South Africa’s Kulula airlines recently received the re branding treatment from the creative agency Atmosphere when they applied this 101 guide to the various parts of the aeroplane. Passengers can now learn where the black box is along with the ‘jump seat’ and ‘throne zone’.
More images can be found at PSFK.
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Liz Danzico recently posted a link to George Bernard Shaw’s writing hut and I was drawn once again to the marvelous, yet infrequent, series of Writers’ Rooms from The Guardian. Shaw’s hut, a retreat from callers to the house — “People bother me,” Shaw confessed. “I came here to hide from them.” — is charming in its plainness. The wicker chair, bare whitewashed wood and the evenly spaced writer’s ephemera.
Compare this then to the litter of post-it notes that swarm around Will Self’s writing room with it’s teetering paper stacks, heaving shelves, and intricately annotated maps.
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When Prokol Polymers introduced their bus shelter in 2007, presenting the Netherlands with an indestructible, vandal proof design, they did so ignoring existing research that fragile-looking bus shelters are considered less of a challenge to destroy, and therefore are less of a target for vandalism.
Spurned on by widespread reporting of this new marvel, hooligans reacted with surprising resourcefulness for to overcome the 500 degrees Celsius fireproof properties of the plastic shelter, required the use of flame throwers.
Here’s the report, albeit in Dutch, from YouTube.
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It’s a shame there isn’t a UK version of the NY Times Netflix rental patterns but the design makes up for this, supporting the playful discovery of viewing patterns.
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If the thought of yet another lunch break or evening is to be spent idly flitting from the sources of blips on your social radar then perhaps you would enjoy the challenge in helping the Victoria and Albert museum to find the best crop (or view) of their collection of 116867 items.
Once past a simple sign up screen your task is to select the best crop and zoom of the images to provide the best viewing experience for those searching the collection.
Because the images are always square it may not be possible to achieve a useful crop showing the whole object, but we can make them display more interesting details so that users of the browse wall get the best possible experience.
(hat tip: Frankie Roberto)
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Nick Martens writing on The Bygone Bureau achieves a step closer to becoming that most desirable of authority, a ‘palaeotypographist’, after browsing the Oxford English Dictionary’s archives revealed some hitherto unknown and, given the brevity of their definitions, ambiguous typographic references.
Take this 1688 quote for bake: “when Letters stick together in distributing… This is called the Letter is Baked.” So we learn that, when printing, the physical pieces of type occasionally stuck together, but we’re left to wonder why this happened, how severe it was, and how printers corrected it. Did baking ruin the type? Did each printer have his own method to prevent baking, a trade secret he passed down only to his apprentice?
More fine examples follow but perhaps the best is saved till last -
To beat fat, 1683, “If a Press-man Takes too much Inck with his Balls, he Beats Fat.”
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Ranking fifth most ‘valuable’ item, and filed away in the mysterious Totem category on the Significant Objects site is this, an exemplar of kitsch and oddly proportioned, Pink Horse.
Pink Horse with a story by Kate Bernheimer
That the Pink Horse sold for a shade over $100, with the original cost a mere hundreth of the selling price seems to vindicate the idea behind Significant Objects -
A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!
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It’s one thing to idly boast you can collect a million drawings of everyone’s favourite, lumbering prairie beast by 2011 and another to build a platform for submissions, display illustrations (of varying quality it must be said) and collect data on the whole project. To succeed, Ola Helland currently needs 1,406 giraffes to arrive each day. I have a feeling this one is going to be a nail-biting race to the finish.
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The addition of an orange light on the light switch to indicate a light remains on in another room is a simple, ‘life-hack’ that would help me remember that I’ve left the attic lit up after I’ve closed the hatch.
Matt Brown Lightswitch
When one of the lights in the garage is on, this orange light turns on in the kitchen. Really handy because those garage lights you normally turn on as you enter the house, and a lot of times they get left on. With this, you can see if they’re on from the inside and turn them off from the inside. It’s also nice because if they’re both on you know that someone is in there.
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Charting the Beatles is a collaborative design project with submissions exploring the music of the Beatles from their use of the American pronounciation to their habit of self-referential lyrics. Possibly the most successful infographic in the set is a graph by Michael Deal tracing the songwriting contributions from each band member using data gleaned from William Dowlding’s Beatlesongs
Michael Deal, Charting The Beatles, Authorship and Collaboration
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