Icon Buzz - Designs & Arts

Dear Colleagues

zenon — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:59:50 +0000

The Ten Thousand Things blog has a fun rant up, admonishing some fellow designers for being cocky divas who need to take it down a peg. Though we’re certainly all not arrogant asses (at least not 100% of the time), I suspect that everyone knows at least one person this rant could apply to—especially if you’ve braved the New York art school trenches…

Pottok: Geoff McFetridge Wallpaper

zenon — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:56:07 +0000

Geoff McFetridge has designed Pottok: a new wallpaper collection featuring cool graphic treatments of trees, apples, flowers, whales (shown above), and more. Hint: click on designs once you hit the site.

ABC3D by Marion Bataille

zenon — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:52:16 +0000

Don’t miss the video preview of French designer Marion Bataille’s alphabet pop-up book ABC3D, in which letterforms literally leap off the page. Starting with the lenticular cover, letters morph into one another and spring into states of depth, all within a crisp black, white and red palette. The book will be published this fall and is available to preorder from Amazon.

Klipsch® Builds upon Image Headphone Popularity with New Model

zenon — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:11:47 +0000

Our interest was piqued last fall when we first saw the “world’s smallest” Klipsch Image X10 headphones at a trade show in Denver, but we were decidedly less enthusiastic when we saw their $350 price.

Now Klipsch announces the Image X5, a silver version of the great-sounding and comfortable inside-the-ear-canal style earbuds. They’re a little easier to make because they’re slightly longer and 2mm larger in diameter, so the company lowered the price to $250, available later this month.

Take a look at the gallery below and you’ll see the X5 models compared to their pricier brethren. Klipsch says the high frequencies of these new phones sound even better than the X10s, but a bit of bass is sacrificed to make that price lower. These we gotta hear.

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AIST Makes Tree With Solar-Cell Leaves

zenon — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:48:48 +0000

What do you do when your species unsettles the balance of nature? Create artificial nature to make up the difference, of course. Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Mitsubishi Corp. and Tokki Corp. have developed a prototype solar cell module that realistically takes on the look of a common houseplant. The organic thin-film solar cells are protected by a layer of plastic, allowing the technology to be used in the future for constructs including walls and windows, clothing materials, leisure goods, outdoor products and toys. Hopefully, if we run out of trees in 50 years, these technological wonders will offer reasonably comforting substitutes.

Really Cool Keyboard

zenon — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:45:25 +0000

Silence that keyboard! That clickety-clacking all day long gets annoying, so that’s why these absolutely silent keyboards exist. Not only is the full-sized ReallyCool Keyboard quiet, it’s waterproof, so you can scrub it with soap and water if you’re in an environment where things get too funky to touch. Even more appealing is its backlighting, for, say, typing next to a hospital bed in the middle of the night.

Marketed to medical facilities, these silent keyboards are seeing use in courtrooms, too, where the distracting rat-a-tat-tat of typing tests the temper of judge and jury. According to its maker, the ReallyCool keyboard has tactile keys, giving you a normal-feeling typing experience even though it’s not particularly ergonomic. You’ll have to pay extra for all that ReallyCoolness, though — it’s $199, in your choice of black or cool gray.

ICooly Delivers Virtual iMac Touchscreen Experience

zenon — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:42:12 +0000

To tide you over until next week, when Apple is rumored to release the new iPhone, we give you the iCooly for the iPod Touch. The iPod holder is designed to look like a mini-iMac for your desktop and the effect, while simple, is a Mac fan’s dream device. Lending to the iMac-like effect is a tiny slot on the side of the unit (where the iMac’s DVD would usually be inserted) accommodating your dock connector and headphones. If you want to know, via miniature scale, what using a touchscreen iMac would be like you can pick your iCooly up for just ¥4,980 ($47) here.

Bamboo Sink Gives Washing up that ‘Earthy’ Quality

zenon — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:32:05 +0000

Bamboo is showing up in all kinds of new products, and why not? It’s eco-friendly (bamboo grows much faster than typical trees and uses less energy to harvest) and looks damn hot. Claiming to be the world’s first bamboo sink, this round basin takes the trend to the bathroom.

To make it, craftsmen hand-turn each sink on a huge lathe and then rub it for a sateen sheen. The sink is then sealed in waterproof polyurethane that’s said to be “maintenance free” and comes with a 10-year guarantee. Apparently the makers started with a salad bowl and quickly expanded their catalog. The sink’s only drawback is the price: $500. It costs a lot green to be green.

Teori

Long Chair, A Bench Made out of One Steel Tube

zenon — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:16:39 +0000

The Long Chair, created by Schemata Architecture in Tokyo, is devilishly simple: take a single tube of stainless steel and bend it into a chair profile over and over. Stack enough of these chair outlines side by side, and you have an actual chair. Stack even more, and you have a bench. Even more, and you have a reeeeeeally long bench.

Probably a pretty uncomfortable bench, I’m guessing — not to mention one that you’d have trouble moving and no doubt gets really cold in the winter. This one’s definitely more cool art project than practical urban fixture, but the wicked shadows in the gallery below still make us want one.

With Pacer Suit, Hear The Music With Every Move of Your Body

zenon — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:44:29 +0000

Put on this outfit, and your whole body turns into a musical instrument. That’s the promise of the Pacer Suit, a design concept that measures electrical impulses of your muscles and turns them into music or sound effects.

Akin to motion capture suits that have lately become commonplace in high-end graphics and animation boutiques, the suit either makes self-contained music with onboard amplifiers and speakers, or communicates wirelessly via infrared with a control console. There, sounds would be assigned and amplified according to the artistic choices of the wearer and her collaborators.

Imagine this attire stretched across the body of an accomplished belly dancer. Too bad the suit obfuscates so much of the visually interesting fleshy parts of the dancer. Never mind that; this kind of dancewear could create an entirely new artform.

Designer : Nikola Knezevic and Danilo Zizic