To Change Hearts and Minds...Change Their Chair! - Core77

http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/to_change_hearts_and_mindschange_their_chair_16836.asp#more
This was what I was going to link to today - a classic case of tactile feedback! Hard chairs make for hard attitudes.

aesthetics of joy

http://aestheticsofjoy.com/


This isn't what I was going to post, but Ingrid Fetell's "Aesthetics of Joy" is a charming blog of the genus "I wish I'd written that". Packed full of really interesting posts and links - marvel at the cubist art of the Dutch tulip growers, and discover what noises children in different countries think animals make! Brilliant. And that multicoloured cake looks just too good not to copy...

Colours In Cultures

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/
This is one of the best things I've seen on the internet in ages. I'm sure it's terribly simplistic and generalizes wildly, but what a fantastic thing! I love it and will refer to it in every technical report I do from now on, ever.

70+ of the Best Free Fonts for Graphic Designers.- unstage

http://www.unstage.com/2010/02/70-of-the-best-free-fonts-for-graphic-designers/
Again, just really bookmarking this for my own use, but some of you may find it interesting.

via core77, my source of all design-y goodness

Discount preselling - it's the way of the future, in advance.

http://www.moq7.com/
(via core77...)

One of the problems for a young designer is that it costs a lot of money upfront to create a product. In particular, for small, mass-produced items, sometimes it's simply impossible to get anyone to supply you with components unless you order a minimum order quantity, or MOQ.

This site helps get designers there. The MOQ target is displayed next to each product, and you get to order your item at a steep discount in return for not really knowing when it's going to be delivered (if ever, I guess). It's a great idea for getting young designers' stuff before they get famous, and allowing them to jumpstart their idea into mass production.

There's not a lot there, yet... and most of them are fairly batty (except for the oddly tedious one or two that smell like some fishfood company taking advantage). My favourite, though is this one - a toothbrush which redirects the water flow up into a nice arc for you to drink from. Inspired.

A couple of interesting links about colour and presentation

Thee have been sitting in my inbox for ages, so it's high time they were posted.

The first, livelgrey.com, is the work of a certain Igor Asselbergs, who as well as working as an illustrator and CEO of a company making digital colour design tools (whatever the heck they are), lectures and writes about colour. It's not that frequently updated, but what he says about the use of colour in design is interesting.

The other one is a bit more fun: infosthetics looks at how information is presented, and the aesthetics at work. 'S good.

It also has, I notice, a post about gapminder, which has to be one of the most fascinated and brilliantly presented look at international economic and social trends ever.

A Soviet Poster A Day

http://sovietposter.blogspot.com/
I have a weakness for Soviet design, of almost all varieties, and this site of Alexander Zakharov's is awesome. The space posters are great, but the early constructivist stuff - like this work of genius - are my favourite.

Resource: NASA measures up

I should say, this is one for the really hard-core geek - or design professional. I've long struggled to find a good resource with some figures for basic anthropometric data - average heights of people, grip strengths, etc. I finally stumbled on this a few weeks back: it's a NASA standard for man-machine interfaces, with a handy section of 'Human Capabilites'. Of course, it's strongly biased towards the sort of thing that might come in handy when designing spaceships, but it does have a lot of really useful stuff - plus a lot of random stuff about how bodies react to microgravity (they get bunged up noses, apparently - food should therefore be saltier. Remember that).


As a design tool, it has lots of flaws - essentially, it's based on young, fit American males, so using it to design, say, a playpen for toddlers would be a bit silly. Nonetheless, v interesting - in a dry, NASA-speak sort of way.

BMW publishes 'The Secret Life of Cars'

Via dezeen:

BMW have just published a report entitled 'The Secret Life of Cars' (download the 3.3MB pdf
here). On one level, it's a long paean to BMW dressed up as research; and there are a few places where some juicy nugget of information has, one suspects, been deleted (I can spot at least one reference to a paragraph no longer there). But there's still some interesting stuff. I especially liked the guy describing how the seating arrangements in British cars varied according to class:


"My American friend sent me a description of where English couples sit in cars. It made me laugh because it's so true. It said with a working class couple the two men sit up front and the women behind. With a middle class couple one couple sit in the front with the man driving and the wife in the passenger seat. And if its an upper class couple the couples mix up so one man drives and the other man's wife sits in the front. Genius."

There are also some interesting observations about who we allow in front of us (small cars let other small cars in, women are more likely to let others in, etc) - although it seemed obvious to me that similar cars are more likely to be polite to each other. After all, the drivers have something in common already.


I do, however, harbour a secret suspicion that every driver quoted is a BMW driver.

WhatTheFont : MyFonts

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/


If you've ever come across a particular bit of writing and wondered what font it was in, then this is the tool for you. Upload a picture of the text (gif, jpeg, etc., etc.) and after a bit of jiggery pokery it'll suggest a list of possible fonts.

I tried it a while back and it worked brilliantly - but I was idly wondering about some text on the side of a drinks carton this afternoon, and I remembered what a brilliant tool this was.

Normal Room (normal my arse)

http://www.normalroom.com/index.php
It's a nice idea - people around the world take photos of their homes and upload them, letting you do a bit of sneaky voyeurism under the guise of ethnographic research. But really, how normal are these rooms going to be? Not very, and not for very long, is my guess. See how quickly this place turns into an audition space for 'Home and Garden' magazine.

Having said that, it's really interesting. What strikes me is how similar these rooms across the world are - there doesn't seem to be a vast amount of cultural difference apparent.



via core77

Open Architecture Network

http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org/
Still only a baby network really, mostly stuff that is already covered in the book Design like you give a Damn', but has the potential to be really, really interesting, I think.


via core77 which also has some interesting ideas on ways of using lulu.com for printing portfolio books, supposedly very cheaply...

Superuse.org: Where recycling meets design

http://www.superuse.org/
"Superuse is a online community of designers, architects and everybody else who is interested in inventive ways of recycling."

Most of the references seem to be Dutch, but that's just another good reason to register and post more stuff that's local to you. My favourite is the 'materials' section, which ranges from the eminently sensible through the perversely attractive to the pointlessly desirable...

Instructables : How to make your own (mini) Plastic Vacuum Former

http://www.instructables.com/id/ELPFLBN6A9EYJ3I2F0
God bless instuctables! I am so doing this.

Check out the comments: "To make it larger use peg board siliconed to a cat liter tub and attach it to a shop vac." Oooo....

Must admit I rather fancy a slightly larger version. Think I might need a slightly larger flat first though...

Pictoplasma!

In the absence of any exciting projects of my own to share (I have several which I want to post, but they're not ready yet), core77 brought me this blast from the past. I came across pictoplasma in book form a few years back and loved it, but here's the website! It's a directory of 6500 character graphics and they are universally very very cool. Check out the archive. Great place for inspiration.