Jul 15, 2008
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OK, so recently there has been a real push on the Swarovski stuff. It used to be that they were pretty much tucked away in the corner of a department store near you. Regardless of your personal view of crystal and the sometimes horrific sculptures created in it (we won’t bore you with ours), the recent push on promotion by the company has seen swatch style stores popping up all around Europe.
The Swarovski Crystal Palace in Milan has started to turn the crystal into something more of an art medium than a… well crystal.
Recently the English artist Paul Cocksedge (stop giggling at the back) showed his piece which shows the Mona Lisa, but only when you look in the convex mirror provided. A trick of the light worthy of David Copperfield. The piece is 4 metres tall and utilises 1440 individual crystals
Anyway, we just thought this was great way of using a material and its inherent properties to create a visual effect with a twist.
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Jul 15, 2008
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Here in the Netherlands, they are recycle crazy and, without giving away my roots, it was a bit of a culture shock to take empty plastic bottles back to the supermarket.
Dutch designer, Jorre van Ast, has created a solution to allow you to recycle those old jars on your shelf. You might have used the contents long before, but this little set of screw on caps allows you to breathe a new life into the glassware itself. Simply by putting one of the pouring, shaking or one of the other tops on the jar you can give it a new use.
The Dutch Kitchenware company “Royal VKB” has picked up this selection of jar attachments for production and they are available now. I reckon the Everybody office kitchen needs some.
I guess the point of this post is to remind us that the best solutions to problems are almost always the most simple, the ones which stare us in the face and the ones which just make you say “Damn, I wish I had thought of that!”. In all forms of design, the brief is a problem which is solved by the designer and in this case, Jorre van Ast has taken an everyday object, which in many homes stays on the shelf or in a cupboard for years, and enabled you to utilise it again. This then reduces the pressure on the recycling system and allowing people to be damn resourceful in the process.
Everybody says well done, Jorre.
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Jul 14, 2008
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Once in a while a piece of art comes along which strikes you as original, clever and downright good looking. In this instance, a fella has written some code/witchcraft to use malware (the nasty bits of software that do nasty bits of work on your computer) to create a beautiful and organic image to represent the nasty bit of software itself.
Dig deeper into his site and you will find that he also grows something which he calls “spam plants”. These use more code/witchcraft to take spam messages and grow them into more organic looking and in some cases beautiful images.
It kind of reminds us of those art images based on fractals which did the rounds in poster stores in the 1990’s. But there is something wonderful about these images, something which makes you want more. The uniqueness is interesting to me and the way in which they seem different each time you look at them is equally as enthralling.
Everybody says good work Alex, stunning images and an original idea. Nice.
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Jul 08, 2008
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Ever wonder where artists and designers get all their inspiration from? Sometimes when you’re watching a movie you wonder if people making these things are on a non-prescribed medicine. Sometimes you see logo or poster designs that evoke the same feeling.
Although some designers just design these kind of things out of their heads, a lot of us get our inspiration from the most usual (and unusual) places. Take this picture for example; looks like it came straight out of a movie doesn’t it? In this case, it was a place at the beach in Estonia, right after a storm followed by a cold winter night. What happens next is a sight that is just as unbelievable as it is beautiful and provides people with a huge amount of inspiration. Imagine loving chocolate, and walking into a bonbonshop in Belgium (home of one of the best bonbon makers). It’s a walhalla come to life, which is exactly what happens to designers when seeing inspirational places like this.
Scenes like this happen all around you though; you don’t necessarily have to go all the way to Estonia to see this. You’d be suprised how many fantasy-like places exist, sometimes even right around the corner.
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Jul 03, 2008
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Here’s a thing. Appeldorn based artist, Ferry Staverman, has produced these wonderful paper sculptures from repeat shapes cut from various different kind of cardboard and paper.
The results are stunning and well worth a look. You can see more of them if you click the picture above, which will lead you to the website promoting the show where they were being displayed… We deal with paper everyday and sometimes you can forget just how easy it is to make something so great looking.
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