bunker 599 into a work of art. The sculpture, designed by Dutch studio RAAAF and Atelier de Lyon, recently won the Architectural Review Award in 2013 for Emerging Architecture.
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As the number of documents you actually need to print diminishes year by year, you’re probably finding that you don’t use office accessories as quickly. Like staples, which are all but useless without stacks of paper to bind. But designer Nilly Mozer has come up with another way to use them up: A lovely clear table that’s really only complete once you’ve adorned it with rows and rows of staples.
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At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), The Verge noted that TV companies had largely given up on 3D displays. A small company called Voxon is not about to give up on the idea, especially because their device actually projects light in three dimensions. They call it the Voxiebox.
In simple terms, Voxiebox displays a 3D image by aiming a laser projector at a screen that’s rapidly moving up and down. The 3D image is a bit like the light trails produced through long exposure photography, except this one’s happening in real-time. Your view of the image or video being displayed changes appropriately as you move around the Voxiebox, as if you were looking at a physical object.
The video below shows Voxon co-founders Will Tamblyn and Gavin Smith talking about how Voxiebox came about. Sadly the sound is worse than the video’s quality, which is a shame because their presentation is informative and inspiring.
As you can see the current prototype of the Voxiebox has a very low resolution, a death sentence in an industry stuck in PPI cold wars and currently under attack from the 4K marketing blitzkrieg. Another challenge facing Voxon is that content has to be made specifically for the display. You can’t just hook it up to your PC, media player or console and expect to see Call of Duty or Game of Thrones in volumetric 3D. Which is why it’s perfectly understandable that Voxon is aiming its first Voxiebox units not to home users but to arcades. On the other hand… arcades? Like, who-goes-to-arcades-anymore-arcades? Good luck.
Still, Voxon believes that their device will carve its own niche. Last year Polygon came up with an interesting story about Joseph White, an eccentric game developer who’s working on a game and game platform called Voxatron. Voxatron’s world is made out of voxels – volumetric pixels – and Polygon said White made his game imagining that Voxiebox would one day exist. Voxiebox, meet Voxatron:
That’s cool and all, but I don’t think that Voxatron or 3D chess (Voxchess?) is Voxiebox’s killer app. Aside from having a more respectable resolution, I think the device would capture the public’s attention and support more effectively if it worked closely with motion sensors. The strength of 3D objects is that they’re tangible – I think Voxon needs to seize that strength.
Take CastAR for example. Industry reputation and connections aside, Technical Illusions is getting the support they need with its augmented reality device because they’re taking cues from the tangible world. The great news here is that display-wise Voxiebox is much better than CastAR’s complicated setup. Voxon just needs to find the right artwork to paint on its canvas.
[via ExtremeTech]
Here’s a simple but rather clever design improvement for clear plastic rulers that most of us would have probably welcomed back in grade school. Nendo’s new Contrast Ruler features metric markings that fade from black to white, so no matter what color of surface you’re working on and shows through, you can always easily discern the tick marks.
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Souvenirs have a tendency to skew way, way kitschy, especially when they’re tied to major events like the Olympics. But these souvenirs—designed by a group of industrial design students—put a totally new spin on the traditional tat, and the results are pretty awesome.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
