Tag: design
Threadless and Griffin team up to bring community-designed cases to the iPhone
Ever checked out the Threadless website? If you haven't, you really should; it's a great online, community driven t-shirt store. Users submit their designs to Threadless, the community votes on them, and the best are made into limited-run t-shirts and…
VIDEO: Steampunk Segway ditches motor
At the Gadget Show Live last weekend, I got as close to a Segway as I’ve ever been, which made me ridiculously excited. I want one. But if I can’t get one, then this is probably the next best thing – it’s a Steampunk Segway, powered by pedalling.
The best thing, though, is that the creator has taken the time to document the entire creation process on Instructables. Make your own, but don’t come crying to us if it falls apart on the hard shoulder of the M4.
Instructables (via Engadget)
Kern – the iPhone game for font geeks
Kerning, if you’re unaware, is the process of adjusting the distance between letters in typography, and now someone’s made a game of the process, and published it for the iPhone. It’s called “Kern”.
It works a little like Tetris – you position a letter at the bottom, and a word falls into place around it. The objective is to get it as close as possible to a perfect kern. It’s not easy, unless you have a perfect eye and a very steady finger.
As you can imagine, the design is absolutely impeccable. It’s enormously geeky, too, but that’s not really going to put off hardcore typographers now, is it? Here’s a video of it in action:
Kern (via Technabob)
Homeless man designs revolutionary speakers
A homeless bloke called Kevin Nelson who lives in California has managed to find a way of getting two distinct stereo sound channels out of a single cabinet. He’s calling it “Crossover Imaging”, because it involves wiring the crossover in a very special way. Each speaker delivers both a left and a right channel.
He’s been working on it since 1989, but despite winning out in comparisons with Polk, KEF, and Klipsch, and a low low price of less than $1,000, he’s only sold 35 pairs. That might be why he’s homeless, I suppose. His company – Zealth Audio Loudspeakers – is currently looking for investors to start full-scale production.
Cnet (via Crunchgear)
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Turn your iPhone into a scanner
When’s the last time you used a scanner?
For me, the answer’s probably “years ago”. It’s something that’s completely exited my life, for some reason. Probably because I just don’t seem to ever get stuff on paper any more. Not stuff that needs to be on my PC, anyway.
Well, an Industrial Design student at the University of Cincinnati, Kyle A Koch, has come up with a big cardboard construct that can be used to scan stuff in using your iPhone. You’ll also need some decent light, and the picture quality won’t even approach ‘medium’, but hey – you never know when it could come in handy.
(via Likecool)
Related posts: Lightbulb/speaker mashups suddenly all over the web | Finger scissors – concept design lets you cut with a gesture
Lightbulb/speaker mashups suddenly all over the web
Okay, ‘all over the web’ is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but just the other day, we spotted the Soundbulb over at Yanko Design. Today, I spotted this concept Bulb-Sound-Speaker over at Crunchgear. Two lamp-speakers in a week? I’m calling that a trend. Before the end of the month, we’ll be swimming in the things.
Silliness aside, it’s quite a cool concept, and could prove useful in public places – restaurants, elevators, etc. Of the two, only the Soundbulb works as a light as well, but they both rely on Bluetooth to ferry the music around the place wirelessly. Would I use one of these? No. Do I think they’d sell? Most definitely.
(via Yanko Design and Crunchgear)
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GODLIKE GENIUS: CD-Rs that look like floppies
Yesterday, we had floppy disk posters, before Christmas we had floppy disk gift tags, today we’ve got floppy disk CD-Rs. Evidently the humble 3.5″ floppy, subject of much mockery in the school playground, is now the coolest kid on the block.
Sure, they only hold 200MB of data (though that’s 13789% more than the originals) and they’re a little on the expensive side – at $10 (£7) a CD, but you can’t put a price on retro-cool, right? Right? What do you mean “28p and a blackjack”?
Designboom (via Technabob)
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Google changes favicon again – much nicer than the lowercase purple g
It seems like only yesterday that Google shifted its favicon from an uppercase G to a purple lowercase g. Well, although the little purple g is still in place, on my computer at least, at the moment, a post on the Official Google Blog suggests that it’s about to change again, to the icon over to the right.
The new icon is a reinterpretation of a submission sent in by a user, one André Resende – a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil. The lucky chap, along with the rest of us, get to see a modified version of his creation (left) twenty thousand times a day as we destroy the planet. What do you think of the new logo? I’m quite a fan…
Related posts: Google changes its favicon from uppercase white ‘G’ to lowercase purple ‘G’ – thoughts? | Google searches causing global warming? Err… no.
CES 2009: iRiver's space-age product lineup
After Dan covered the Wave-Home multimedia communicator the other day, I did a little more digging, and found a bunch of other matching products that iRiver unveiled at CES.
I’ve always quietly been a fan of iRiver’s design work. Their latest MP3 players look incredible, and these sleek new gadgets wouldn’t be out of place in a documentary called “The home of 2100”. Click the Wave-Home below to view the gallery.
iRiver (via Akihabaranews)
Finger scissors – concept design lets you cut with a gesture
These finger scissors are the work of Effrat Gommeh at Yanko Design. Slip these on, then make the rock-paper-scissors snipping gesture, and you’ll be able to cut paper like it was… er… paper. Brilliant.
Also brilliant on the Yanko Design site: a laptop mousetrap for those with prying roommates, a beautiful and elegant transparent iron, and the customizable peel-off light. I think I’ve found a new favourite group of designers…
Yanko Design (via Gizmodo)
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