Future Routers is a great little colab design project between Goldsmiths and Talk Talk (appalling customer service, even if they have interesting corporate comms projects) that re-imagines the humble broadband router into something nicer/smarter – essentially designed around people rather than technology.

My favourite is the snappily titled ‘Energy Saver’ above, which has 4 hooks for house keys. When the last person to leave home takes their keys, it switches itself off. Presumably it switches on again when the keys are deposited back, but it doesn’t actually state that anywhere :(

via CR Blog

the-affair is an indie label out of East London striving to rid the world of boring and dumb popcorn tees. They produce in limited runs of only 200 per design and each one is based on literature – hence their slogan “the thinking man’s brand”.

They’ve just dropped Batch.04 / Obscurity in time for the northern summer. The 3 new designs were begun from slightly more obscure sources than usual, but the results speak for themselves.

Strange Aeons is based on H.P Lovecraft’s very particular form of tenticled horror in The Call of Cthulu.

Whilst We comes courtesy of their insatiable fascination with dystopic fiction, this time via Zamyatin’s novel of the same name, widely agreed to be the inspiration for Orwell’s 1984.

And finally Corto’s Crash SS09 is a brand new aqua colourway of their best-selling (and now sold-out) Corto’s Crash.

Get on over there and grab yourself one before they’re all gone…

Full disclosure: I am one half of the-affair with my partner in crime Dave Black

White Void’s (new?) folio is perhaps the most elegant use of Papervision I’ve ever seen. As an interface, it feels like the future simply because it is so damn intuitive. Oh, and the work’s not bad either :-p

Meet the coolest digi-analogue clock. Ever! The Clock Clock.

In digital, I often feel that there is a tendency to overwork ideas. Longer non-linear time frames, coupled with clients who were sound alseep during the single-minded proposition part of their marketing degrees, don’t help the situation. Many many times I’ve sat in meetings that were overcomplicating an idea for on other reason than habit.

But not all ideas need to be ground breaking. Some just need to be simple, timely and well executed. And this new press campaign for Sony Walkman is a perfect case in point. Its not a new idea by any stretch, but its executed with a sense of calm elegance that elevates it above the clutter.

via i believe in advertising

Lovely piece of motion graphics for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. Such a simple idea – to make the piece of music into a literal rollercoaster, to mimic the emotions embodied in the music. The only thing that lets it down is the cheesy red endline “Great Emotions” which seems slapped on at the last minute and is in no way integrated into the design of the piece.

‘Now Showing’ is an exhibition “exploring the Lost ‘Art’ of the Film Poster” currently at The Cosh Gallery in London. 40 creatives were asked to submit a design/illustration for an iconic film. The two below stand out to me, especially the bold elegance of the ‘Birds’ poster by Corey Holms / Marian Bantjes. See the full set at flickr.

Nikon has just relaunched their US portal, designed by my good friend Tom Kershaw, ex de-construct. Apart from the de rigeur Papervision homepage, I like the fact that the EXIF data (all the stuff the camera records every time a shot is taken) has been used as a hook for design, and a pathway into the content. And its nice to know that there are some clients out there brave enough NOT to overload the homepage with 17 content boxes / promotions.

It’s been a wild and intense 6 months since Mr. Black and myself launched our t-shirt brand the-affair. Apart from boring countless people at every opportunity with tales of our exploits across the blogosphere, we’ve actually been posting our tees off to exotic and unexpected destinations all over this little globe of ours.

Tempers have been frayed, our sanity was threatened, and calls from friends and concerned family members went unanswered and ignored. Many late nights, cups of tea and cigarettes later, we’ve arrived back from the printers with our second humble offering. Like that difficult-second-album, we deliberated, mused and mulled over the themes and artwork for an unnecessarily long time.

Continuing to turn to literature for inspiration, we took ideas from William Gibson’s techno-nerd-cyber-punk novel ‘Neuromancer’ as well as developing a rather clever interpretation of a quote by every MBA’s favourite intellectual, Niccolo Machiavelli.

Anyway check them all out here, the-affair. As always, all feedback is very much appreciated.

99% of the time, Christmas cards are shit. So shit in fact that just the thought of them makes me cringe. Thankfully here’s two brilliant examples of that 1% of the time we all look forward to…

The first is a game by Framestore CFC and its as addictive as it is simple, and as is it well executed. I’m not a massive gamer, but this isn’t really a concept I’ve come across before, and just the fact that its a polar bear flying through the air makes the whole thing perfectly surreal.

The second example comes courtesy of AKQA and their little webcam-ified furry friends Cheese and Biscuits. Their (in)decision to run on the wheel controls the electricity supply to a lovely (and possibly very tiny) neon light message. Oh and they only work M-F, 9:30 – 5:30. Whoever said that AKQA worked everyone into the ground?!?!? ;-p

via Big Joel

About a year ago, a strange thing happened amidst the rubble of broken dreams and the boozers of East London. Two pilgrims to this savage land decided to pool their industry experience, raw talent and shamelessly egotistical aspirations. After much beardstroking and arguing, the-affair was born.

Slightly more intelligent than your average brand, our graphic tees are influenced by subjects that delve a little deeper than your standard pop-references. Too high-brow? Actually, we’ve just got a little more faith in our customers.

the-affair, because everyone deserves a bit on the side.

…………………………………………..

As some of you know myself and Señor Black have just begun a tee-shirt brand called the-affair. So do me a favour and check out the site. If you like it, or even better if you don’t, i’d love some feedback. We’re really interested in any thoughts whatsoever.

*Warning, shamless piece of self-promotion

Check this out – the original Macintosh manual from 1984. Get past the nerdy men and the idea of carrying around a desktop, and what’s really interesting is that this little book had to explain an entire paradigm shift. Concepts like ’scrolling’ and ’saving’ digitally simply didn’t exist, and had to be explained from scratch… The entire book can be found here.

This is beautifully poetic salary comparison charts the gap between the wages of the CEO and his emmployee’s (in the USA?). A simple change in the scale of heads has never had such dual resonance. Enough to make your blood boil, even if the data visualisation itself is so cute!

via information aesthetics

Not sure how new this is, but news.com has something called ‘hot news’ (the top image) which is essentially a real-time data visualisation of the most popular stories. Definitely the next level above what most news services provide and we’re certainly going to see more of it – that is, ways of visualising the massive amounts of data we’re contantly and increasingly being bombarded with into more easily digestibel byte-sized chunks. I just hope that Marcos Weskamp of the much more elegant original (bottom image) got some financial action out of it!

Sometimes you just have to have a laugh at yourself and thank god you’re not yet bald or this would be waaaay to close to the bone ;)

via leigh hibell

Apart from being a design studio, Neu Army is an RSS of quality websites that i’ve always subscribed to. And although its been down for sometime now (boo hoo), here’s a lovely piece of old-skool typographic design that I think is worth sharing. That and as a positioning tool, “This ain’t no side hustle” is also interesting… Anyway, i’m looking forward to the 07 site!

This site for Checkland Kindleysides is a nice translation into digital of the amazing work of Peter Callesen (above). Sure it lacks the beautiful 3Dimensionality of real paper, but the effect is still nice. They also use Mrs Eaves which is one of the nicest sets of ligatures around, if a little overused now :(

via Nicki

Wine that loves is like “Wine for Dummies” but for the ADD-generation. Why bother to learn about anything when some clever marketing can do it for you? Cynicism aside, its actually some lovely bold, and most importantly simple, graphic design on the bottles. Shame about the website…

via the aesthetic poetic

The Republic Of Ideas is billed as “a place to swap ideas”. It launches in September, and word on the street is that its going to be an ‘new ideas marketplace’, i guess not unlike OpenAd, but potentially more digitally-led. At the moment there’s some nice motion/type goinng on, so let’s wait and see…

via advertisinglab

Nice minimalist design and key-based navigation for this polish site, FETA. What I really like is just how quickly its possible to move through a mountain of information – far more effective than mouse-based interaction.

Scott Evans might have won student of the year, but I can’t help but think that there musn’t have been too much else on offer. Sorry Scott, I liked your video but it was a little too conveniently political for my liking to be the winner of such a prestigious prize.

Although simplicity is the best way of communicating (complex) concepts, I don’t see global warming as particularly difficult to comprehend. Stop driving when you can and take public transport. Or even better, get a bike. Stop buying apples from the other side of the planet when they’re out of season here. Boycott ryanair and easyjet. Its pretty fucking simple…

via CR

The National Theatre has just released its entire poster archive for online sale / reprint. They’re not very expensive and there’s some great design such as the ‘Equus’ poster above. But what’s really interesting is that – because they are usually designed in-house – today’s NT posters are a continuation of a graphic language began in the 60’s (see the second image above).

via Nicki

Its no secret that I’m a mac man through and through, possibly even a zealot. I can’t understand people that complain about the price of Apple products. Yeah they’re expensive, but they’re so fucking sexy (the power of emotional design) I just don’t care.

So if you’re anything like me, you’ll also appreciate this image detailing the evolution of every Apple product since the company began.

via Alex Griffin

One for all the designers out there, the favourites of Michael C Place from Build. Not only is the set itself a great archive, but I actually never knew Flickr had this functionality.

This new Mercedes (UK) C-Class site went around work today, and I thought it was worth mentioning because it stands out for its lack of car-porn photography. Instead, it uses little interactive experiences to illustrate the product points (check out the pink section), but does so in a very restrained, let’s say Mercedes, way.

Only at the very end do you get a small 360 of a white car on a white background. Nice, subtle work by Agency Republic.

Little Deviant is another car site pretending to not be a car site. With a much younger target market than most brands, Scion can afford to be a little more edgy and this combination of illustration and a generally dark WoW aesthetic (not to mention the complete voiceover rip-off) serves to really differentiate this piece of marketing from the average.

Not only is the pop-up aesthetic of the ’sets’ done very well, but the site is its own world with its own mythology – neologisms such as “sheeple” make it stick in the mind long after the browser window is closed. But its the soft-sell and the lack of car-porn that roots you in this new ‘world’. In fact you only get anything more than a cursory glimpse of the car/logo in scene 5.

Anyway check it out, and just in case you’ve got ADD, the password to jump to the end is either “scralp” or “slog”.

CR is running an experiment with Michael C Place of Build, where they will ‘document one month in the life of a graphic designer’.

Whilst I think as an idea its quite interesting, I can’t get over the fact that its a little too old-skool traditional to do all this documentation, then release it in print… To me its screaming out for a real-time website – where you can listen to the music he’s listenting to (rather than just reading about it), see his diary (rather than just reading about it) and see the buzz around the studio. It seems like a perfect way for the bored designer to kill 10 mins, but its definitely not riveting reading…

In an attempt to think about this, I’ve set up a new discussion thread on the flickr group unillustrated. Some of my (crazy?) thoughts so far: can we use nanomachines to create illustration? or what about Arificial Intelligence? can computer’s ‘illustrate’? or is it a quintessentially *human* ability?

So go on, have your say!

NikeSB updates today with a fresh design from odopod. However its not really the design that grabbed me, but more the very clever use of dynamically scaling the height of the flash movie, without having to refresh the HTML… the result is that the browser’s scrollbar functions as usual (when required, when not it simply disappears), but the entire height of the window is a flash movie.

This is not something I’ve seen too much of before, so I’ve asked around here at de-construct and funnily enough, they’re using some of my mate Gabes’ open source .js :) anyway what happens is this (courtesy of Matt): “looks like an event from the flash is being called on each new ‘page’ in the flash, which in turns calls a resize of the swf embed:”

function updateSwfSize(w,h){
var forcesize = new SWFForceSize( so,w,h );
}

make sense? good! :-P

unillustrated is a little collaborative project I’ve just set up on flickr. Essentially, its an ongoing experiment into the power of illustration – by removing it from iconic pieces of communication. The above example of Pink Floyd’s cover is a good indication of where I’m going with this, but I think someone else trumped me with the Ikea instruction sheet.

Anyway there’s also a bunch of dicussion threads where I’mn trying to figure out – by throwing it open – exactly what is / is not illustration. So, help me out and get involved! :)

via basement

Apart from the whole vinyl toy phenomenon, we’ve had footballs (was it adidas or nike?), BMW cars in the 80’s, and now the Vader helmet. The Vader Project gets artists and designers from across the globe to paint the iconic mask. The results range from hilarious to plain awful, but there’s something strangely attractive about a pink Vader helmet inscribed with “voices in my head”…

via Mark Swift

I’ve just returned from Barcelona – that most beautiful of cities – from the awesomely inspiring OFFF festival (not sure i got enough superlatives in there ;). As usual, there was a plethora of incredible people presenting amazing work that lies mostly on the art side of the art-design divide. There was Maeda, Neville Brody, Flight404, North Kingdom, Graffiti Research Lab and Universal Everything among others. Full run down from my POV will be up by the end of the week.

One for the type nerds… this is a series of shirts by Blanka where the weight of the font determines the size of shirt – and thus cheekily points to the weight of the user. Quite subtle, über nerdy, and something my CD would definitely wear!

This has got to be one of the best videos I’ve seen in a long time, and i’m not talking about the great motion design or animation. Its the tees man! The shear volume of work that went into each one of them, but more importantly, the social commentary – explicit or not – that i find so appealing. Their target market is the blank-tee / AA generation, and so using the tee as the canvas for the bands visual ideas is, IMHO, a brilliant example of marketing. Even more so when you consider that each of these shirts can be purchased online (apparently). If you know where, please let me know!

Personal Pies is a project that abstracts one person’s everyday life into accountable bites/bytes of of information in an attempt to provide “an audit of my life so far”.

I think this is a really interesting idea, and is not at all unlike Feltron’s brilliant personal annual report – although not as well designed. The desire to quantify the minutiae of life in a corporate-esque way speaks volumes of our society and the increasing measure-ability of the world in general.

I just came across this super-talented crew from Gent, Belgium going by the name of Glossy. Check out their site for a bunch of interesting graphic projects that reside mainly in the environmental domain, but it was the above image that really caught my attention… What a simple mash-up, executed with subtlety and wit – to brilliant effect!

Selftitled is John Iacoviello’s portfolio, and its one of the better ones I’ve seen lately… The circular interface had a lovely feel to it – for example, the cursor jumps to the nearest side if you don’t follow the diameter – and everything animates beautifully…

via thwefwa.com

Another beautifully executed site for Y-3, seamlessly blending video and 360 photography. This time they’ve used mirrors and a whole lot of complex math to create a haunting effect, which is heightened by some fantastic sound design. This is a must-see for anyone involved in online branding / microsite design.

Coming to you from the very talented crew at Neue Digitale

For the 100th anniversary of Lipton tea in Japan, Nendo built a life-size installation of the Mad-Hatter’s tea party. Designed to distort scale – both visually and physically – the space literally “pulls you in” (their words not mine) so you feel like Alice herself. If only I could’ve seen this in real life…

Not having a TV means i’m not exactly up-to-speed on the latest music vids – so please forgive the fact that I’m posting about the White Stripes now… But this video is brilliant, so I just had to throw it up. Enjoy.

Audi’s decided to enter the supercar market with their new R8. Not only is this one sexy car, but this has got to be the slickest 3D I’ve seen online in a very long time. I’m equal parts in awe at what they’ve achieved, and in shock at the money they must’ve thrown at the 3D company!

Unfortunately the rest of the site and the way the information is presented is testament to the fact that they threw everything at the 3D and nothing at the design or the sound (the music is truly awful).

T-post is a really nice twist on the t-shirt idea… Blending the worlds of magazine/news and fashion, T-post has managed to stand out from the plethora of other online tee brands. You subscribe much like a magazine, and every 6 weeks you get a new shirt, by a different designer. But wait, there’s more! Every tee is inspired by a news event that occurred within that 6 week period (and for your mental convenience, that article is printed on the inside of each shirt). So not only do you get a constantly fresh wardrobe, but you get a wearable conversation piece!

Technorati Tags: fashion, t-shirts

Lobo mashes up just about every style imaginable in their latest spot for Dupont… Well worth a look from these grandaddies of the mograph scene.

via motionographer

Technorati Tags: design, motiongraphics

IKEA’s campaign sites are increasingly something to look forward to, and this is no exception. In what looks like the follow up to their matrix-meet-kitchen website of earlier this year, this one adopts a story-based (as in building not narrative) interface and full-screen immersive video. Its in Swedish, but you’ll get the idea… Check it out

By the very talented chaps at Forsman & Bodenfors

Check it out – first proper look at the GUI for the upcoming PS3. Some really nice animation in terms of presenting options to the user… I’ll definitely be mining this puppy in upcoming sites!

Evil mega-corporations travelling through time to commit industrial espionage, combined with choose-your-own-adventure-style branching story lines in this all-singing, all-dancing Flash site for casio’s new water-proof mobile – G’zOne.

Stylistically its the jedi knights meet waterworld with a bit of ghost in the shell and bjork’s white robots thrown in for good measure. And apart from the annoying ‘next’ button (and the fact that i don’t speak japanese), this is a definite must see…

If you haven’t been to Japan, this might all seem a little far fetched in order to flog a few phones. If you have, you’ll understand…

http://gzone.jp/

As a designer you either love it for its elegance and diversity in weight, or you hate it for its over/mis-use and its general lack of thought. Whatever you’re position, this new feature length doco about the world’s most famous typeface looks not be missed.

Billed as “an exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them, and a fluid discussion with renowned designers about the choices and aesthetics behind their use of type.” It sounds like typography 101 for the masses, and if that’s the case I only hope it helps the designer’s cause when it comes to choosing something other than helvetica!!!

Check it out here.

Who knows? But there’s £5K up for grabs to the best 30s shameless self-promo video made with your mobile-phone produced. Check it out