ECO design fair, shanghai

Does anyone still follow this?

I recently hit a eco design fair here at the URBN hotel (first carbon neutral hotel in shanghai) where about 20 vendors showed their wares made of bamboo, or fruit imported from germany. The best part was the BBQ. I'll post pictures when I get my camera back.

what up from china

They say design is soon movin over to china to be closer to prototyping and mfg, and i'm a little bit of proof. I'm interning for a toy co. here as a designer- along with 2 other americans and a frenchman. They are looking for someone from germany now, and had israeli interns in the past. My israeli supervisors are interested in having a international design team to push and pull different mindsets and methods from around the globe- not to mention the extreme language hurdles. Mandarin is the majority lang. in the office, plus the boss' hebrew, and our english, and a few spurts of german, french, and pig latin. See, our collegues speak often in mandarin and we americans don't have a language that no one else knows. So thus the piglatin. we call it our "secret language". It seems that talking about people in front of them in a diff language is the trend. gar!!

But I digress. What I've found here, is that they know nothing of the design process. I take that back. They know nothing of design. It's completely fustrating trying to work w/o a solid project basis, trying to explain that ideations are not the final mfg'd product, and that ideas are literally ideas. On top of that the vocabulary is all twerked. The boss told my co-worker that he needs to be more "oily".... meaning flexible? i think...its fustratingly funny. Or describing to them that there are differnt types of people/designers for web/graphics/engineering- and that although I can design the website visually, I am not a programmer. "Did you make the new website yet?" I don't even know how to access the server! I just arrange photos on illustrator!

gah!

Check it out...

http://castrobabypuncher.blogspot.com/

clever truths

upclose shot

clever ad

pixelproject

im sure most of you here should have a website. why not post it up here for free...just for fun.
http://www.nonbot.com/pixel-project.aspx

all you have to know is what hex color you want and what link you want it to link to.

Color + Design Blog

This sweet site takes things and boils them down to their color schemes which are downloadable in diff file formats. Cool inspiration, methinks. Imagine giving a preso, "And I was inspired to use these colors by a female parrot fish" [link]

ironic.

Made in the Uk by chrisparry. A signet ring with your fingerprint on it. This one made me smirk. Quite the concept of taking sometihng so personal and unique into a piece of jewelry- ergh signet ring. So literal. Yet has some sense to it. What if, instead of signatures we just used our thumbprints? it'd be much harder to reproduce- but everyone would need better eyes. to identify it i guess. kinda like one of the winners of the global ID card competition.


Ashleigh Caffey, New York

bottle prototyping

Thought I'd share a project I'm working on. Open to any comments and suggestions! Above are a few photos from the process I used to make a bottle.

I'm currently working on a project (theme: capturing and sharing moments) for school and needed to make a rough sketch model. My project is called message in a bottle, thus my design is bottle shaped. I was going to use a lathe and foam to make models but ran into the problem of the school's woodshop being closed due to the holiday on monday. To solve this problem, I used cardboard and laser cut each cross section and glued them together to make the form of the bottle.

any creative ad finds?

heres one i found on digg.




http://www.hemmy.net/2006/10/15/creative-advertisements-around-the-world/





lemme know if you find some that inspire you too.

Pre-Announcing the annual Threadless Awards!

Starting with 2007, Threadless will begin hosting the annual Threadless Awards! While an official date is TBA (soon though!), the winners of the 2007 Threadless Awards will probably be announced in January or February of 2008.

Each person who wins a Threadless Award will receive a "Bestee", an incredible trophy shaped like Bestee the Elephant giving her STAMP of approval (inspired by this)! There will be 10-20 Bestee categories like "Most Groundbreaking Design" to "Best Gallery Photo" to "Most Dedicated Blogger". Actual categories are still in the works and we'll announce them within the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

Oh, we almost forgot the best part...

$100,000 in cash will be
awarded for the 2007 Bestees!

--------------------------------

sounds like a fun collab project.
what do u guys think of threadless anyway?

oh yeah. heres a link to a new ps3 ad. its got some awesome cg.
click the pic to watch the movie.

nutandbee.com


kawaiinot.com



anyone into character design? i wanna draw some crazy
character illustrations with someone

eve of halloween post

Cockeyed is the website of Rob Cockerham the man behind the above two costumes and a website full of fun filled answers. He's posted the process and results to many experiements:

-How much gold is in Goldschlager
-Can collecting cans in a shopping really generate a substantial income?
-Are spring shoes really possible and do they help you jump higher?
-and also the pranks section: slipping in fatty photoshop menus into TGI fridays(to replace vegetarian ones) (it has a photo of a stick of butter wrapped in bacon, lol)

enjoy!

XRS flash website

XRS site
an amazing example of where flash is taking us.

kenny wong: illustrator

kenny wong is an illustrator dude- but he has a really rad website and some awesome work. Okay, so its a little dizzying at first, but the whole branding of the website is so clean, and awesome, and just amazing. Check out molly's house, his workspace, and read through the copperhead-18 story.(which I thouroughly enjoyed, tho long) Yeah. something nifty to look at.

hello

this is brian and im new here so just thought i'd say hello, after intruding upon this humble design blog thanks to kristina's invite. mm i guess just a little about me...

my name is brian and i just graduated from ccsf with a degree in graphic design. right after getting done with school i ended up in japan for 2 months during the summer and then europe for 3 weeks with The Kristina. so now im poor and unemployed (arent we all?) and putting together a redesign of my website and getting a printed portfolio out and all that good crap. i love ling ling potstickers, play the drums and guitar for my church, dumpster dive for treasure, was raised on videogames like zelda and rtype, am an advanced metal artist, draws quirky creatures on my arms in tattoo form, reads bringhurst before going to bed (any type lovers here?), went to the maker faire...

and since this blog is a design blog. i must post a picture else i be shunned.
heres some of where i get inspiration from: omnivorous



ignore the chopped off right side of the image. :D

latte art, the new scene, brooklyn west

Good ol Oaktown has been getting some much-needed buzz as of late. Here is a link to the latest article in San Francisco magazine hyping our fair town as 'the next scene' and giving some ink to the monthly Art Murmur and bubbling-up uptown/downtown art and design scenes.

Anyone who lives here has been watching this happening for a while now. It's refreshing to see businesses other than nail salons and vacuum repair shops giving our fair city real urban life.

One place I've been keeping track of lately is the Awaken Cafe, soon to open in the now-closed (and sadly lamented) Golden Bull at 414 14th street in downtown. They are doing a total green re-model of the space, and promising to bring latte art to Oakland's caffeine addicts.

Also of note is the recently opened FiveTen Studio, run by local designer/entrepreneur Alfonso Dominguez who has his hands in some of the best new restaurants and design shops sprouting up around Old Oakland. He's making a concerted effort to showcase local up-and-coming talent. Designers, take note!

yamaha tesseract concept

This is the newest concept to come out of Yamaha's motorcycle division for the Tokyo Motor Show. It's a mix between motorcycle and scooter, similar to Piaggio's MP3 scooter. Yamaha says it's a little wider than a motorcycle and still leans into corners. The engine is a hybrid between V-Twin engine and electric motor.

As for the styling? It's, uh... different! Imagine a Transformer half transformed and you'll be pretty darn close. [autoblog.com]

¡very important!

things you should know:

1. Car drawing tutorial

2. IDSA openings & parties for this week!

3. Rock Paper Scissors Collective in Oakland hosts free or cheap classes, and has "lab time" for access to screen printing studio and industrial sewing machines for way cheap. Check it out. I made a T-shirt last week!