Font-loving

I get regular updates from Veer about their various product offerings. (While I like their design-geek merchandise, unfortunately their shipping costs to Canada are rather prohibitive to me actually ordering anything).

In any event, I get updated about their fonts, and each and every time I see their font selection, I'm always instantly in love with anything by Alejandro Paul. I think it has to do with the beautiful ligatures in his script fonts -- exampled by the "lf" of "Hybrid golf nights" and the double-ff in "My Affair" below.



I'm trying to justify the need to purchase these beautiful fonts ($395 for 5 typefaces), but have yet to find a project that needs them...

Cool DIY pinhole cameras

I *think* I originally saw this on drawn.ca. (?)
Corbis (a source for images of all sorts) has a fun little site where you can download .pdfs of readymech pinhole cameras that you can make yourself. FOR FREE! Readymechs are *free* flatpack toys that you can download, print and build using a standard letter-sized page.



The downloads give you a full list of required materials (which includes an empty film canister and how to open one), and then you too can make your own pinhole camera.

Check out the site to see some of the images taken with a pinhole camera. I've always loved these simple cameras and how you can take an ordinary scene and produce these wonderfully surreal images with a box, a small hole and some film.

I'm looking forward to the day when our son is old enough to try out this sort of fun stuff with him.

Custom wedding invitations

We recently designed some custom wedding invitations for our friends Shona and Craig which turned out so nicely that I thought I'd show them off.

Shona and Craig aren't stuffy-wedding-nazi types and they wanted something on the modern side that didn't look like it was too sappy. They definitely didn't want anything that was 'stock' looking either, and coming up with a custom invite was one of the most fun design projects we've ever had.

When they mentioned that their ceremony would be in an arboretum, I started playing around with a stylized tree. Note the subtle hearts formed with the branches :)

They picked a beautiful pearl-metallic blue card stock of a nice snappy thickness. Into the laser-cutter it went! (We really like playing with our laser and seeing just how fine a resolution we can push it to).

The end result was this:


The invitation text was printed onto matte-white cardstock with the tree motif repeated inside:

Congrats to Shona and Craig! May your wedded life be blissful and full of unicorn-sappiness! ;)

By the way...

We've lowered the regular price on our earrings from $120 to $89. This means that if you've got a promo code, you'll get even more savings.

So in case you were eyeing them before, take another look.
(We were able to lower the price due to some much better metal supplier prices, so we're reflecting that in the pricing of the earrings. Yay!)

Habitrails for all sizes

A Habitrail for those of you that never got the opportunity to look after the class mascot in grade school, is a really cool system of cages, tunnels, observation areas etc. designed to keep your little hamster/gerbil/mouse active and happy. As a kid, I envied the fun that the hamster must be having!

Well, now I can envy fish too.

Octopus Studios has these Habitrail-esque aquariums that look so amazing. The company is based in France, but they ship worldwide -- though, prices start at $3400. And then there's that small problem of cleaning... (Found via Gizmodo)

Thankfully, we've recently found human-sized Habitrails locally.

If you're in Ottawa, and you have kids, I highly recommend checking out Cosmic Adventures. It's a little on the pricey side if you're going for a single visit, but since we live fairly close, we opted for the super-deluxe annual membership, where we've already broken even with 8 visits in 6 weeks. Since our son is still young enough to require constant supervision, we've made the sacrifice and gone up to the upper eschelons on the play structure with him ;)

My inner child is quite happy there.

"Make my logo bigger!" cream

This will probably only be really funny to the designer-types out there. Though, it might also strike a little too close to home for anyone who has ever had a client who has hired them for their expertise, only to have said client request the opposite of what you've recommended (you know, as the "expert").



The folks over at Agency Fusion created a (very long) parody infomercial for a bunch of products: "Make my logo bigger!" cream, "White space eliminator" spray, "Starburst" dust, "Fluorescencesizer", and "Emotionator".

"Now that's what I call stand-out advertising!"

For just three easy payments of $29.95, you could get all of them above! The video on this site is long, but it's worth the chuckle.

Plushie! for the pattern impaired

Saw this via BoingBoing:


It's "Plushie: an interactive design system for plush toys". It's a little interactive program that allows someone who couldn't draw a pattern to save their life (me! me!) to create patterns for 3D plush toys. They've got a link for the demo program (see under 'Demonstrations'), but it's for Windows only and not for us lowly mac users. It looks intriguing enough though, that I'm willing to unearth my old, loud PC to give it a shot.

I've made plushies in the past, but they've been more along the lines of fluffified flat shapes, as evidenced by these:


These are my version of Eric's parents, done in miniature, about 5" high, with cardboard versions of their furniture. It was part of their Christmas gift a couple of years ago, and it's been hard to top... I figure the gift of the grand-child will just have to suffice now.

In any case, I'm already thinking I'd like to try more 3D plushies when there's actually time. (Time?)

Oh and FYI: next Tuesday the 18th is our last day for taking orders. Then we're closing shop until New Year's. We'll still be around answering emails though. And if you're stuck for a gift, and don't want to do the panicked, last-minute shipping, we've always got gift certificates.

When pigs fly

A while back, someone (my better half, maybe?) introduced me to the Flying Pig company, because they obviously knew that I have this fascination for paper engineering in its many forms (elaborate origami, pop-up books, whathaveyou).

I just love the idea that something that comes as a 2-D form can be manipulated into something almost magically 3-D.
The Flying Pig makes these wonderful paper animation kits that are "paper models you make that move."

And they do have some pretty elaborate and whimsical models. Of them all, my favourites include their namesake 'Flying Pig':



and the 'T Rex':


Make sure to check out their page of free downloadable kits too. They're FREE! (I downloaded one, but I haven't had the time yet to actually assemble it).

Mix-ee-pliz-ik

I realize that the postings have slowed down a bit and I have no other excuse except that I've been balancing the usual rigours of being the mother of a kid who wants and reaches for everything! and perhaps my new inexplicable addiction to playing scrabble online against my friends via Facebook doesn't help things. Needless to say, my productivity has gone way down.

I recently found the Mxyplyzyk store -- and they've got some whimsically designed stuff, including:
This booster seat for $22 US (though, not appropriate yet for our monkey since there are no straps):


The nutty squirrel nutcracker ($20):


For you comic book geeks out there, the store's name comes from early Superman comics. They also have a bricks & mortar store in NYC which was a fun visit when we were there a couple of years ago.

Art of the Business Card

If you're looking for inspiration in the design of your own business card, or just want to go looking at some good examples of well thought-out, graphic design, take a look at this Flickr Group: Art of the Business Card.

There are over 500 images of different business cards. Most of them go beyond the simple little piece of cardstock that just gets thrown in goldfish bowls in restaurants offering a draw for a free lunch :)

Here's a couple of examples.
A clever use of props for this hair and make-up artist's card:


And a full set of company cards, indexed depending on which department you're looking for:


While there are some great ideas here, and some fanatastic-looking ones that are round or longer or bigger than your typical business card, like this manicurist's card(that puts die-cuts to good use):

the ones I like best are those that actually work within the normal parameters of a business card since the unusually shaped ones just don't work for practicality for fitting in rolodexes!

And the Award Goes to... an Award?

While browsing through the latest I.D. Annual Design Review, I was stopped by a photo of this beautiful, pointy object (page 103 for those who have access to the annual).



The shiny pyramid turned out to be the Vilcek trophy given annually to American immigrants who have made a lasting contributions in the arts and sciences. Also included with the award is a cheque for $50,000. I'm assuming part of this money is to be used to create a mantle worthy of such an award. It just wouldn't look right on an IKEA Billy bookcase.

The award winning award is individualized with the recipients name in the base. How is it made you ask? At least that's what I wanted to know. Turns out it's an extrusion using rapid prototyping technology that was then plated in silver. I was a little disappointed that it was that simple, but what an impact. A superb use of the technology.

The design is by Sagmeister, and here I thought I didn't like nything they ever did. (BTW not a big fan of his present website either, it really does a number on my astigmatism).

Beyond just a folding chair

I can't remember where I found this originally, but I did think it was cool enough at the time to bookmark it.



This is definitely a design I'd like to see up close and personally.

P.S. Happy fourth of July to our American friends!

Vincent Reardon

It was kind of neat, when in reading the Apartment Therapy blog, I came across some furniture designs that I actually recognized.

Now it's one thing to recognize a Le Courbusier lounger, or a Pantone chair, it's another thing to recognize a design because you'd seen sketches of it. By the designer. Because you had to sit in some boring classes with them.

Vincent Reardon is the collaborative efforts of Matt Pauk and Rob Tang, who recently debuted their furniture designs at this year's ICFF. Both are former classmates of mine whose furniture designs are fantastic. (And I've always been jealous of their sketching ability).

Here's just a couple of examples of their designs.
The slot sofa:



And the cuppa end table:



Check out their full collection here. I'm going to make a point of checking their site now and then just to see what else these guys design.

Cool tool

There's a part of me that really enjoys walking through paper and fabric stores and being able to fully appreciate the texture and tactility of the materials. The problem is there aren't very many 'cool' or 'modern' fabrics or paper available to us locally, so much of what we see around us is rather traditionally or even boring.

Both paper and fabric designs are an interesting study of repetition and pattern and while I've never dabbled in the design of either, it does intrigue me. I recently came across Symmetry Works from Artlandia that could make designer repeats a lot easier. Symmetry Works is an Adobe Illustrator plug-in that will take any vector artwork that you've made and apply the necessary transformations to make a repeated pattern.



The download for the plug-in costs $229 US, so it's a bit pricey as something to play around with, but it does intrigue me...

..and we're back :)

First of all Happy New Year and hello again to those of you who read (or used to read) our blog. To make a long story short, we got a little busy over the holiday season with our orders, our feature in Real Simple magazine, and our first Christmas with a baby in the family :) -- it's hard to say what kept us the busiest...

Suffice it to say, once again, I will be attempting to post on a semi-regular basis.

First up -- anyone who's been wanting one of our large-inlay pendants, beit a washi pendant, ox bone pendant or anything else, we've got good news! We've restocked and we'll be open for orders of these pieces at 8pm EDT tonight. If for some reason we sell out again though, we will have to stop taking orders once again, but we do think we'll have enough supply at least for the next little while.

And now onto something fun: Sketch furniture by FRONT (I think we found this via BoingBoing maybe?) It's an interesting concept where members of a design group called FRONT were able to make 3D SLAs of sketches of furniture that they drew in free space that were motion captured. The result were these interesting, organic furniture pieces:



Make sure to check out the You-Tube video on their page.

Recycling in a cool way

We actually have a little folder of goodies that we mean to blog about, and over the last two months, this folder has slowly gotten bigger and bigger, but there never seems to be the time to sit down and write a post. This is where we conveniently blame our kid (gratuitous picture of offspring here):


Now on to the real reason for this post... I've been meaning to write about Freitag for a while. Freitag sells a number of different bags (including all sorts of totes and messenger bags),


and the idea is that you choose not only from different truck tarps, but also the exact piece of the tarp from which you'd like your bag to be made. Just go to the F-cut, and you can start customizing your own bag:



A completely customized bag is then cut by hand and made just for you (For $220 US). Pretty cool eh?

Expanding shoes = Longer product life

We found Inchworm shoes recently via surfing Gizmodo.
These kids' shoes expand one full size (in half-size increments) thereby increasing the amount of time that your kid can actually wear them since for such wee little feet chances are, the shoes won't get worn out, but rather grown out.

There's quite the range of styles for both little girls and boys. It's nice to know that 5% of the sales goes towards Juvenile Diabetes Research.
The Prowler ($19.95)


Cute! These slip-on Primers ($19.95)


From a product design point of view, I'd love to get my hands on a pair to see just how the sizing mechanism works.

(They even address this a bit in their FAQ:
Why hasn't this been done before?
Because as simple as it is to operate the shoe - this was not easy to accomplish!)

Boob tubes

I'd seen these Hannspree TVs a while back and I was reminded of them when I thought of how a friend's three-year-old had asked for a Dora the Explorer TV last Christmas (though, they didn't indulge that request). While the Dora TV was merely a pink TV with 'Dora' decals, the Hannspree products take 'theme products' to the next level.

Some of these sets are pretty neat looking:


Like this Retro-looking Mickey 10" LCD TV (on sale for $180 US) since it lends some styling without being too over-the-top.

Other Hannspree sets though go way overboard to the point where the look of the TV could tend to interfere with the whole idea of watching what's on it.

Red Apple 10" LCD TV, $400


Semi-truck 10" LCD TV, $400



Of course, that might be what you're after if you'd prefer to have your kids look at a TV that's off...

Multi-functional furniture

There's something functionally cool about furniture that does double duty for different functions. In the most recent issue of dwell magazine, we saw an ad for some pretty cool products by the European furniture company, mobelform.

Many of their pieces are suitable for very small European-type spaces and makes great use of very tight spaces. Of course, there are some hefty price tags to go along with such ingenuity, unfortunately.

First up is the Nuovoliola at $10,180. It's a wall-bed unit that went put away is a little love seat with a shelf on top. Pulled down, the shelf is a support for the bed and a shoe rack. Nifty.



This next piece, the Doc Divano ($5470), is kind of fun since it's a sofa and a bunk bed all rolled into one:



Finally, the Spazio 05 ($6020) is a neat idea, but I think it only works well if you can keep a desk uncluttered enough to withstand the movement up and down.


The listing of mobelform's latest products is here, or you can view their full catalogue.

Downsizing - who needs a mansion anyway?

I'm not a big fan of water, but I love the work that goes into designing boat interiors because of how efficiently a space can be used. Along the same lines, I've always loved floorplans and seeing how spaces are used -- especially small ones. I don't mean the "under 2000 sq. ft." homes that some of these Home / Interior magazines think of when they say "small". I mean truly tiny.

The Tumbleweed Tiny House Company has mastered the utilization of small spaces, ranging in size from 40 sq. ft. up to a 'whopping' 500 sq. ft. All of the houses are designed by Jay Shafer, who actually lives in a 100 sq foot home that he designed himself. Below are a couple of examples of some of these tiny houses.

The Eepoo house is ~100 sq. ft (and it's portable).



The Greg is smaller at 60 sq. ft., but has an upper sleeping loft.




You can buy full drawing sets of the Tumbleweed houses ($850US) so you can build your own, or you can even buy ready-made models starting from ~$30k. In so many ways I'd love to be so minimalistic that we could live in such a small space. Realistically though, the tiny houses probably aren't meant for family living :)