An amazing book/sculpture piece from American visual artist Tauba Auerbach. Created in collaboration with New York-based independent bookstore Printed Matter, its made up of six die cut paper ‘pop-up book’ style sculptures, creating a truly interactive experience for the ‘reader’.
Video shot by director Sam Fleischner.
See more of Tauba Auerbach’s projects here
If you’re not already aware of The Noun Project, you should be. It’s one of those sites you think should have always existed, and wonder why it took so long to arrive. Launched in 2010 by husband-and-wife team of Edward Boatman and Sofya Polyakov, along with designer Scott Thomas, the site allows members to upload icons for others to download. They describe it as –
Creating, Sharing and Celebrating the World’s Visual Language
Its a simple concept, but one with multiple uses. From my own experience I’ve been uploading icons on and off for the last two–three years (and being paid monthly for downloads), but from digging a little deeper into their blog there’s a whole other aspect to it. The ‘Nouns’ on their site have also been used for education and signage systems, like their ‘Iconathons’ where they aim to “add to the public domain a set of graphic symbols that can be used to easily communicate concepts frequently needed in civic design.
If you fancy having a look around, or even uploading/downloading some icons, you can take a look at thenounproject.com
Or if you’d like to take a look at my icon collection you can see them on my page at thenounproject.com/tomwalshdesign
After years of planning, designing and procrastinating over my side-project Typograf, I decided that at the very least it should be more than an empty page with ‘coming soon’ (which also isn’t strictly true, as its been there for almost a decade…). And so Typograf mark II was born. Essentially it’s an aggregator for my typography related Pinterest pins, pulling in anything I add to those boards and displaying them all in one place. Making it easy for me, and anyone else on the web who stumbles across it, to see it all in one place. It’s still effectively a holding page, but at least its now a page with some use, to me anyway.
The next step will be working out how to randomise a selection of web fonts for use in the header and footer, but that’s Mark III. Expect that in another decade then.
You can take a look at typograf.co.uk/
Stunning new light installation by Seoul based Kimchi & Chips (AKA Elliot Woods and Mimi Son), which creates three dimensional ‘phantoms of light’ in the air by crossing millions of calibrated light beams in smoke.
You can see more of their work here –
Lovely idea from RCA graduate David Hedberg. ‘Smile TV’ displays a scrambled ‘no signal’ message (remember those, before the digital switch?), unless the person in front of the screen smiles. The longer the viewer smiles, the longer they have a fuzz-free signal.
Here he explains the thinking behind the project to CreativeApplications.net:
“I thought about content and how we, in the old days, used to get it delivered into our household via antennas installed on our individual rooftops. When the reception failed, somebody had to climb up there and fix the antenna to pick up the signal again. Today, with information widely accessible, often at the palm of our hands, the question is no longer if we can receive, but whether we are receptive. In the economy of ‘liking’ things we have very much taken on the role of antennas ourselves – transmitting content on to each other.”
You can read the full article on Creative Applications here
creativeapplications.net
And you can see more of David Hedberg’s work on his site here
davidhedberg.info
Nice project by Jacopo Colo. Hex Clock is a precise hexadecimal color clock which goes the whole 24 hours color range, from #000000 to #235959. Generally it’s pretty dark, but at least its accurate! The only improvement I would make would be to have a dynamic favicon which updates alongside the screen background, but maybe simple is better…
Take a look here –
Ever wondered if your interpretation of a book was accurate? Wonder no more. With e-books taking over printed book sales it was only a matter of time before we made them more ‘interactive’. Effectively less book-like… And that’s exactly what Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab have created with their project ‘Sensory Fiction’. A wearable, augmented book that attempts to make the reader ‘feel’ the story page by page. With clever use of vibration, lighting, heat and air bags it induces physical sensations from the reader that align with what’s happening on each page of the book. Clever stuff eh.
For a slightly more technical explanation of the project, take a look on the MIT site here
I won’t even try to explain how this works, but its pretty amazing. The creators at Tangible Media Group sum it up as –
“inFORM is a Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way. inFORM can also interact with the physical world around it, for example moving objects on the table’s surface. Remote participants in a video conference can be displayed physically, allowing for a strong sense of presence and the ability to interact physically at a distance. inFORM is a step toward our vision of Radical Atoms: tangible.media.mit.edu/vision/ ”
If you’d like to read more about this project you can visit their site here
Dubble, the new iPhone app which explores and experiments with double exposure. With a nice, clean and friendly interface Dubble is about as straight forward to get started with as you can get (which makes me wonder why they spent so much time on infographics to explain it… I won’t knock them for that though, they’ve been nicely done and add to the feel of the app as a whole). How it works, in a nutshell, is you take a photo and upload it. Seconds later that photo is ‘double exposed’ (overlaid/blended) with another Dubble user’s photo from anywhere in the world.
Double exposing isn’t a new idea, not even in terms of apps, or even apps this year (see my earlier post on the Goldfrapp app here), but what I like about this one is the random possibilities of the collaborations. It brings back the feel and excitement of taking a film in to be processed. Waiting/wondering/worrying how/if they’ll turn out. At least with this app you don’t have to worry about wasting your money on out of focus or overexposed prints though, as its free!
Interface wise its clean and simple. Fairly familiar in design to quite a few apps, but still nice to look at. Some of the icons seem a little chunky, but as a whole that’s a pretty minor criticism.
If you want to have a play for yourself you can download Dubble from the App Store here
(it’s not available on Android, yet)
Lovely experimental experience from Goldfrapp, which allows the user to create discs which form ‘soundscapes’. Using any of the four supplied templates you can create ‘discs’ which represent sounds, the more discs you create the more multi-layered the soundscape becomes. A nice way to engage fans on it’s own, but it also comes with an accompanying ‘Tales of Us’ photo app. Through the app you can either take new photos, choose photos from your library, or have the app pick two at random. It then layers the photos as a ‘double exposure’ (see what they did there?), giving a selection of filters and adjustments that lets you create something quite similar to an Instagram filter, but with a more abstract depth. All round worth checking out.
