I just picked up the latest issue of the San Francisco Panorama today from Green Apple. McSweeney’s has proven that the American newspaper is still viable. It just takes a team of writers five months to produce a single issue, which sells for $17.52 :)
Filed under: design, McSweeney's, san francisco · 0 Comments
Elsa Mora’s flower girls are so pretty, they make me wish I had a garden (or want to raid my neighbor’s garden :)
Filed under: cuuuuute, design, flowers, inspiration · 1 Comment
I bought this necklace on etsy last week and it just came today. I love it! The necklace was designed by n-e-r-v-o-u-s system using a particle system applet they wrote, and then cut out of silicone rubber with a waterjet. The necklace has an imperfect clasp so I got it for $20 instead of $75. There are 3 more left at this price. Here’s more of their jewelry designs.
“the best way to stay updated with the design encyclopedia is through our ass”
design rule #1: choose a font that doesn’t make you look like ass.
Filed under: design · 2 Comments
It might have looked like this! (This was a school project by bhilmers)
Filed under: design, video · 0 Comments
Stefan Sagmeister, one of my favorite print designers, is going to be giving a talk at Stanford tomorrow. It’ll be in Pigott Hall (Bldg 260, Room 113) at 8pm. Here’s more on him
Stefan Sagmeister is one of the most influential graphic designers in the world working today. Since 1993 Sagmeister Inc., has focused on all things printed, including posters, brochures, books, and graphics and packaging for music clients…He’s created iconic album covers for Lou Reed, the Talking Heads, and the Rolling Stones…
Also, here’s a talk that he did at TED in 2004 that I recently watched while on the train. It’s called “Yes, design can make you happy.” I don’t know if design always makes me happy but this talk definitely did!
Filed under: design, upcoming, video, why are we here? · 0 Comments
Check out this impossibly-cute fake laptop keyboard. Someone call TikiRobot HR.. We need to hire this kid, stat!
Apparently the pet keys are shortcuts for webkinz. Via Shifted Librarian
Filed under: cuuuuute, design, doodles, multitouch, tronix · 1 Comment
For a long time now, I’ve wanted to come up with a way to make looking for used furniture on craigslist easier and less tedious. So last night, I came up with this.
If I had programming chops, I would have created some bot-thingy that automatically pulls stuff out of craigslist and formats it like you see on the site I came up with. But, since I have no programming chops, I used something called wists, which is a visual-bookmarking-tool that creates thumbnails of things I bookmark and organizes them into a nice little grid. It’s pretty neat. Although it’s still tedious for me to go through craigslist, since I have to bookmark something in order for it to appear on the site…but look! I’ve made it less tedious for you! :-)
Filed under: design · 8 Comments
Check out these neat illustrated playing cards. I ordered 3 different decks so we need to have a poker party when they arrive. You can order them here if you want a deck too.
Filed under: design, doodles · 0 Comments
Conceived by Brian Eno as “visual music”, his latest artwork, 77 Million Paintings is a constantly evolving sound and imagescape which continues his exploration into light as an artist’s medium and the aesthetic possibilities of “generative software”.
This exhibition is happening next weekend at the Yerba Buena Center and it’s only going to be up for 3 nights (actually only 2 nights for the general public). Let’s go! I loved reading his published journal A Year of Swollen Appendices so I’m curious. (I posted some snippets from the book last year over here).
More info and tickets over here.
Filed under: design, upcoming · 0 Comments
For my birthday, I received a package labeled FRAGILE LIKE EGGS! I need to work this phrase into my daily conversation…
I bet you can’t guess what was inside the box!
Filed under: design, wtf??? · 2 Comments
oh wow, there are some beautiful paper sculptures on Richard Sweeney’s flickr page and his website. so beautiful, i want to live in them!
Filed under: design, inspiration · 0 Comments
I got my FlyTech Dragonfly today. I had forgotten I ordered it … opening the box was a brief flash of genuine excitement … A dragonfly!!!!!!
Co-workers were as shocked at the $50 purchase as I was shocked that they couldn’t understand how cool this was … an RC dragonfly that flies by flapping its wings? … dude …. it has blue LEDs for eyes!!!
I found the FlyTech Dragonfly is tough to navigate in the two indoor spaces I tried: my open floor plan office and my apartment. They recommend 16×16 feet minimum for indoor flight, but I found even that to be too little. The ‘fly has large swings of pitch and yaw that I find difficult to control in small spaces. On the other hand, the ‘fly crashes into walls just like a real bug crashes into windows ;-) SMACK!!
But I had a great time just now taking the dragonfly out to the local park. His wings got wet from the dew on the grass. The ‘fly has about 10x more charm than an RC airplane or helicopter. Zipping by, close in, it felt more like a friend swinging by than a drone airplane.
Like the iPod, the ‘fly itself seems to have a non-replaceable internal battery. Interestingly, the way it works is you put 6 AA batteries in the remote control, and then you connect a cord to recharge the dragonfly’s internal recharchable battery. Charging takes about 20 minutes … flight time seems to be about 5-10 minutes. Never enough.
I think with some practice I will be able to launch Dragonfly from my 4th story balcony, fly around a bit, and then turn around for a SMACK!! landing against the sliding glass door. Naturally this will probably annoy my snotty neighbors
Link to FlyTech Dragonfly on Robots Rule
Filed under: design, science, tronix · 7 Comments
I love this site! It’s a collection of visualizations of complex networks from all manner of disciplines – Art, Biology, Transportation, Music etc. A treasure trove for design / data visualization geeks. There’s even a downloadable poster at the bottom of this page over here.
Filed under: design · 3 Comments
So I’m kind of bummed that I missed all the bikes that zipped through the Bay Area for the Tour of California last weekend (my mom was in town and it was Chinese New Year so there was family stuff to tend to) but I just discovered that I can follow all the other stages live from this nifty web app. I don’t actually follow cycling and have absolutely no idea what’s going on (there’s some information overload happening on this app)…but I like looking at photos of the landscape because it gets me psyched for June when I’ll hopefully make a similar (but shorter and muuuch slooooowwwer) trip down the coast. It also gets me psyched for the weekend so i can go on a bike ride!
Filed under: cartography, cycling, design · 1 Comment
A while back, I designed this tshirt with the intention of giving it to a friend for her birthday, but I never got around to printing it. I found it on my computer a couple days ago and finally decided to get one made so I sent it to Zazzle (an online make-your-own-tshirt-or-whatever-else-you-want shop). Today I got an email from Zazzle that said
Unfortunately, your order has been cancelled because it contains content that is in violation of United States copyright and/or trademark laws. Specifically, your order contains a product(s) with a copyright-protected image of Pac Man.
This really bums me out :-(
Filed under: design, tshirt · 5 Comments
If someone got me a cake like this I think I would start crying right there:
via Jamie via nonumnos
Filed under: design, food · 4 Comments
Covers is a nice site dedicated to the appreciation of book cover design.
When I was a kid, my fantasy job was to be a book cover designer. I imagined reading books all day and then designing covers for them, thereby combining my 2 favorite childhood activities. How cool would that be?!
Anyways, I don’t design books right now and I’ve been buying most of my books from Amazon these days but I still love going to Green Apple Books (my very favorite store in all of SF) to browse…I think part of the pleasure I get from going there comes from looking at all the different covers and touching the different types of paper…I always walk out with something beautiful I didn’t know about that makes me happy or that pokes my head in the all the right places, reminding me of how tiny my world is and expanding it just a little bit.
Browsing through this site feels a little bit closer to the serendipitous experience of browsing through Green Apple than browsing through Amazon. (though of course still not the same)
Filed under: books, design · 0 Comments
Did you know that the One Laptop Per Child laptop was a tablet as well?
It has a transflective screen so you can read it in the sun (and turn off the backlight and save battery). Also, it has three trackpads, mounted side-by-side, that can be used as a drawing surface. Only the middle trackpad is wired up right now..
Filed under: design, inspiration · 1 Comment
What a neat idea! “Stain is a set of a teacups designed to improve through use….The interior surface of the cup is treated so as to stain more in predetermined places. The more the cups are used, the more the pattern is revealed. Over time they will build up an individual pattern dependent on the users personal way of drinking tea.”
Filed under: design, neat · 4 Comments
When I was at Giant Robot last Saturday, I picked up this adorable book called The Little Book of Hindu Deities: From the Goddess of Wealth to the Sacred Cow
He’s also got a website called GheeHappy where he sells super cute prints and tshirts too!
Filed under: books, cuuuuute, design, doodles, tshirt · 1 Comment
Threadless is having a $10 Tshirt sale, so forget about the laundry, it’s time to stock up on new tees. and stock up now because the nice ones tend to sell out fast (like this one which is no longer available in girly sizes unfortunately…but all you boys can get it if you want girls to stare at your chest…well, nerdy ones like me at least.) If I were from the midwest, I’d be inclined to get this super sweet one…but since I’m not, I think I’ll make do with being a smooth criminal.
Oh and if you CLICK HERE TO ORDER your tee, you’ll be supporting TikiRobot because we’ll get a referral or something like that…which means if you order 3 shirts, we’ll almost be able to get ourselves one too (and won’t have to walk around naked). yay!
Filed under: design · 5 Comments
This is a pretty neat idea. Jeremy Keith of Adactio has come up with a little script that displays the multiple RSS feeds of his life (from Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, and his blog) by date and time, and eventually as a timeline.
Just about every time somebody publishes something on the Web, it gets time stamped. Wouldn’t it be nice to pull in all these disparate bits of time stamped information and build up a timeline of online activity?….Over the course of any particular day, I could be updating five or six RSS feeds, depending on how much I’m blogging, how many links I’m posting, or how much music I’m listening to. I’d like to take those individual feeds and mush ‘em all up together.
I don’t have quite as much of my life online as he does but I imagine if I saw my online activities displayed as a timeline I might be compelled to contribute a lot more.
Filed under: design · 4 Comments
About a month ago I was going on about trying to use a newsreader to keep up with all the RSS flying around. I tried Google News Reader, hated it. I tried about 10 other RSS readers, both web based and client software (mac)… I felt like they all missed the point.
When I’m reading RSS, I actually don’t give a monkey’s tail about the RSS. RSS is stupid, unformatted, unstyled text with no soul and even less information. The way to consume RSS coming from websites is to read it in it’s richest form: from the website itself. Some client newsreaders go a short way down this path by giving you button to open the article in your web browser. But this is totally lame. I mean, a drunk dog could open up a web browser and sit there through the World Wide Wait and sift through the blink tags and advertisements and try to read the article.
I am happy to make the first public mention of TikiRobotReader, a Mac OS X application that (eventually) will handle RSS in a way that is not totally dain bramaged. TRR is Open Source, a Cocoa application, and a work in progress.
The basic idea is that for a given Article, TRR will download the link to the article’s web representation and convert it to PDF so the articles are all nice and shiny and ready for your skimming pleasure, no waiting required. Here is what I want TRR to be:
The current release is ugly as hell, but functional. At this point TRR is best enjoyed by running out of XCode so you can debug crashes and implement nifty features. I will be using it as my daily news reader in this fashion. But the nightly builds are functional and get the idea across. Feel free to contribute! Design ideas are helpful and code contributions are always a good thing. TikiRobotReader is meant to present RSS the way you, the discerning TikiRobot! blog reader, think is best. TRR will be a great place to implement all those Web 2.0/client features we want but can’t get anywhere else.
Link to TikiRobotReader nightly build
Link to TikiRobotReader SourceForge page
Filed under: all talk, apps, cocoa, code code, design, lifehacking, meta, osx, tiki lifestyle · 5 Comments
