Every now and then I post some fairly interesting (and often dug in) things in my journal, but trolling through all those many many entries to find what I was looking for was not easy. As such, I’ve moved all the juicy good bits to right here. Handy, hey?
[update]So, its been a while, and as such I make no promises that the links still go to the things of awesome. Hopefully they do, if they don’t let me know and I’ll remove them![/update]
21/11/07
-Jim Erickson’s Portfolio Site
-this man is fantastic. His shots are gorgeous! I particularly liked the Tango set :)
-Tetris furniture
-funky and fairly awesome :) Pity its just a concept.
-Reebok has joined up with John Maeda, and together they have joined art and mathematics and put them on a sneaker. *grin*
-So, Burton put their boards up in a gallery and had a show! Its pretty awesome, and getting to see the art behind the boards. :)
-Its an egg cup *with* soilders (ironic, hey?)
-Concordia Children’s Services in the Philippines had a very effective ad campaign . . . its kinda scary to think about really.
-Another fantastic photographer
-Jeremy Cowart :) (and on an awesome note, he did the photo shoots for a bunch of shows, the most exciting (in my opinion) being Prison Break! Yay!)
-DC are making art
-hurrah!
-The Feed Project: Buy 1 FEED bag = 1 child fed in an school environment for one year. Every little bit helps, right?
-Cute little place in the woods. Sometimes good design just blows me away.
-Auckland Advertising steps up. Saatchi and Saatchi placed Batman stickers on the lights around Sky City, so when the lights were on, the beams had mini batmans in them. :)
-Its Garbage Bag Art, to help make Tokyo pretty. :)
-Take the old school and cut bits out. Add some amusing text, and waala! You have Silhouette Master Piece Theatre! :)
-Its a dominio trail, Guiness Style
-Cute Christmas cards from the Shama Foundation (non profit organisation helping Madagascar’s children)
-XKCD
-spreading the love.
-SelfHealing tape. Works for me! :D!
-Catbird has a gorgeous bunch of quaint jewelery (check out Verameat, with their dino rings!)
05/11/07
-Completely not lethal mouse traps
-Death of Street Art in Barcelona :(
-Gun Mug
-For Serious? Fireplaces that are gorgeous, and don’t look like giant encasing steel boxes . . .
-Sugar Skulls, just in case you like them sweet *and* crunchy.
-Tin can speaker set *grin* Slightly ironic, yes?
-Push away stairs. Just in case you needed the extra space . . .
-kawaiinot is a webcomic that is horribly cute and often horribly wrong. This particular one made me giggle :)
-Its an self sufficent ecofriendly small little apartment that you can place pretty much anywhere you need to. Kinda cute, I think :)
-Sander Plug have designed a rather weird clip by the name of ‘Chocolade Hass’, in which a few chocolate bunnies are melted in grotesque fashions. It’s all done in pastels and has a very eerie (considering the content) soundtrack . . .
-So they take the subject line from their SPAM, and they make it ART :)
-I like sneakers. Quite alot, actually. And now that adicolor has been out for a while, Nike is doing something similar. Except, they’re doing it with *style*. :) Fancy smancy, ooohh yeah!
-Where the wild Things are brought for Halloween *grin*
-So, its apparently the worlds simplest folding bike, thats lightweight and ultra portable. Mmhmm. Its also one of the weirdest looking bikes I’ve seen.
-The making of Adidas Soccer Balls, in photo form :)
-Corey Arnold is a fantastic. Check out is Human Animal, Animal Human series.
-The never ending rainbow.
-Mapping all colours of the rainbow in your BRAIN.
18/10/07
-It’s politically correct
-Tattoos for the blind. Visual adnorment for the visually impared.
-It’s amusing, but true. Thumbsucker Movie Posters. Flawedness and pain is okay.
-It’s kinda cute
-Custom made Mr Potato Heads :)
-It’s bright and pretty
-Sony Bravia: the Pyramid.
-It’s bright and cute
-Sony Bravia: the Bunnies.
-It’s handmade. Boots, with an emphasis on handmade.
-It’s space worthy
-Money For Space (Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination or QUID).
-It’s kiwi art
-which I’d very much like to visit.
-It’s about translation. To French, but it seems to work okay.
-It’s kinda novel. The Human Flipbook (done with tshirts, not humans, so don’t worry)
-It’s rollerman.
-It’s designer goodies. Formstark
-whole bunch of well designed clever functional stuff! *drools*
-It’s Unatural naturalness. Landscape architect Gunther Vogt Kunsthaus Bregenz has (re?)created natural landscapes in manmade enviroments. Is this where our future is headed? Really?
-It’s real cgi
-While its usual for us to see some rendered wireframe CGI, Toyota have gone that much further and acutally rendered a Corolla using *wire*. Its pretty damn awesome . . .
-It’s mindblowing. Seriously. Mind blowing animation. Be wow’d.
-It’s clever marketing. Accidents at Sea, with a twist that drives the point home :(
25/09/07
-Geekery in the extreme. Ms Paint extradionare.
-Old school seasame st crayola segment (Man, I doubt its that labour intensive now.) Still cool to look back and see.
-Andre Zuckerman has a book called ‘creatures’ coming out in October, and I was blown *away* but its magnifacence. :) (and seriously, flick through all the photos until you get the making of at the end. I am so so jealous!)
-Recycling at its best, Green Light Concepts makes cool lamps out of old traffic light covers :)
-So, street art is something which is constantly evolving. Its the fight between the wall owners keeping their tunnel/bridge/motorway barriers a nice shade of grey, and the artists designing their bombs and showing their skills. Other things takes the walls and shows their history. Nice to know this art isn’t gone forever.
-This is a Citroen ad, novel. Its basically a rubix cube of *cars*.
-Clever lamp shadows :)
-Minesweeper, the movie. Need I say more?
-RB Solutions
-takes photos with a Canon EOS 20D, and ads amusing cartoons/photoshops.
-Gummy Bin, for recycling gum! Cute, and better than it being on the road, right?
-Peter Callesen does absolutely *fantastic* works of art in paper form. Well and truely amazing!
-Photosynth appears to be a social photo 3d/spatial model maker, that takes visual data from ordinary networking sites, like flickr, say. Its been joined with Seadragon, and truly appears to be a step forward in spatial imaging technology. (Vid Example)
-Clever
-using flash (I think) this person draws a lady from her skeleton, up. Its pretty clever!
-A fun game, all you have to do is get your little guy (who has two spiderman like wire things) as far along the course as you can. Addictive!
-A site with an interface WITHOUT clicks!
-I need this, its ‘everthing is okay’ tape.
-Escher’s “relativity” in Lego form
-The shooting of all sorts of things, crayons, $100 bills . . . amusing photography.
30/08/07
-It’s art
- The Luminary series focuses on unfocused light. On a cursory level, it speaks to a simplicity of form and color and their interplay. With further study of the 8 images as a whole, various themes, emotions and interpretations begin to develop. Mostly, I’d like to have these on my walls, thanks.
-It’s cuteness
-origami jewelery (made from sheets of silver!) I was kind amazed that this was out there (and seriously, 99% silver!)
-It’s fucking awesome! Steampunk lightsabre: Bringing Star Wars to the industrial age. *grin* Okay, forgetting that everytime I watch Star Wars I fall asleep (pretty much without fail), I still know what a Light Sabre is, and I kinda like that instead of being retrofuturistic, its industrial :)
-It’s minimalist. Abacus magnetic watches. Basically theres a ball on the inside of the watch, and when you level out the little ball stps at the time! :D!
-It’s fandom. *grin* An interesting entry in the Daily Prophet.
-It’s a house on a stick.
-It’s American. Cowboys are cooler than builders, right? Cowboy hard hats are the cool way to pretend your not a builder :P (Includes pictures from Extreme House Makeover, just to show you that building and cowboys *can* coexist)
-It’s squee worthy, if you like Heroes. They have milk now. :)
-It’s history
-The Art of Chris Sanders (who has a fantastic history of working for the likes of Disney, and now Dreamworks
-you should totally check out his profile).
-It’s nakedness. In order to raise awareness about Global Warming, Spencer Tunick and greenpeace photographed a whole lot of naked people. Because we all know how much nakedness increases awareness . . .
-It’s more cuteness! A very clever chickabee changes super big tshirts into cute dresses and tops and wearable things
-hurrah! :) I like clever and chic recycling. Woot!
16/08/07
-Bravia (who did the ad with the millions and millions of balls, and the bursted paint building) are now doing another! This time, with many many bright playdoh bunnies!
-In Rome its fashionable to express your love by leaving a lock on a bridge, and throwing the ‘key to my heart’ off the side. Apparently inspired by Federico Moccia’s recent book, Ho Voglio di Te.Oh
-sweetness! *happy sigh* :)
-Speaking of love (or in this case, gentlemanly pride), Blur Studios presents A Gentlemans Duel
-an absolutely fabulous animation that is filled with Giant Robots, boobs, and a very suave butler. :)
-And following on the robot theme, Buynlarge is up and running. Buynlarge appers to be a robot selling corporation created entirely by pixar . . . Its all very amusing. I hope the associated animated feature (a least, I *assume* there will be an associted animated feature, this is *pixar*, right? [edit]Of course there is an animated feature! WALL.E, brought to you buy Disney and Pixar
-hurrah! :D![/edit])
-What else? If your really bored there have been a bunch of games designed to test human capabilities:
-Red Square is apparently designed to find fighter jet pilots. If you get to 25, your doing well!
-Shoot the Sheep is designed to test your reflexes, and
-Defense Tower is an addictive strategy game.
-Also, Watercones are a cleverly designed contraption to get clean, drinkable water where there would otherwise be no clean, drinkable water.
-*drools* The Ikea 2008 Catalogue is out. We don’t have *anything* even *close* to being an equivilent of Ikea here. And the catalogue is just so shiny!
-And in other pretty and shiny things, Etsy provides the prettiest and shinest things around! :)
06/08/07
-Park Planters (Beware, some of the panels are NC17) Drawing inspiration from the bonsai, park planters were created to elevate the common household plant to the status of full grown tree. The potted plant becomes the backdrop for an urban park scene. Ranging from dog walkers to flashers and muggers, no two scenes are alike ensuring the autonomy of each piece.
-From EW, aninterview with Joss Whendon
-exciting news about Buffy! Hurrah!
-Airmail letters in which to send your news and thoughts on random things that fly. Like pigs, say.
-Muggle pants
-a cute little animated segment of the Quidditch World Cup. :)
-Index cards of LIFE. Amusing, crasy, AWESOME.
-Wanna see a Giant Skull made of pots and pans floating in Venices Grand Canal? Suuure you do.
-Axe strikes again, with another hilarious ad campaign. This time is the “Get A Girlfriend” 3 step process to take you from the scenes shown to having the ladies hanging all over you in no time. Just quietly, I thought that frog leaping contest was pretty cool :)
30/08/07
-cuteness
-Adidas and Yoshiaki Kaihatsu take what would be normal adidas traksuits and make ‘em into cute little stuffed toys!
-Itsa choose you own ending story that you follow by walking the streets of San Francisco. Clever indeed. Kinda makes you want to go to SF, right?
-Apparently happiness is just around the corner (Street art in Barcelona
-wooster’s celebrating).
-Joe Sheehan is a Wellington artist who “takes the ordinary and makes it more by carving them out of greenstone and being ironic. For example his piece ‘Song remains the same’ is a cassette tape carved from Canadian jade, with a ‘river recording’ nestled on the inside. Amusing, hey?
-Pimp my rice paddy: Each year, farmers in the town of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture create works of crop art by growing a little purple and yellowleafed kodaimai rice along with their local greenleafed tsugaruroman variety. This year’s creation
-a pair of grassy reproductions of famous woodblock prints from Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji
-has begun to appear. It will be visible until the rice is harvested in September.
-Much has been said about British bad boy artist DAMIEN HIRST’s groundbreaking $100 million diamondencrusted platinum skull titled “For The Love of God” since it went on display at London’s White Cube Gallery in June, but to date, little has been revealed about the making of this bling masterpiece. Supertouch offers a stepbystep look at the creation of this masterpiece.
-Clever. what you can’t see with your eyes CAN be seen with your camera. Assuming, of course, that your happy to have advertising in your photos . . . kameraflageTM is possible because digital cameras see a broader spectrum of light (colors) than human eyes. By rendering content in these invisible colors we are able to create displays that are invisible to the naked eye, yet can be seen when imaged with a digital camera.
-So, I have a thing for stripy socks
-and now you can get them from VENDING MACHINES! :) Novel, right?
-Invisible City
-Superb urban sculpture in Wellington by artist Anton Parsons. Two steel slates covered with a braille message. Check out a close up here.
19/07/07
-Sand Sculptures of the most fantastic kind. Impressive to say the least.
-Loire Estuary 2007 is an outdoor, contemporaryart exhibition now taking place in France. All of the work is being installed along a 40mile stretch at the mouth of the Loire River, from SaintNazaire to Nantes. Florentijn Hofman’s massive rubber duck is definitley something to looksee. :)
-The Simpsons go to Paris with Linda Evangelista. The Simpsons ladies become models, this post displays the Simpsons article, the designers, and the fashion pieces. :) Novel indeed, Illustrations by Julius Preite.
18/07/07
-For the fifth anniversary of the Schiermonnikoog International Chamber Music Festival Florentijn Hofman placed a series of grand pianos on a derelict beach. “This refers to stranded cargo and ditto whales. To be salvaged or saved; in any case to be wondered and surprised about. To one person it’s of value beyond measure, the other looks upon it as being just derelict wood. Islanders come and gather, to admire, to salvage or to save and, thus, see their beach again in a whole new perspective.”
-Call me a soppy romantic, but I thought Andrew English’s rings with imprinted fingerprints were awfully cute
-Euclide’s current exhibition “I Have Been Remembering: HalfLives And HalfTruths,” feature hundreds of oneinch drawings of Seattle landscapes, each encased in a single puff of bubble wrap. But that wasn’t all, there were bubble pieces mounted to the gallery’s front window which were injected with water from local sources and other bubbles glued to the floor of the gallery’s front entrance prevent visitors from entering without popping the pieces. Taking the exhibit outside the gallery walls, additional bubble wrap pieces are scattered throughout the streets of Seattle.
-If your in Seattle from the 14 July to the 7 August, go to the OKOK Gallery and have a look see, because some of us aren’t lucky enough to live in that part of the world to see such fantasticness.
-In the interest of reducing energy consumption Mark Ontkush wrote an article about how much could be economized if a Google page used a black background instead of white (as whenever your PC screen is all white the computer will consume about 74 watts. When black it uses an average of 59 watts). Taking into account the enormous popularity of the site, according to Mark’s calculations, about 750 megawatts/hour would be economized each year. Using this data Google created an all dark version of his search engine calling it Blackle that works exactly as the original version but consumes less power. Pretty fancy, right?
16/07/07
-Tinywarbler’s Etsy Shop sells the cutest handmade elephants and wales. Just quietly I’m jonesing for the elephant with the green ears.
-The writer of Buffy and Firefly and I think Star Trek (and who apparently also hangs out on the Vancouver sets of Battlestar Galatica) who is otherwise known as Jane Espenson has a blog! Most of its writing stuff but occasionally something else shines through :)
-Telecon
-a parody of Telecom’s ads. :) Ah, such amusing paradoys often come with big old companies that are quite happy to rip you off . . .
-Christian Ward is a freelance illustrator and is most definitely of the awesome :)
-Dollar Oragami: You haven’t seen money till its in Praying Mantis form, or even Stegasaurus form (Oh yeah, you read that right, some guy made a Stegasaurus out of an american one dollar bill!)
-Barcelona happy pills are the kind that I really really like :) yay for sugary goodness!
06/07/07
-Shiny Energy Saving Adaptor: According to the EDF “the standby mode of electrical appliances can respresent up to 10% of electrical consumption of housing”. This is a fancy way to control those trixy standby modes!
-Rain Water Garden: “Rainwater has been used to create an ideal microclimate for a water garden, without wasting a drop. Aqva Garden is an ingenious system designed by ecoLogicStudio (alias Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto) in collaboration with another two young designers (Francesco Brenta and Laura Micalizzi), presented for the first time at this year’s Milan Furniture Fair.”
05/06/07
-Threadless.com: I’m still totally in love with threadless. I’m addicted to shirt buying, not to mention I get all excited when I recognise a threadless shirt on someone else. Its like we’re one big club! :)
-The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot that is on earth,r ight now. Mostly I think its a bit freaky looking, like two guys in a scrum that runs in sync with each other instead of against each other. Interesting to see what the miltary is doin, wouldn’t you say?
-Extra (the gum) did a cute animated ad that I swear, is the cutest. Thing. Ever.
-Underwater Exhibition: The sculptor Jason Taylor did an underwater exhibition, the besides being gorgeous, helps coral reef regeneration in the Caribbean. Functional Art. :)
25/05/07
-The Skirball Center in LA (which is apparently ‘one of the world’s most dynamic Jewish cultural institutions’), is having a noah’s ark exhibition. It all looks pretty cool, and fancy and interactive. Most, I liked the kiwis :)
-Plastic Oceans by Susan Casey is a very scary article. Basically we need to be aware of nurdles (lentilsize pellets of plastic in its rawest form) that are seriously damaging our oceans. Nurdles people! Be aware!
24/05/07
-Walking Speeds: So, it appears that people are walking FASTER nowadays. Well, according to iptv who wrote a fancy article about it. Also, apparently, “Men are generally 25 per cent quicker on their feet than women”. Thats a whole 25%! So, my walking speed may NOT be slow, in comparison to the general walking speed of women in NZ. It probably is, but there is a chance its not, and that my walking speed is perfectly acceptable, thank you very much.
23/05/07
-Earnest Sewn: How awesome is this store? You can go in and select the material and buttons and pockets and EVERYTHING and they custom make your JEANS! Plus, their site is so very cool (very old school Americana). *sigh* If I was a millionaire, right after feeding lots of hungry people, jeans it would be!
18/05/07
-designhead.net have gone scary. They designed a gas shower mask, which is cool, yes, but mostly creepy as.
-thinkgeek.com have produced a clever Hydrodynamic Building Set. Its like lego, but for water. Way fun.
14/05/07
-iwanexstudio.com is a site where they photoshop people to make them look more gorgeous in cosmetic/beauty campaigns, with alot of famous people. Its kinda interesting to look at the before and afters.
-The Encyclopedia of Life! Kind of like wiki, except they are look at creating an entry for all “1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet”
-wow! They have a couple demonstration pages, and it mentions that it probably won’t be available to the general public to late 2008. Still, exciting!
-quester.peugeot.fr: Peugeot Cuteness! (Oh! I wish I spoke french!)
-rimowa.com created an awesome ad filmed in Rio De Janero about travel cases. The colours and culture
-oh so very clever.
09/05/07
-The Mrzyk And Moriceau Show was held in NY at hte Max Lang Gallery. I WISH I lived somewhere so I could’ve see this. Alas!
Jason Sho Green has created a shop full of AWESOME. Yay for Jason Sho Green! :)
Marble Magents: At some point I’d like to make these cute Marble Magnets. However, knowing myself as I do, I think posting here and later admiring the pictures is as probably as far as its going to go.
03/05/07
-Grown Up Seating It’s basically a seesaw for adults, which I thought was kinda nostalgic sweet.
-Solid Poetryis basically just fancy paving blocks that get patterned when they get wet. Kinda like a secret.
-Energy Consumption Campaign: I thought this was clever. Its a enviromental awareness campaign thats very visual, to get people to think about how much energy it consumes before you buy it. And effective, I thought.
-Adobe’s Interactive Mural is another example of advertising being clever, and Adobe’s Interactive Mural demonstrates this so well. This kinda marketing campaign is AWESOME, something I kinda wish that ICONZ were awesome enough to think up. Alas, our budget is more with letterbox drops than big awesome interactive murals.
29/03/07
-TShirt Sites of the Awesome: owlmovement.com, boundlessny.com, funkrush.bigcartel.com, shirtstain.com, bustedtees.com, theryde.com, mrvintage.co.nz, scarygoround.com,brandneusense.com and aisleside.com.
15/02/07
-Fancy Fancy Fancy Things that indeed are very very very fancy.
-Zink.com are very clever, and have developed the technology to produce polariods WITHOUT INK! How very very clever!
-Technabob.com have a bunch of shiny things, but none as shiny as this. :)
-Seasonal Sculpture Parks are one of those things I wish I’d gone out and done instead of wasting my weekends being lethargic . . .
13/03/07
-Why do you do what you do? No. Seriously? Why?
06/03/07
-Shut down day is exactly what it sounds like. Its a day in which to shutdown your computer and leave it alone.
26/02/07
-Index Cards of the most amusing kind.
-This is the car of the future. I WANT one!
-Urban Curators “is a project highlighting the interesting and unexpected areas in urban enviroments”. Art in the ordinary
-very very clever. :)
