Great series of ads for jobsintown.de.

Not sure it would work here in the US; people would mostly ignore them as they rushed around their busy days.

Or maybe not. They are incredibly eyecatching. Large photos. Minimal copy. Creates curiousity. Gets the message across.

Good design meets good concept.

By Scholz & Friends, Berlin.

Check out a few more in the series here.

Dennis Guidone designed this beautiful clock which will be on display for Milan Design Week and eventually produced by NAVA.

As others have pointed out, this clock has but two functions: (1) it tells time; and (2) it makes resetting the time for daylight savings a snap: you simply tip it over to the other side of its “base.”

Because you know how annoyed you are having to re-figure out how to set all the digital clocks on your microwave and stove. You’ve done it once, already, but that was almost a year ago!

Maybe the clock would tip over on its own, and I’d show up an hour early or late. Because of this, I’d carry around a photo of the clock as my ready-made excuse. Not so bad.

This watch by the same designer comes with the same built in alibi: ”I thought I was on time, I really did…  ”

Sometimes, just sometimes, bits of wisdom find their way into fortune cookies.

“Weniger, aber besser.” 

If I had gone to school for design, no doubt I  would have come across this famous quote from Dieter Rams, one of the most influential industrial designers of modern society. Alas,  it has taken me this long to discover his wonderfully succinct description of what is also my own design philosphy: ”Less, but better.”

Dieter Rams, as head of design at Braun from the early 60’s into the 90’s, created many of the iconic products of that era, including the record player, radio, calculator and juicer designs we are all completely familiar with today.

Johnathan Ive, designer at Apple, is a big Dieter Rams fan, and it has been pointed out that many of Apple’s products, from their computers to iPods, draw from and are very similar to Rams’ Braun objects. The calculator in the iPhone is almost a replica of the his famous Braun calculator. Read the rest of this entry »

A wonderful example of great web design, both visually and interactively.

Great look, and great feel.

I even submitted a word-color-story of my own.

This is what I am aiming towards in my work.

Created by AKQA.

Thanks to Evolve for posting this inspiration.

Supposedly unique in the USA, Camac Street between Walnut and Locust is paved with wooden cobblestones.

Single-lane Camac street is also known as “Avenue of the Artists”.  Historically it was home to many important artist clubs and organizations, such as the Philadelphia Sketch Club, started in 1860 and led by Thomas Eakins.

It is surmised that the street was paved with wood instead of the traditional stones or granite belgian blocks to help mute the sounds of the horses’ hooves as traffic passed by the artist gatherings.

These square blocks of wood were re-discovered in the late 1980’s during a street resurfacing project, and the city decided to repave this one section with wooden replicas of the originals.

The wooden blocks are currently being replaced, which needs to happen every several years, as they begin to disintegrate and rot. Wooden block streets are attractive, but not enitrely practical.

It should be pointed out, however, that asphalt also requires replacement or resurfacing relatively often.

Though there don’t seem to be other preserved or refurbished streets like this in this country, wooden cobblestones can be found in historical sites around the world, from Prague to Havana.

Willard Wigan is an incredible artist from the UK who creates tiny sculptures, usually literally in the eye of a needle or on the head of a pin. The sculptures, which range in subject from pop culture characters to historical objects, are almost invisible to the human eye.

Wigan uses human, rabbit, fly and other hairs as his sculpting tools, creating brushes of different sizes. His website says that to create his miniature works, he “enters a meditative state in which his heartbeat is slowed, allowing him to reduce hand tremors and sculpt between pulse beats.” He says he does not enjoy the work itself, but enjoys the products when he is done.

Because of this, and the length of time each piece takes, originals are extremely rare, and are sold in a special glass viewing cube that includes a microscope. The works also tour on exhibition, under large insurance policies.

Visit his website to see more  www.willard-wigan.com. (Via)

“Man has invaded space — not in airplanes which would fall to pieces with age before Earth’s near neighbors were visited, but with thoughts which travel faster and work more miracles even than the light of the sun.”

From a 1918 encylopedia of sorts, for children, this beautiful poster does a great job of illustrating the concept of the relative enormity of space. There is a lot of information here, presented in a very accessible design.

The spaceships themseles are whimsical but not entirely unlikely creations, amalgams of several different types of ships and planes, which seem to be leaping into space directly out of the ocean and into a map of our solar system.

The notes and captions around the sides of the drawing help paint the picture of the scale of this map (though using a now-common speed of around 120 mph — 2 miles per minute) with references to well-known historical happenings.

Still a useful teaching tool. Good design withstands the test of time.

Originally scanned in by Azrael Brown, much commented on here, and brought to my attention by John Nack.

The iPhone can take a screenshot! It has been able to since the 2.0 firmware upgrade, but I didn’t know until I stumbled across it and took a screenshot quite by mistake. And didn’t even realize I had done it until it showed up in my camera roll. 

To do it you hold down the home button, then press and release the sleep/wake button. The screen flashes, and the snapshot is stored with your pics.

Interesting that they chose to dedicate this button combo to taking a screenshot. With only two buttons, there are a limited number of functions that can be physically triggered.

Having only two buttons (and the sleep/wake button is almost hidden itself — took me a month or two to discover it) makes for a very nice streamlined design. But I would give it up and add an ugly button if it would let me cut and paste…

This was one of my main quibbles with Apple’s design — the loss of functionality in the name of design. Such as no right-click on the mouse (mitten mouse, I called it). But, having not used Macs since 1997, little did I know that for the past four years, their mice have had right-clickability. You just can’t see the two different buttons, they are sensors under the single shell.

Turns out the iPhone snaps screenshots itself, all the time, in order to create the aesthetically pleasing “shrinking” of the screen back into the homepage. Some deem this a security flaw, and apparently police have harvested these screenshots to use against arrested suspects.