Author Archive

A love story in milk

This is a lovely short film created by Catsnake for a Friends of the Earth campaign. It’s sweet and cute but with a cruel twist at the end!

Falling for an angel

Back in March at London’s Victoria station, Lynx delivered an augmented reality angel down on to unsuspecting, but then rather delighted commuters.

Device utopia

I noticed today an advert for the ‘DEVICE DESIGN DAY’ in San Francisco which is an event for ‘DESIGN FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF PRODUCTS’ (yes it was all in caps!), and just as it happens I also read the first few lines of a blog that could have been titled ‘Device overload’ asking “why [...]

Posted on Aug 12th 2010 by · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Product design, Viewpoints · Tags: ,

Beauty…but at a price

Many of us aspire to create beauty where we can. It could be in how a logo or letterform is crafted to suggest an emotive value. It might also be in how a surface is sculpted to bring elegance and ‘line’ to a product. It might even be how a mechanism is elegantly engineered to [...]

Sergey Larenkov: the past forms the present

Mixing the past and present in one image is not necessarily new, however the photo-compositions of Sergey Larenkov make for eerie viewing. The juxtaposition of modern life with all its luxuries against the grit and desperation of the second world-war make for images that not only appear ghost-like, but also stimulate reflection on times and [...]

Posted on Aug 2nd 2010 by · Permalink · One Comment
In: Art, Ooh that's nice · Tags: ,

Mastering the Routemaster

The Beetle, the Mini, the Fiat 500 and now the Routemaster bus. All have been or are being updated and contemporised (among many others), and I was hoping to draw some learning from the transformations that have taken place. Now speaking honestly this was principally because I love the transformations that have taken place on [...]

Product design monotone monotony

In 18 years of product design I have never managed to read the ‘Consumer Electronics (CE) design manual’ page 35 that says that consumer electronics products need to be painted either silver or black or some indeterminate between-tone. Neither evidently did the Samsung designer who came up with the G-series hard drive and frankly, thank [...]

Posted on May 12th 2010 by · Permalink · 2 Comments
In: Innovation, Product design, Viewpoints · Tags: , ,

Amazing micro sculptures from Williard Wigan

After my previous post about  Swann Morton, on their website I stumbled across the work of  micro sculptor Williard Wigan and how he, for the first time in a while made me think ‘how the hell do you make that?’. I started to write a bit more about him,  then realised this excerpt from Wikipedia [...]

Posted on Mar 25th 2010 by · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Art, Ooh that's nice, Structural design · Tags: 

Loving the Swann!

I had one of those great ‘getting your hands dirty’ occasions a few days ago when I had to trim out some new concepts with a knife, so I picked up the ever faithful Swann-Morton scalpel, inserted a #11 and started to cut. While avoiding my fingers, I wondered at what made the Swann-Morton conjure [...]

Posted on Mar 22nd 2010 by · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Product design, Structural design, Viewpoints · Tags: 

Big brother, Identical twin

What is the value of family over identity? That is what came to mind when I saw the new member of the i-family pop it’s head out to the media world a few weeks ago. Another way of saying this is how much does the iPad actually have to look like a scaled up iPhone [...]

Posted on Mar 12th 2010 by · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Digital, Structural design · Tags: , ,