Archive for August, 2010

A select few songs by Taken By Trees have been a stand in for my Kings Of Convenience needs recently, attractive slow guitar and melody and a voice to hum along to.

There’s no rush in Candy Claws’ In the Deep Time, it as if Mum matured and worked with someone like Library Tapes.

Foxes In Fiction has been doing some covers lately and I had to share this one he did of Sufjan Stevens’ John Wayne Gacy Jr.

Just to change speeds since its Friday and I just posted 3 bedtime style tracks, here’s a new Nacho Lovers spin of CFCF off the new remix EP.

These clock concepts by Saikat Biswas fall right in place with the concepts of the Holga D—just awesome. The clock no has hands or even markings to show the time, instead it uses a bar that grows progressively larger as time passes. We’ve all seen a similar design in the past when waiting impatiently for a flash site to load. To me this is a very interesting way to show time and I probably wouldn’t be hesitant to mount this on my wall.

The size of this clock is about 12 inches in diameter with a depth of about .6 of an inch. It also runs on 2 AAA batteries and as something more to note, the “loader” looking bar is actually a thin disc inside the clock and not a digital screen.

Read the full process.

For some relaxing diverse lo-fi I don’t think it gets any better than the output of Brooklyn’s Olde English Spelling Bee. I was introduced to them by grabbing up the Ducktails LP and fell back in love with them after hearing Stellar OM Source, enough talk I hope you enjoy this label and if you like anything by them buy direct and support a special label like this.

Pelican Parts has a fairly sizable collection of Porsche Racing posters and have kindly posted high-res scans on their site. There are several eras represented, each with their own distinct style. Really shows off how classic the Porsche logo is, it seems to work pretty much anywhere you put it. Note the various 917’s in there.

I remember seeing some similar posters up on Grain Edit a while back with a link to VP Racing where you could buy some. I always meant to pick one up, but I just checked back and pretty much all the ones I wanted are gone. Someone really needs to reprint these.

There’s an article over at the Porsche site about Eric Strenger, who designed a lot of the Porsche racing posters during these periods. Looking through his work it’s amazing how much range he had as an artist. I would never have guessed some of these were by the same person.

Source Pelican Collection via a time to get

OpenIDEO is a web platform for facilitating social innovation. It launched this past Monday and was developed by IDEO. It is designed as a collaborative creative space where everyone (designer or not) can come together and participate in the design process, through inspiration, concepting and evaluation. It is based around design challenges which start out as simple questions but tackle significant global challenges. Watch the video above to learn more. To really get a sense for the site, sign up on OpenIDEO and start adding inspirations!

The first challenge is for Jaime Oliver, the winner of this year’s TED prize and flag bearer of the Food Revolution in America. The goal is to find ways to raise awareness about the benefits of healthy and fresh food, especially for children. You can watch Jaime introduce the challenge in the video above.

I’ve been working as an intern at IDEO for the past 2 months and was able to participate in the first OpenIDEO internal challenge: to design the logo for the site. It was a really exciting process and I cannot wait to see these other challenges get put through the same paces. By breaking up the design process into these three easy phases, it ensures that important milestones are accomplished. I found the inspiration phase especially helpful, even for projects unrelated to the logo development.

I’ll be at IDEO through mid-September, when my master’s program begins again.

Thanks to The Ghostly Store and AIAIAI, we’ve got a pair of the beautiful TMA-1 Heaphones to give away. Enter to win in the comments by telling us your favorite song or artist we’ve posted on the blog this year. Be sure to leave a valid email in the “email” field so we can contact you if you win. Winner will be announced this week. Enter here

If you’re not feeling particularly lucky today, or just don’t want to wait, The Ghostly Store has special pre-order pricing on the TMA-1 now through August 10th. Check it out!

More about the TMA-1 Heaphones in this video:

10,000 Year Clock Prototype

The idea behind the Clock is to be an inspiration for long-term thinking, to help make thinking long term automatic and common, instead of difficult and rare. It is hoped to be an artifact to connect its visitors to the future in the same way relics from ancient civilizations connect us to the past. Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well-engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think. [link]

The clock may reside mostly underground, near Van Horn, Texas, and will tick once a year. There is a fascinating set of principles guiding the construction of the clock. I enjoyed the various options for timing the clock: piezoelectric oscillator, pendulum, orbital dynamics and etc. “Sounds made up” as my roommate is fond of saying. Currently there is a prototype design at the Science Museum of London.

By the way I titled this post “10,000 Year Time Machine” because any clock that will work for this period of time is much more than a clock, it is a giant MACHINE. Apologies if you were expecting a post on an actual time machine like a Delorean.

I met Willy Anderson before I knew he made music under the name Weed. He was kind, straight edge(had to throw that in because of his band name) and the quietest guy on the field during a late night wiffle ball game. I remember wanting to talk to him because he was wearing a Winnipeg Jets hat in Brooklyn which meant that he might of had the unhealthy obsession about 1990’s NHL hockey as I did. After finding his music I had to share it with friends plus also collab on a shirt idea which is a mixture of his EP art and the Vancouver Canucks logo, so the above imagery is that result.

I always thought Yo La Tengo’s Summer Sun record to be the best record to listen to it with friends while doing something outdoorsy like canoeing or camping, never tested it but i’m sure it would hold up to my expectations.

I saw Mark Kozelek the other night, I hope the people in San Fran caught him as well recently. He was selling all his albums for only $10! after the show so I picked up the live session one from 2009, definitely disappointed, he did a great job with my favorite song Carry Me Ohio.

Sadly I don’t know much about Forest Swords but that never stops me from posting a bands music. The echo on the vocals at 2:17 and 2:31 is what grabbed me, I want it to loop forever! is it going thru a guitar?! whatever is going on, i’m a fan.

Clutch’d has a gallery of beautiful Porsche 917 photos up. The legendary racer celebrated it’s 40th anniversary last year. Such an amazing design, and always love the vintage racing graphics.

Source

It always seemed odd to me that I never see these beautiful houses while out and about. But then again, if you have the money to build an amazing house, chances are you’ll have the money to properly gate it or purchase secluded property. In this case though, this house was built smack dab on a steep hill just outside of Seattle.

After coming across the house on Deforest Architect’s website I realized that I had seen it before while it was being constructed. By its looks at the time, it appeared substantially nicer than any of the surrounding houses. Because of that I had assumed it was an oddly placed office building rather than a home.

As you go inside the house it opens up with a modern, metal and wood theme. The wood is even complimented by the metal of two turntables and a mixer atop a small, raised cove above the living room.

Note: There is a skateboard deck giveaway going on at Wanken right now, you can enter here.