Nicolas Damiens and Julien Sans thought it would be cool to offer inspiring fonts based on the scrawl of some of their favorite recording artists like Bowie, Lennon, and Cobain, whose handwriting appears on the cool cover of his published journals (above). IP lawyers put the kibosh on their SongwritersFonts project real quick-like. Read the rest
I enjoyed watching Steve Schoger make changes to a poorly designed website, explaining why he made the changes as he made them.
Before:
After:
Seoul-based designer Yang Si Young created the "Library Chair" in answer to a personal challenge: to design a piece of furniture that's also a library; with built-in shelving and a place to read. Read the rest
Apple's education-centric new Ipad is meant to be used in rambunctious classrooms where drops and other abuse will be commonplace; it is also meant to compete with relatively easy-to-service Pixelbooks that school district IT departments can fix themselves or get repaired by a wide variety of independent, local service depots whose community-based technicians do repairs onsite and also keep local tax dollars circulating in the community. Read the rest
Braille Neue is a dual typeface designed by Kosuke Takahashi that overlays Braille and English into one simple font. For sighted people who do not currently know Braille, it's also a great mnemonic for learning Braille characters. Read the rest
Dezeen interview leading architects and designers around the world for Elevation, a new documentary on how drones will change cities. Speculative architect Liam Young points out, "Now that drones are in the hands of every person in the street, they're potentially as disruptive as the internet." Read the rest
Designer Irina Blok lives in Silicon Valley and is the creator of Google's now-iconic green Android logo. A couple of years ago, she started producing Only in Silicon Valley, a line of on-point greeting cards for "geeks."
She writes that the cards are designed to "celebrate tech culture of Silicon Valley, without taking ourselves too seriously."
Take a look...
She's got lots more over at Zazzle. Cards are $2.96 each.
Previously: Modest Silicon Valley home breaks record for highest price paid per square foot Read the rest
Peter Dahmen is a world-renowned pop-up book designer. In addition to books, he makes cards, sculptures and displays. Here he picked ten of his most satisfying. Read the rest
An art collector who died earlier this year donated a remarkable collection of escaliers to Cooper-Hewiit Museum. The tiny staircases were fashioned by French compagnons, a secretive trade group of master craftworkers. Read the rest
Spanish artist David Moreno draws, 3D renders, and even sculpts thin wire-like material into striking floating cities, sculptures that have an architectual feel. Read the rest
Valerio Sommella just won a 2018 design award from The German Design Council for these disorienting centerpiece plates he created for Il Coccio. Read the rest
Lauren Ko of LOKOKITCHEN in Seattle bakes up pies and tarts that are so creative that fans might feel bad slicing into them. Read the rest
It's pretty clear that whoever designed the four teaser posters for Disney's Solo: A Star Wars Story, drew a great deal of inspiration from the 2015 album covers designed by Hachim Bahous for Sony Music France’s Legacy Recordings.
From Quartz:
Imitation is an inevitability, says graphic design historian Steven Heller. “If something is good, it will knocked off,” he says. “Look at I ❤ NY. Look at Coke and Pepsi. Look at the ripoffs around the world for Starbucks.”
Heller says there appears to be enough visual similarities between Balhous design and Disney’s posters to make it seem like a copy: the condensed fonts, the weathered, textured background, the color palette, and the photo treatment of characters from the movie displayed inside the letters.
But of course, Balhous isn't the first designer to fill letters with images. Quartz offers the following examples of prior art:
Saul Bass’s rejected poster for “The Shining” (1980); Philip Castle’s poster for “Clockwork Orange,” (1972); Saul Bass’s poster for “The Cardinal” (1963)
Bahous wants credit and compensation from Disney, but if he takes it to court it will be an uphill fight. From Quartz:
Read the restDesigners need to satisfy two criteria to win a court case: They need to show “substantial similarities” (which Bahous arguably does in his Facebook post), and they need to prove that the designers had access to the original design work (in this case, his Sony CD covers). This could involve asking the Star Wars poster designers to show their inspiration boards or unpack their conceptual process at the trial.
From treehouses to homes on wheels to tiny off-grid cottages, the folks at Living Big In A Tiny House count down their five favorite tiny home tours from last year. Read the rest
