get your strut on

I love Dan Edmunds's nerdy suspension discourses.  Here's one on Buick's new setup.

"cool" thermometer

 

Rather nifty bit of modern design.  Bravo!

Ringworld

A horizonless-map of Manhattan.  What a good idea!

Gives a whole another meaning to "up-town girl," no?

Nuclear Reactors

Nifty nuclear reactor cut-away illustrations

Design's tricky

How restaurant menus work. Nota Bene, the magazine's doing the exact same thing - how much design goes into their layout and topic choice?  Is it fair to say that New York is the Balthazar of magazines? (yes it is)

They have Grandmaster Flash's seal of approval*

I bought two of these A4 Whitelines notebooks, and I think I'm going to have to go out and buy a lifetime supply just in case they stop making them. The gimmick is that the pages have very faint gray squares, which leaves a grid of white lines. So it's an inverse engineer's quadrille pad, and it's absolutely wonderful. Ten times better than a moleskin.

*not that I'm such a fan of that song, or even of old school rap.  It gets name dropped by hipper than thou music nerds, and next thing you know, they're droning on about how much they like Dario Argento films or somesuch schock. Just like I am right now.

The Piet Mondrian of Cameras

Sure, they say the Pentax K-x is inspired by some Japanese robot toy, but were do you think the robot got its inspiration from?  20th century De Stijl artwork, that's where.

That's a nice light switch

Touch-sensitive LED backlit light switch.

OMG! OMG! OMG!

Mountains out of molehills.

The video-game line is nicely periodic.

nifty tins

Vintage type-writer tins

Fascinating

Ultra-well designed infographic showing how we spend each day's moments away.

Granted, this averages over weekends, so you'd expect the maximum to be something like 70%, but there are way less people working at a business at any given time than I would have guessed, and somehow this feels wrong. Or maybe it's very impressive, depending on how you think about it.

The Professor Model

These coconut headphones are genius.

I hate the 80's

"Stap Man"

The smartest thing ever?

Well, not really, but still: Keychain key.

House Design

I'm not sure that modern is my thing - it comes off awfully anti-septic and sterile most of the time, but that's a hell of a aquarium tank view. On sale for $4.95M.

Continuing off on the tangent, if I picture the ideal house in my mind's eye, wavy little lines appear and there is a juxtaposition of all of the homes you've see in family holiday movies. The set designers are aiming for a very strong Norman Rockwell vibe without being too Grandma's house or gothic about it, and so they do a very good job of balancing home and design. I think a key part is that there needs to be detail and texture on all scales. Modern design creates tension on purpose by shaving off most of the mid-scale detail and whatnot. So it might be striking to see, but I'm not sure I'd want to live there.

And it goes without saying that the Ferris Bueller house is up for sale too.

Design

Lamp No. 1

Every design should be filled with Easter eggs

Jalopnik - Top Ten Auto Design Easter-Eggs.

I like the Nissan Cube's headliner and the Ford GT's headlights the best.

Design 2

Uplift Floaty Mirror: It's like a DeLorean in your bathroom

They had me at DeLorean.

Design

NES gamepad mouse is the most amazing piece of industrial design in the history of humankind

Boy is GenX nostalgia going to be* obnoxious.

*if not already - I Love the 80's!

Really pretty

Check out the gallery at Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape.

Paging through them feels like I'm getting tomorrow's nostalgia today, and it creates this desire in me to somehow to go out and photograph a bit of what I walk past every day, what might be thought of as blight or an eyesore, and frame it in some artful way poetic shot. Dance a bit about architecture, if you will. Stop and smell the smokestacks.