I have finally found a soup to nuts Steampunk machine / design concept that I can really get behind. From the looks of things each and every little detail is taken care of. I hate it when the aesthetic doesn’t extend correctly and seamlessly to the peripherals. With this design shown over at Yanko Design, they thought of everything. From the speakers to the mouspad having a tiny little desk lamp over it. Even the cabling is wrapped to look the part.

The machine appears to be a mac mini, and is inscribed with The Apple Company, Gearless Calulating Device. The best part is if you follow through to the original designer and you have the extra coinage you too can have one of these beauties built for you by Old Time Computers.

Well Done !

Via » Yanko Design.

Wave of the future or messy addiction? This gizmo uses a shortwave radio reciever to create what they dub very slow scan TV. The machines is a Canvas of ink filled bubble wrap. It is able to create 1 frame of Video per day. At 24 frames per second you can make a 30 second commercial in 720 days, or 1.97 years… AT very low def i might add. with shifty color…

Ok at some point its not tech and its just fun because we can. The scanner travels back and forth across the canvas which is a giant roll of bubble wrap injecting dye inot each bubble. The problem is that TV is don in RGB, percentages of Red Green and Blue, as the three primary colors of light. Pigment doesn’t work that way so they need to use Cyan Magenta and Yellow dye to create similar colors. CYM. Which is the same set of basic inks most printers use. Bigger images and a video of the contraption in action after the jump Read the rest of this entry »

You wouldn’t think it but bricks are particularly complicate things to make. But they are, You need to harvest and process the clay, strain form dye and fire them, and the you’re left with a marginally effective building material. Despite the Little piggies obvious success using them, there are much better materials out there, just non as readily available and inexpensive.

Imagine a world where the primary building material were mushrooms. Well it might not be too far off. When mushrooms grow the tiny fibrous root system that supports the fungi is called Mycelium. Apparently when dried this stuff is tougher than any proverbial nails. Non toxic, water resistant (something most bricks really aren’t) and mold resistant to boot. So in reality it could be used as support beams and insulation i the same home. Smurfy! A company called Ecovative is trying to bring this unusual building material to the public.

Futurismic

One of the biggest buzzwords lately is Green Tech. But the problem with generating power is that quite frankly its a bit hard to do. Solar energy is by far the most talked about alternative energy source but Solar energy is operating at around 20 % efficiency. That means for every 10 units of energy collected by the panel you get 2 usable portions out.

Wind energy is a lot more efficient, the only problem being that its much harder to find a sustainable wind source than a sunny day. Portable wind generators, provided they don’t need a ton of sustained wind would be a huge boon to emerging societies, relief work in remote locations or just being awesome all by your lonesome and blogging on a mountaintop.

While just a concept piece the Eolic looks like it might have a horse in that race. Carbon Fibre and a small footprint could make this an interesting design to watch, and it looks just plain awesome, lets admit it.

EcoFriend

Art Auctions are common by anyone’s standards. You can’t go more than a few days weeks without reading something about a some piece selling for a price you wouldn’t pay. However this installation / art piece by Caleb Larsen takes the auction and makes THAT the real art.

This little black box is a sophisticated internet enabled device. Its sole purpose in life, other than looking mysterious is to sell itself to the highest bidder. In turn the winner of the auction agrees to a contract which says that the device must be connected to the internet upon reception. The device is staffed with an algorithm which searches Ebay for a listing of itself. If the search turns up negative then the device creates an auction with the previous selling price as the starting bid, and sells itself off.

The current owner gets the proceeds of the sale and must ship the item to its new owner. This is cannibalistic capitalism at its finest. Especially since the contract is apparently written to give the artist a 15% cut each time…

Via Make: Online Caleb Larsen’s A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter.

I’m a sucker for well made and well designed tools. And one of my most frequently used tools of late is my sketchbook. My sketchbook however is almost used up and in quite poor condition, So i’ve been looking around for another to replace it.

I came across These beautifully constructed Xylobooks by Container Corps. Using reclaimed woof from a local furniture factory. these 128 page books are a stunning example of handcrafted, hand-bound design. For such quality they don’t seem to be overly expensive at 45.00 per.  The selection of woods obviously varies with the availability of the resources

h/t Corre77

Rethink Hanger uses plastic bottles to hang clothes. Imagine cutting down on plastic entering the waste stream and at the same time making something useful for yourself. This contraption allows you to screw two bottles into a plastic hook creating an item thatis in need.

The unit will cost 8 dollars per hanger, which is quite a nut to crack when you consider trying to fill a closet. Also you need to consider the extra room the bottles would take up over the dread wire hangers. If there was some way to melt or flatten them slightly this would be a fantastic idea.

h/t SlipperBrick

Michael Deal Charts the Beatles. For a band that made a consistent hits. Its a well know fact that i have a serious weakness for Infographics and so call “infoporn” in general. I aspire to see things as these artists do.

The above chart is an example of splicing the authorship of different Beatles with color coded bars. Seeing the authorship and the control over the musical direction over the course of their run visually gives a different sense as to how the band was creatively organized. In this case it’s not just about the band, which i like, but rather the different ways of conceptualizing the information that represents the band.

Eventually this larger infographic collaboration is going to be housed at http://www.chartingthebeatles.com/ so if you’re like me and dig yourself some infographicskeep it on your radar

A while back I started a series of articles with the intent of bringing the basics of graphic design to the masses.  I started with the premise that good design concepts should be accessible to everyone. It doesn’t matter if you are an artist, an accountant or a homemaker the basics of color and layout are accessible concepts.

In the spirit of those articles i decided to collect the thoughts and examples into an easy to read E-book, or PDF for the rest of us. I hope you enjoy. This book distills parts of my lecture from podcamp on graphic design tricks as well as touching on simple accessibility design hacks to make sure that your blog reaches the widest number of people.

How you present your ideas can matter more than what you have to say.

If you have great content why make it painful to read.

CaffiNation Blog Design Guide FREE  E-Book Download right here

The fine folks from Information Architects have done it once again. I love maps, all sizes and shapes the odder the subject matter the more obtuse the cartographic experience the better. There are two maps that hang in my office at work one is the Opte.org project a long dormant project, last updated in 2005, last map from 2003 which attempted to map the Internet in one day. The chaos that was produced is beautiful static.

The other is last years version of the Web Trends Map from iA. A graphic playground of data mined from the popular impressions and practical uses of online entities. All of this mapped onto the Tokyo Metro train map. in iA’s own words. Why? Because it works beautifully. This year’s version has a new bold graphic style and the same great information. Each year the techniques used to create the map seem to be honed a bit finer and the result that much more stunning. Read the rest of this entry »