The Revolights Bike Lighting System : Thinking Different
As Kent was riding home one night, he wondered why his bike’s headlight, meant to illuminate the road ahead of him, was mounted on the handlebars. Why couldn’t the light be closer to the ground? He put his engineering mind to work, and Revolights were born.
The arcs of light are formed by LEDs programmed to detect your speed and blink on as they pass the front or rear of the bicycle.
The Revolights bike lighting system consists of two narrow rings of LEDs that mount directly to each wheel using a series of rim-specific clips. Polymer lithium-ion batteries, bracket-mounted to the front and rear hub, supply power to the LEDs. The batteries are slim and lightweight, and can be charged via USB. A small, fork-mounted magnet provides speed data to the rings, allowing the LEDs to blink on only when oriented at the front or rear of the bicycle.
Wanted: Paul Sahre Creates Stunning Boxed Set Of Malcolm Gladwell’s Classics
Love him or hate him, Malcolm Gladwell has made an indelible impact on how zillions of people see the world via his best-selling books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. If there were a Criterion Collection for nonfiction, these volumes would be in it—and now, thanks to the efforts of designer Paul Sahre and illustrator Brian Rea, you can actually buy a handsome boxed set of Gladwell’s three hits that wouldn’t look out of place next to your Stanley Kubrick collection.
Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.
Moshun for HypeForType
Static typefaces are so 2011, as demonstrated by this wonderful animated typeface from Jeroen Krielaars of Calango.
When Worlds Collide : Ice Cube Celebrates The Eames for Pacific Standard Time the birth of the LA art scene.
Ray and Charles Eames? They ain’t bougie. At least according to Ice Cube. With their intuitive aesthetic and playful outlook, The Eames set out to bring modern design to the masses and Ice Cube’s story is a measure of their success.
Ice Cube drives Inglewood blvd. describing the Los Angeles that he knows. He talks of landmarks like The Forum, Five Torches, Cockatoo Inn, Brolly Hut, and Watts Towers. He refers to the 110 as “Gangsta Highway”. Cube says coming from South Central LA teaches you how to be resourceful. The video cuts to Cube walking the Eames House perimeter, through the Eames living room, and sitting in the Eames lounge chair. He brings us back to his NWA years when he studied architectural drafting before launching his rap career. One thing he learned that translates is to always have a plan. Cube describes the modern, green and resourceful building design of Charles and Ray Eames. Visionaries of connecting nature and structure. Cube ends by saying “Who are these people who got a problem with LA? Maybe they mad cuz they don’t live here.” Song during intro is “A Bird in the Hand” off of Death Certificate.
Check out the profound comments below:
+++
For more info on Ice Cube & The Eames visit http://pacificstandardtime.org.
The fewer materials you use to make a product, the better. That’s a basic tenet of green design. But it’s tough to cut fat: Take a lamp, which generally has a bulb, a base, a neck, a shade, and all the fittings in between—each its own little environmental horror. Which is what makes Flaca, an LED lamp by the Mexican designersMasiosare Studio, so smart. “Flaca” means skinny in Spanish, and it certainly lives up to its name: It’s a flat 6-ounce slab of steel that’s pre-cut to fold out, like a pop-up card, into a full-blown table lamp. The bulb sticks permanently to the head with what the designers call “auto-adhesive tape” (tape-on bulbs, that’s a new one!). And the height can be customized by adjusting the creases in the neck. The whole package ships flat in 100% recyclable cardboard, which reduces both shipping costs and environmental impact. Yes, yes, we know. The most eco-friendly lamp is the one you already own. But if you happen to be in dire need of a new one, you could do worse than Flaca. As lamps go, skinny really is better. Masiosare’s Eduardo Meza Flaca tells Design Lens that Flaca has been selected as part of a project called Destination: Mexico, which will open at MoMA this spring. The lamp will be available at MoMA’s NYC stores and online starting in April. The price has yet to be determined.Simple Genius: Ultra-Thin Lamp Pops Up From A Sheet Of Steel
SFMOMA Expansion Video
SFMOMA : Nu Expansion
The architects’ sketches for SFMOMA’s new expansion reveal a transformative design for the museum, the neighborhood, and the city. “Our design for SFMOMA responds to the unique demands of this site, as well as the physical and urban terrain of San Francisco,” says Snøhetta principal architect Craig Dykers. “The scale of the building meets the museum’s mission, and our approach to the neighborhood strengthens SFMOMA’s engagement with the city. Pedestrian routes will enliven the streets surrounding the museum and create a procession of stairs and platforms leading up to the new building, echoing the network of paths, stairways, and terracing that is a trademark of the city.”
Public circulation between the museum and the city will be enhanced through the creation of free ground-level galleries, new entrances that make the museum accessible from every direction, a central public gathering place, and more extensive routes of public circulation. The use of glass throughout the building, as well as the creation of several outdoor terraces and a new sculpture garden, further serves to open up the museum and connect it to the city.
The design of the interior spaces synthesizes the current Mario Botta-designed building and the new Snøhetta expansion into one seamless whole. Two main entrances (the current entrance on Third Street and a new one on Natoma) will lead into a central space that will serve as the public entry point to all galleries. To create an expansive, flowing space on the entry level of the museum, the original staircase will be removed from the Botta atrium. There will also be a new entrance added on Minna Street to facilitate the arrival of school groups.
In addition to the new routes of public circulation welcoming visitors into the museum, the design will foster more intuitive navigation within the museum. While most museums have a single area dedicated to education, the new SFMOMA will feature a variety of education spaces throughout the building, directly connected to the galleries. In addition, an innovative, multifunctional gallery space will be easily adapted for educational programs, live performances, and special events.
The expansion also includes galleries of differing scale, materials, and lighting specifically designed to showcase a range of art, from photography to installation, video, painting, and sculpture. The galleries in the existing and new buildings will be unified and total 130,000 square feet, doubling our current gallery space.
The building also introduces a façade on Howard Street that will feature a large, street-level gallery enclosed in glass on three sides, providing views of both the art in the galleries and the new public spaces. Upon opening, the Howard Street gallery will house Richard Serra’s masterpiece Sequence (2006), which is part of the Fisher Collection. The sculpture will be visible from the outside even when the museum is closed.
On Howard Street, the glass-enclosed gallery and pedestrian promenade will be located on a site currently occupied by Fire House 1 and its neighbor at 670 Howard Street. SFMOMA is designing, financing, and constructing a new, replacement fire station on nearby Folsom Street, representing a gift to the city of more than $10 million, that will provide the Fire Department with a state-of-the-art facility that will enhance emergency response time.
House Industries
Interview with Ken Barber
House Industries has been producing their premier league retro design and their true love…Fonts! Fonts! Fonts! since 1993. House Industries’ lead letterer Ken Barber recently visited us in Berlin to give a workshop at our Gestalten Space, which explored the creative process of hand-lettering and the application of illustrative letterforms in contemporary graphic design. We took this chance to interview him on Gestalten.tv where he talks about the necessity of specialization and the fine lines between lettering, typography, and font design.
They made the picture instantly special,” wrote Legendary Director Martin Scorsese of Saul Bass’s titles. “And they didn’t stand apart from the movie, they drew you into it instantly. Because putting it quite simply, Saul Bass was a great filmmaker. He would look at the film in question, and understand the rhythm, the structure, the mood — he would penetrate the heart of the movie and find its secret.
Detour Exhibition - Naoki Yoshimoto by Moleskine ®
VISUALS:
The Design of Symbols
By STEVEN HELLER
Photo: The simplest signs are often the most powerful. Corporate logos, from “Symbol”: clockwise from top left, the Council of Fashion Designers of America; Penguin; Continental Airlines; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; and CBS.
We see them in airports, hospitals and government buildings, in waiting rooms and bathrooms, on exits and entrances: schematic silhouettes of men, women and children. The graphic icons are characterized by a no-frills, geometric style that is immediately recognizable and decipherable wherever they’re found. But while the symbols are ubiquitous, few people know where they had their origins.
The prototypes for this pictorial language were developed in the 1930s at the Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna by Otto Neurath (1882-1945), a left-leaning Viennese social scientist who specialized in political economy. His system of sign symbols, which became known as the International System of Typographic Picture Education (Isotype), grew out of his calling to revolutionize understanding among peoples and institutions. That graphic design history was made by a political economist was no accident. Neurath “wanted to familiarize and educate the working class about the broader systems of order at work in the contemporary city,” Nader Vossoughian, a curator and critic, writes in OTTO NEURATH: The Language of the Global Polis (NAi Publishers, paper, $35), a compact, exhaustively researched biography that explains Neurath’s visual philosophy in the context of his social and environmental concerns. Neurath sought to develop “a system of graphic representation that made statistical data legible and accessible to nonspecialized mass audiences,” to “bridge the gap between reading and seeing in an effort to accelerate the transmission of information.” His system of reductive images, which portrayed people through the use of clichéd characteristics (laborers holding hammers, office workers at typewriters, farmers with hoes), were so easy to recognize that words were superfluous. Indeed, the range of Isotype imagery was so broad, and the anatomical, building and machine diagrams so varied, virtually any idea could be expressed by one or more combined images.
A trailer for a new documentary looking at one of America’s most influential design houses has just been released. Eames: The Architect and the Painter is set for a limited debut on November 18th, and follows the remarkable life and influence of the husband and wife pair Charles and Ray Eames, who were artists, designers, and architects, and had an immense influence on American design in the 20th century. Narrated by James Franco, the film has been enjoying some success on the film festival circuit but is only set to be shown in select theaters, so have a look at the First Run Theaters link below to see if it’ll be played near you.Legendary Eames Design House gets a Documentary
Sound Machines: Teenage Engineering OP-1
Status Symbols are devices that transcend their specs and features, and become something beautiful and luxurious in their own right. They’re things that live on after the megapixel and megahertz wars move past them, beacons of timeless design and innovation.
With retro-futurism at a peak, the OP-1 represents the platonic ideal of the movement. The synthesizer mixes the form factor of a Casio VL-Tone, 80s vector graphics for a UI, and an expansive set of modern tone- and beat-creation utilities that blend digital power and analog concepts. For instance, recording takes place on a digital representation of a four track tape recorder, but you can vary speed and even record backwards, just like in olden days, and match the tape speed to your sequencer clock, just like in the here and now. It’s a beautiful mashup.
Available @ Teenage Engineering.com
I’d loved to see him do Paris. “Shit, dees buttresses be flyin’, yo.”
TheGrerex 1 weeks ago / 151 Likes
“This is going green, 1949 style bitch. B’lee dat!”
ciaranoc 2 weeks ago / 209 Likes