Les Ateliers Ruby are celebrating the 90th anniversary of BMW Motorrad by launching a new range of 5 luxury motorcycle helmets as part of the “Munich 90 Collection”. The collection references the color scheme of legendary models which have helped BMW leave it’s undeniable mark on motor sports history.
Inspired by a recent episode of Roman Mars’ wonderful podcast 99% Invisible, I sought out a few images of WWI-era “dazzle” ship camouflage. Rather than blending a target with its surrounding colors and textures, dazzle (aka “razzle dazzle” or “dazzle painting”) deliberately caused ships to clash with the sea and sky, creating eye-aching shimmer effects and making it difficult to discern the craft’s direction, speed, and distance. The hope—and it was a hope, as dazzle inventor Norman Wilkinson’s theories were never properly proven—was that the bedazzle’d ships would so confuse enemy submarines that their torpedoes would never meet their mark. The nautical old guard, as one would expect, rejected Wilkinson’s sweetly cracked vision; the artists of the era’s burgeoning Cubist movement, however, were utterly delighted.
Posted by: Todd Goldstein | Instagram: @toddiangoldstein
Follow this great Tumblr: Postcards From Above, where “Google Maps Meets The World Of Vintage Postcards”.
For those of you looking to make this Monday go by a bit quicker. Browser Pong is a traditional Pong game played not in a browser window, but with browser windows. Designed by Stewdio, an art practice, code house, and graphic design studio based in London.
Tested and approved for Macintosh using the following browsers in order of preference: Safari 4, FireFox 3.6, Chrome 4, and Opera 10.
Loving these little Kraft envelopes by Midori. I suddenly have the urge to organize everything into these things and put them in a filing cabinet, never to be seen again.
A Collection A Day is a blog by Lisa Congdon chronicling her daily obsession with assorted ephemera. I’ve always held onto little scraps and tokens like these, but none are as good as the stuff Congdon has on display. I often find this kind of stuff even more inspirational than straight-forward design, particularly the airline tags.
Source A Collection A Day via Grain Edit
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3KrFV0-WFw
I know this falls a little outside the normal scope of this blog but it’s Friday and this was too good to pass up. The Parrot ARDrone is being billed as the “First iPhone-Controlled Quadricopter Drone”. There’s no need to go much further than that for me, but add a camera to the helicopter and camera-view mode to the iPhone and I’m sold. The most amazing part of it all is the craft’s ability to right itself automatically using it’s built-in array of sensors (not to mention the potential for augmented reality applications given the manufacturer’s third-party development scheme) . It’s not out yet — the site says “coming in 2010” — and no word on pricing but I can’t imagine it will be very cheap. I think I’d be willing to splurge on something like this as long as it was cheaper than the iPhone itself. For more info check out this hands-on test of the ARDrone.
While the Quadricopter and it’s iPhone interfacing abilities are pretty incredible, I wish they had made an airplane version (although not sure the WiFi range would be sufficient for that), small R/C helicopters seem like they’re mostly for bothering dogs and tooling around your living room, not really as suited toward outdoor flight as the video suggests. When I worked at BKWLD with Dusty we got a couple of R/C planes and would fly them at lunch in the open spaces of Roseville. I loved those things, I don’t know why but R/C never seems to get old, I think I was about as excited every time I took that thing out as I was the first time I got an R/C car for Christmas. Since I moved to San Francisco I haven’t been using it; I think it’s in a closet somewhere. I bet the batteries are shot but I might get some new ones and take it for a spin at the park this weekend.
So we all download and save images of items, graphics and photos from the internet daily and some of the time you have no idea where to give credit besides maybe the guy that posted it first or second randomly on a blog. I‘d like to get some answers on a few of these but also just post some interesting pieces that we come across that might have been sitting on our drives for awhile that are go to for inspiration or just found randomly on a forum with no info attached and just look great. Either way hopefully the point that gets across here is that they are inspiring in some sort of way to you as well.
For the 3 images up here: the first one I have a feeling is Will Calcutt’s who takes photos for Ghostly International but I have no proof either way it’s an intense shot, nothing like the average landscape shots you see these days. The second one I just wanted to know what is going on, is this a operator jail? The third one I like only in a Royksopp cute kinda of way, a bit amateur in parts and wears his influences on his sleeve and it feels abit unfinished but I enjoy the colors and shapes of the “mum like” mountains.
Aaron Draplin (who’s blog is always an excellent source of inspiration) finds gold on the road during “The World’s Longest Yardsale”. I’ll let Draplin explain it in his own words:
THE STORY: Our second annual running of the World’s Longest Yard Sale. Dale, Jess, Evan, Uncle Bob, Dad and Aaron. Four days of wild, sun-up to sundown treasure hunting spanning five states and some 630 fuckin’ miles on Highway 127. Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio. Not for the weak of heart. You man enough? What happens on the road, stays on the road.
Amazing! Check out more of the results at Draplin’s Flickr:
Pregame . Earlybird Day . Day 1 . Day 2 . Day 3 . Day 4
