NEW IMPROVED BLOG

There's a new and improved Blog at The Ideation Phase

http://www.theideationphase.com

why no posts?!

So you might have noticed the blog hasn't been updated in a while. I blame the girl next to me in the picture. The courting process has taken quite an effort but I have emerged from the endeavor a lucky man about to be taken away from the dregs of singleness. We're getting married August 18th, going to Mexico for a week then coming home. A new revamped design blog at a new URL will be coming up sometime after that, check back here for further details.

photos courtesy BTO Photography

Algea Filled Hummer - Transportation design

GM recently won a design contest against other major automakers for a fully recyclable, environmentally friendly vehicle. Ironically this they aligned this new design with the Hummer which in its current state is an afront to mother earth in all respects of its existance. The interesting thing about it is that it is an filled by algea that creates oxygen. I'm assuming this oxygen is supposed to make us feel better about ourselves and our pollution by driving.

Anyhow click here to view a CNN article on the contest

And click here to view a gallery of all the entries by other automakers

Eduardo Recife - Graphic Design

Eduardo Recife is my graphic design hero. He recently put together a commercial website showcasing a whole bunch of his more recent work.

EMBT Arquitectes Associates - The Scottish Parliament at Edinburgh

I'm a little behind on this one, but I ran across this CNN article about an increadibly beautiful building. The Scottish Parliament building was completed about a year ago and has been winning some awards including a REBA. The building was designed by EMBT Arquitectes Associates.

Click here for the CNN article

Click here for the Google image gallery showing photos of the site

Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture

The Modern Museum of Contemporary Art is holding an interesting show drawing a comparison between architecture and fashion design called Skin + Bones. This exhibition explores the common visual and intellectual principles that underlie both fashion and architecture. Both disciplines start with the human body and expand on ideas of space and movement, serving as outward expressions of personal, political, and cultural identity. Architects and fashion designers produce environments defined through spatial awareness the structures they create are based on volume, function, proportion, and material. Presenting the work of international fashion designers and architects, the exhibition examines themes such as shelter, identity, tectonic strategies, creative process, and parallel stylistic tendencies including deconstruction and minimalism. The exhibition is curated by MOCA Curator of Architecture & Design Brooke Hodge and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

June Kim - Graphic Design

June Kim has a great youthful feel to her work.

AWA - Architecture

AWA has some beautiful work. Their site is really nice in that they show a lot of process from sketches to photos of the finished structure. Their site is a little tricky and you might miss the good stuff (like I did the first time I ran across the site). Click Projects > click on one of the building icons > click on Project Description > then click on one of the bars in the center of image.

Decoder Ring Design - Graphic Design

Decoder Ring is one of those graphic design firms that you would hire because they are masters of a particular style. They do excellent work that is distinctively consistent.

Coexist - Web Design

Coexist has some really solid web work, I really like how dominat a role photography plays on their sites.

War Posters

The Revolutionary Tides website is a collection of war time posters from various eras and conflicts. It gives some interesting history behind the posters as well as a good visual offering of great old posters.

Habachy Designs - Interior Design

Habachy Design is an Atlanta based interior design firm. They've done some pretty well known projects in town including the club, Compound.

Julia Fullerton-Batten - Photography

Julia Fullerton-Batten has some beautiful work and I am especially intrigued by the project titled 'Teenage Stories'.

Eame Lounge Chair and Aeron Chair

Core77 recently posted two videos on the assembly of the classic Eames Lounge chair in 1960 and the modern day assembly of the Aeron chair.

Click here to see the Eames Lounge chair video

Click here to see the Aeron assembly

These videos are interesting, but after first seeing the Eames Lounge chair video then seeing the Aeron chair video, I couldn't help but think of some of the raw basic principles of design, specifically, the idea of simplicity being a hallmark of good design. The Eames chair was so simple to assemble, and it still served the job keeping someone butt a specific distance off the ground. The Aeron chair had such a high level of complexity that I had to ask myself, "is this appropriate and needed?" I fully understand that the Aeron chair has a million little gizmos and adjustments built in, but is it necessary? I'm not sure really, just pondering the thought.

Find Your Inner Pollock

A neat website on the JacksonPollock.org site that helps you find your inner Pollock (without the pesky alcoholism). Click here to go to the page.

Athenaeum Press - Letter Press Graphic Design

Athenaeum Press has some amazing work. I've never seen such fine detail with letterpress. I only wish they would expand their imegery to things other than old signs (which is cool don't get me wrong I'd just love to see some variety).

Elizabeth Schuppe - Painting

Elizabeth Schuppe has some great work inspired by the expressionist. I really like the line work she adds to her fields of color.

2006 IDEA Awards - Industrial Design

I missed this award somehow, I'm not sure how long these results have been out, but the 2006 IDEA award winners are availble for viewing.

The Louvre in Atlanta

The Louvre is coming to Atlanta. The High Museum of Art and the Louvre have partnered to share works for an exhibit that I am very excited about. Odds are I'll be attending this show several times, I have high hopes for it.

Context of Value - Product Design

The goal of many designers when sitting down and working on a project is to add value to a product; add value so that a consumer would like to buy the product. Niti Bahn proposes that value has context. Value is not the same from one culture to the next. Niti Bahn and phenomenologist Tom Guarriello discuss the idea of contextual value in a pod cast .mp3 that you can listen to by clicking here.

China's First Luxury Brand

Raphael le Masne de Charmont, chief executive of Shanghai Tang since 2001, discusses how the company has grown and established itself as China’s first luxury brand -- via innovative design strategies

Click here to download the .mp3

Today's Fringe Ideas, Tomorrow's Wisdom

The banter of "ethnography", "user centered design", and "innovation culture" are filling the ears of business managers. Design as a strategic advantage is no longer the secret it used to be. Andrew Zoli writes in interesting article pushing the principle of innovation over the right-brained religion that is being so commonly pushed. Click here to read "Today's Fringe Ideas, Tomorrow's Wisdom."

Hammer Press - Graphic Design

Hammer Press has some really unique work. It is impressive that press work like this has so much complexity.

White Space

an interesting discussion about white space, click here...

The Conspiracy of Art by Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard is a social theorist (how you get that sweet job title I do not know). Baudrillard is known for his reasoning on such diverse topics as AIDS, and Gulf War in terms of their interconnectivity to other things. Baudrillard uses this principle to argue that in our present 'global' society, wherein technological communication has created an excessive proliferation of meaning, meaning's self-referentiality has prompted... a world where meaning has been effaced and society has been reduced to an opaque mass, where the 'real' has been reduced to the self-referential signs of its existence.

I recently purchased his book Conspiracy of Art and like what I've read so far. It's one of those great books you'll never fully understand the first time through and will likely spend a lot of time reading and re-reading his densely packed sentences. In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the "end of art," Baudrillard celebrates art's new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole.

I love some good leads on new materials. I feel constrained by materials all day at work, I tend to get excited about new extended boundaries. Check out Core77's material trends slide show for some sweet new possibilities.