Boing Boing » design

Record Eater: 1967 record player that ran in any orientation

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 May 2013 02:46:31 +0000

Every single thing about this ad is great: the illustration, the typography, the industrial design of the gadget, the copy. What a beauty.

The Record Eater ‘45 rpm’ record player ad, 1967. (via BruceS)

Dazzle-paint bar

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 13 May 2013 17:42:34 +0000

The basement of the Hôtel Americano in Chelsea, NYC has been done over in dazzle-paint reminiscent of the cubist battleship paint used to confound the enemy in WWI (and dazzle makeup used to fake out face-recognition systems). The work is by German artist Tobias Rehberger, who describes it as a re-creation of Frankfurt's Bar Oppenheimer.

The space, which opens May 10 and will remain open until July 14, dazzles the senses with its salonlike atmosphere, tight dimensions and prismatic black-and-white stripes; it’s also a functional bar where anyone can stop in for a drink during the life of the project.

By Design | A Bar That’s Also a Piece of Art [Rocky Casale/New York Times Magazine]

(via JWZ)

(Image: downsized, cropped thumbnail of a larger photo by Matthew Cianfrani, viewable here)

Chris Shaw re-imagines the Madonna at SFMOMA

Ben Marks — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:21:35 +0000

As the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art prepares to shutter its South of Market location for the next three years, during which it will spend almost half a billion dollars to more than double its size for the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, the museum’s restaurant on Third Street closes out its more modest exhibition program with nine acrylic-on-canvas paintings by Chris Shaw, on view through June 3, 2013. Admission is free.

Best known locally for his rock posters, Shaw has used his swan-song time slot to present a series of vividly colored Madonnas, each based on Madonnas by such 15th century artists as Bellini, Botticelli, and Ambrogio de Predis. For Shaw, the Madonna is just another propaganda icon, a vessel to be filled up with whatever one is trying to sell. In Shaw’s case, his Madonnas have set aside the Christ Child for a Kalishnikov, a bottle of Colt 45, and an orange squid, whose mantle resembles the Pope’s peaked mitre and groping tentacles suggest a fallen priest’s restless reach.

While the Madonna with the Kalashnikov, to say nothing of the one wearing a suicide bomb vest, are the most obvious eyebrow raisers, Shaw’s most subversive paintings are probably his Madonnas of Science. One holds a magnet, another peers through a microscope, and another cradles an armillary sphere, Shaw’s representation of what we think we might know about dark matter. And of course there’s a Madonna containing a Higgs-Boson particle, replacing the son of God with the newly discovered God particle. Chris Shaw at the SFMOMA

Dictionary of Surrealism and the Graphic Image

David Pescovitz — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:27:08 +0000

BB contributor Mark Dery says:

Rick Poynor, an unapproachably brilliant writer on design and visual culture, has generously posted at Design Observer the glossary of Surrealist concepts from his catalog to an exhibition of Czech Surrealist works. BB readers should print this out and keep it within handy reach on the night table, to be repurposed as a road atlas for dreaming.

"A Dictionary of Surrealism and the Graphic Image"

Child abuse PSA street-poster has a secret message for kids

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 08 May 2013 03:19:43 +0000

The Anar Foundation and Grey Spain created a lenticular street-poster about child abuse that shows a "secret" message to people who view it from a kid's eye-height.

ANAR Foundation manages in Spain the european unique phone number 116 111, to attend children and teenagers under a risk situation. On this telephone number, only for minors, they can find the help they need in a totally anonymous and confidential way. But, how can we get our message to a child abuse victim, even when they are accompanied by their aggressor?
Knowing the average height for adults and children under 10,GREY has created two different messages. Using an outdoor lenticular we show adults an awareness message, while children see a message where we offer them our help and show them the telephone number. A message only for children.

Glad they're using this power for good and not evil. Wait until the grocery stores get hold of it and start loading the pester-power ads at kids' eye-height.

FUNDACIÓN ANAR. "ONLY FOR CHILDREN"

PLOS Computational Biology wants your t-shirt designs

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 04 May 2013 15:51:33 +0000

Alan sez, "The fine folk doing open-access science at PLOS are once again crowd-sourcing their T-shirt design. They want something that 'appeal[s] to the computational biology community and encapsulate[s] a recent advance or innovation in the field.' You have until May 14 to submit ideas for a shirt that will debut at their July meeting in Berlin."

Looking for mathematical perfection in all the wrong places

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:05:41 +0000

The Golden Ratio — that geometric expression of the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, etc.) — has influenced the way master painters created art and can be spotted occurring naturally in the seed arrangement on the face of a sunflower. But its serendipitous appearances aren't nearly as frequent as pop culture would have you believe, writes Samuel Arbesman at The Nautilus. In fact, one of the most common examples of mathematical perfection — the chambered nautilus shell — actually isn't. Even math can become part of the myths we tell ourselves as we try to create meaning in the universe.

Image: Golden Ratio, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ernestduffoo's photostream

Clever, vintage covers for Orwell reissues

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 02 May 2013 05:14:24 +0000

Spotted these yesterday (though they've been around for a while - see Mark's post from January): Penguin's done a bunch of George Orwell paperback reissues with clever and vintagey covers. The Nineteen Eighty-Four has a black mask over the title that you can scratch off (or leave intact), while Animal Farm and Books v Cigarettes both sport lovely old school covers.

Infographic: how money corrupts Congress, and what to do about it

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 02 May 2013 03:10:13 +0000

Money wins Elections is an excellent, scrolling infographic that illustrates how money corrupts the American legislative process, showing that time and again, Congress has voted the way that the big money told it to, against the prevailing popular opinion. It's all in support of the American Anti-corruption Act, and it was created by Tony Chu for part of his MFA thesis project.

Money wins Elections

Giant binder-clip handbag

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:04:07 +0000

Peter Bristol created this binder clip bag in 2007 and now he's looking for manufacturing partners: "The binder icon functions so well as a bag you can almost take it seriously. Constructed of wool felt and aluminum tubing."

Clip Bag (via Super Punch)

HOWTO make a spiral oak staircase out of cheap IKEA countertops

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:41:20 +0000

Bryce Phelps made himself a beautiful oak spiral staircase and saved a ton of money by cutting up cheap IKEA oak countertops for the treads:

I went with a 4" steel pipe from the local steel yard buying 18'. Also purchased some angle and flat steel to frame out the stairs. My treads needed to be 22" long making the whole staircase 4' including the center pipe. The treads are 30 degrees, so you can fit 6 on one side or 180 degrees together. I had a total of 7 treads or runs and about a 9" rise. Take the overall height and divide by the runs = the rise needed. Once all this was welded back supports aren't needed and the stairs are very rigid.
For the treads I headed to Ikea and picked up the 8' NUMERÄR Countertop in Oak, traced and pattern and laid out the cuts in pencil with the grain all going the same direction. I cut the straight lines with the skilsaw and round cuts with the bandsaw. Took the router to the edges and followed up with some sanding and stain. Attached the treads with lags and wiped everything down.
It really turned out better than I thought and for a fraction of the price + you get to tell people you made it.

Spiral Staircase with Numerar

20-foot dinosaur made from balloons

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 22:38:17 +0000

This 20-foot-tall acrocanthosaurus is made out of twisted-together balloons. It was created over four days by Larry Moss and Kelly Cheatle's company Airgami for the lobby of the Virgina Museum of Natural History.

airigami (headed by larry moss) has completed a 20-foot long acrocanthosaurus--a dinosaur from the early cretaceous period. this is not the first time the team has built one of the mammoth creatures from their signature medium of balloons, but it is the first occasion in which they have produced and displayed one alongside a cast of an actual skeleton of a prehistoric reptile. finished over the course of four days, the massive inflated beast is installed within the virgina museum of natural history (for as long as it will last).
the core team of marsh gallagher, TJ michael, phil cosmos and dee cosmos who realized the larger than life blow-up sculpture were assisted by many helpers including elementary school students and museum staff.

20-foot dinosaur made from balloons by airigami [Designboom]

Mid-century modern kitchen

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:07:21 +0000

Now that's a kitchen!

1950 Armstrong Mid Century Modern Kitchen

How the Pirates of the Caribbean ride came to be

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:45:30 +0000

Here's a sweet mini-doc on the creation of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, the last ride that Walt Disney supervised to completion. Pirates, like the Haunted Mansion, was originally intended as a walk-through museum of old-timey stuff, but the advent of robotic props ("audio-animatronics," whose R&D was funded commissions for the NY World's Fair in 1964) was a breakthrough that changed the way Disney's designers thought about ride possibilities.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN THE RIDE PART1 (via Vintage Parks Disney)

Wyndhamesque missives from Scarfolk, an English horror-town trapped in a 1969-79 loop

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:42:17 +0000

I'm loving the Scarfolk site, where "Dr R Littler" chronicles the mysteries of an English town stuck in a Wyndham-esque loop betwen 1969 and 1979. It's full of the most lovely horrors. It's all so perfectly wrought and so grisly and freaked out and perfectly aged. If only we could all retire to Scarfolk and never grow old!

Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever. "Visit Scarfolk today. Our number one priority is keeping rabies at bay." For more information please reread.

Scarfolk Council (via Die Puny Humans)

Chainmail tights

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:15:07 +0000

Mitmunk's chainmail tights don't actually appear to be on sale any longer, but the design is a treat.

(via Geeks Are Sexy)

Update: Hurrah, they're back on sale (thanks, Dean!)

Lincoln Continental

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:26:08 +0000

Three ads for tailfinned Lincoln Continentals are a reminder that one of the best ways to make something amazingly beautiful is to make a million mediocre and terrible things and wait half a century (or more) until the good ones have risen to the top. The suicide door was incredibly dumb, but it sure looked nice, at least when designers lucked into (or were canny enough to create) a pleasing form for them.

Lincoln Continental - Sunday Sample

Bookcase/staircase/slide!

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:21:30 +0000

Architects Moon Hoon designed a house in Chungcheongbuk-do, South Korea, that uses a staircase as a slide, a library and a room-divider. My goodness, it is lovely.

The basic request of upper and lower spatial organization and the shape of the site promted a long and tin house with fluctuating facade which would allow for more differentiated view. The key was coming up with a multi-functional space which is a large staircase, bookshelves, casual reading space, home cinema, slide and many more…
The client was very pleased with the design, and the initial design was accepted and finalized almost instantly, only with minor adjustments. The kitchen and dining space is another important space where family gathers to bond. The TV was pushed away to a smaller living room. The attic is where the best view is possible, it is used as a play room for younger kids. The multi-use stair and slice space brings much active energy to the house, not only children, but also grown ups love the slide staircase…An action filled playful house for all ages…

Panorama House by Moon Hoon (via Neatorama)

Glow-in-the-dark Haunted Mansion tee

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 03:46:35 +0000

I'm at LAX as I type this, heading home from a great family spring break in LA that culminated with a trip to Disneyland. While I was at the Mouse, I happened upon this killer Haunted Mansion t-shirt, which wasn't available in my size at first, but later got re-stocked. I'm wearing it now. it is awesome Alas, it appears to be a park-only item (neener-neener), though you can always try Disneyland Deliv-EARS (and yes, it glows in the dark).

PS: I also met a Haunted Mansion cast-member whose no-foolin' hometown was Purgatory.

Insane tees - Kickstarted, full-shirt printing with indie artist designs

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 02:03:40 +0000

Jordan sez, "Our t-shirt company was just successfully funded through Kickstarter, now at $46,000+ with 4 days to go. We take insane art from independent artists and throw them on shirts using a new type of printing called Sublimation. It allows us to print ALL OVER the shirt in extremely vibrant colors."

Not all this stuff is up my street, but some of it is pretty fawesome.

RaveNectar: This isn't clothing - it's an EXPERIENCE. (Thanks, Jordan)

Ordered list of credible fictions

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:31:21 +0000

I love Bruce Sterling's "Design Fiction Slider-Bar of Disbelief," a list of fictions in ascending order of credibility:

9.4 New age crystals, lucky charms, protective pendants, mojo hands, voodoo dolls, magic wands
9.3 Quack devices, medical hoaxes
9.3 Fantasy “objects” in fantasy cinema and computer-games
9.2 Physically impossible sci-fi literary devices: time machines, humanoid robots
9.2 Perpetual motion machines; free-energy gizmos, other physically impossible engineering fantasies
9.0 State libels, black propaganda, military ruses; missile gaps, vengeance weapons, Star Wars SDI
8.9 “Realplay” services, “experiential futurism” encounters, military and emergency training drills, props and immersive set-design, scripted personas
8.8 Online roleplaying scenario games
8.7 Net.art interventions, diegetic performance art, provocative device-art scandals
8.6 Guerrilla street-theater; costumes, puppets, banners, songs, lynchings-in-effigy, mock trials, mass set-designed Nuremberg rallies, propaganda trains
8.5 Fake products, product forgeries, theft-of-services, con-schemes, 419 frauds

Spoiler alert: the list ends with these:

1.0 Engineering specifications, software code
0.5 Historical tech assessment of extinct technologies, the “judgement of history’
0.0 The ideal and unobtainable “objective truth” about objects and services

Design Fiction: The Design Fiction Slider-Bar of Disbelief

Limited-edition LP housed in a cast sugar box

David Pescovitz — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:26:34 +0000

The deluxe edition of dark IDM/R&B duo Beacon's new LP consists of rose-colored vinyl housed in an cast sugar box. The Ghostly International label worked with sculptor Fernando Mastrangelo to create the object, available in an edition of 20. You can't eat it though as it's coated in epoxy. Oh, it includes the digital download too. "TWWS DELUXE ART EDITION by Fernando Mastrangelo x Beacon" (via The Fox Is Black, thanks Patrick Kelly!)

COOP/Pressure Printing car engine fine art print

David Pescovitz — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:14:49 +0000

Seen here is "Hemi-Powered," a new fine art print collaboration by our pals COOP and Pressure Printing's Brad Keech! COOP's model for this beaut was a Dodge 426 Hemi engine (aka "The Elephant") with a Cragar blower. The relief print is 38.5" x 30", available in a limited edition of 25 signed and numbered for the price of $666 (natch). More details on the Pressure Printing blog here.

Convertible coffee-table/sofa/dining room table + stools

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 03:21:32 +0000

Julia Kononenko, a designer in Kharkiv, Ukraine, created a clever piece of furniture that converts from a coffee table to a sofa to a dining room table with chairs. It's more small living-space porn for me -- the perfect thing for your 130sqft apartment.

In our apartments we are always in the confrontation with furniture for the living space. It is so important, that the Interior items possess little space, are multi-functional and small in size. I created a sofa for the living room, that can easily be transformed into a small dining-table with 6 padded stools. In terms of ergonomics it gives maximum comfort and convenience to the user. While transforming the sofa, the seat turns into six padded stools, and the backrest - into a countertop. From one small sofa, we can get a dining-table for 6 persones. Transformation furniture - ideal for limited space.

Сonvertible sofa

Tiki Room mugs

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 18:59:28 +0000

Designer Kevin Kidney's posted more of the awesome Tiki Room stuff he and Jody Daily designed for the Disneyland Tiki Room 50th Anniversary event this summer (he posted his Luau Bowl earlier). This time around, it's a pair of lidded mugs paying homage to two of the idols of the tiki garden outside the Tiki Room in Disneyland: Pele and Tangaroa-Ru.

New Tiki Room Collectibles Coming to Disneyland This Summer (Part 1)

Clever, 130sqft Paris apartment

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:13:12 +0000

Inthralld showcases a 130 square-foot apartment in Paris, where a set of insanely clever design decisions allows for a full apartment's worth of amenities to be jammed into a teeny weeny space. I love the drawers in the steps, but of course I really love the hiding bed/sofa. Basically, I want to live in a Murphy apartment and/or houseboat.

What was once a master suite of an apartment in the Montparnasse neighborhood is now a 130 square foot micro apartment that houses all of the necessities. There’s even an extremely creative way to house the mattress-slash-sofa. The bed doubles as seating space for lounging and entertaining, which rolls away discreetly underneath a set of steps on the floor. The Magis One stools add some much needed contemporary pizazz to the inner environment, while the storage really looks like art and functions just perfectly.

130 Square Foot Micro Apartment in Paris (via Core77)

Mid-Century Modern housing designs vs children

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 15:18:38 +0000

Projectophile's Clare has a funny post about the hazards presented by beautiful mid-century modern home designs to children. My grandparents had a proper split-level MCM when I was a kid, and it's a wonder we survived. As Clare says, "I love open, flowing space as much as the next modern girl. But I know it would only be a matter of minutes before my kid flings himself off one of these deadly ledges..."

15 Mid-Century Modern Dream Homes that will Kill Your Children (via MeFi)

More dazzling design/art from We Buy Your Kids

David Pescovitz — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:44:40 +0000

From the Instagram feed of hyper-talented Australian design/illustration duo We Buy Your Kids (aka Sonny Day and Biddy Maroney): the cover art for a 2008 split 7" vinyl by Cloud Control and Telekinesis! and poster for a 2012 Eleanor Friedberger concert. webuyyourkids on Instagram

When US money was nice to look at

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 16:12:47 +0000

US currency was beautiful, once upon a time, when it sported images of animals and symbolic statuary, rather than deifying its citizen-rulers by putting presidents on the money as though they were kings. This 1901 $10 note (available on Wikimedia Commons in a 33.34MB, 6,454 × 5,784 JPEG!) is a case in point.

United States $10 Banknote, Legal Tender, Series of 1901 (Fr. Ref#114), depicting Meriwether Lewis and William Clark of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. The central portrait is a depiction of an American bison. Part of the National Numismatic Collection, NMAH, Smithsonian Institution. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

How the amazing UK cover for Rapture of the Nerds came to be

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:23:49 +0000

I'm really impressed with the cover of the UK edition of Rapture of the Nerds, the novel I wrote with Charlie Stross. But it turns out that producing that cover was quite a journey. Designer Martin Stiff was kind enough to share his notes on the process, along with all the proto covers he produced for the UK publisher, Titan Books:

Designing book covers is the best job in the goddamn world. If you're lucky, like we are at Amazing15, you get to work with incredibly talented and lovely people, on some of the most fiendishly interesting projects you can't even begin to imagine without the aid of viralised nootropics.
When the incredibly talented and lovely Cath at Titan Books asked us to design the UK cover for Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross' The Rapture of the Nerds we braced ourselves. If you haven't read it, do it now. The book is a melting pot of brain-warping ideas, every time you think you get a handle on what it is, what it means, it shifts in your hands like an organic Rubik's cube.

Books which can manipulate reality aren't easy to design covers for. When you start a new project there's generally two initial ways in: 1) you step into it and find a moment, a scene, an element and pin your cover design on that or 2) you step back and look at the overall picture - try and find the theme. But what do you do when that picture seems to keep changing? The answer is, you keep chasing it. And what happens when there's other people involved in the process, each of whom has their *own* take on the book, a take which fluctuates as wildly as your own? The answer is you chase even harder and you don't look back.

The first ideas we turned in were turned down. They looked non-fiction (v2), or too young (v3). Version 4 hung around for a while but it quickly became too *normal* and that's just not something the novel is, so we threw it out. We fiddled with icons and graphics (v5, v6) and impossible shapes (v7) to match the impossible shape of the story but each time the book out-thought us and proved us wrong. Version 8 hung around for a while, but it still didn't feel *right* dammit, it felt like a good book cover but Nerds isn't *just* a 'good book', it's so much more than that. For a while there we lost the plot entirely (v9 was so wrong it had to be fired into the heart of the sun to destroy it), and when we came back up we played with colours and abstract patterns like madmen. Version 10 and 13 had something – after weeks of getting dirty with angry covers that weren't right we liked the simple cleanliness and easy lines. It felt like a breath of fresh air. It felt like The Rapture of the Nerds.

We chased harder. We imagined a bright spectrum filtered through a fractured pattern, clean fonts with nothing to hide. We got close. We kept the chaos subtle, a radiation of binary noise printed in spot varnish so you can only see it in angled light but you can feel it all the time under your fingertips. We got close and we caught it (v15). It wasn't easy, but if it gets easy, you're doing it wrong. We've just finished designing the covers to Doctorow's Pirate Cinema and Homeland. Designing book covers is the best job in the goddamn world.
Martin Stiff, Amazing15