Danbusha

Design Crush

Mondays.

Pantone

Science!

Design Crush

Local photographer Michael Salisbury snapped some excellent photos of the fog swallowing Chicago this summer. You can see more over on his Flickr stream and on Instagram. Some of these are available as prints on Crated.

Calvin and Hobbes

Parallel universe

Definition

Via, um Playboy

Ceramic artist Johnson Tsang (previously) created a pair of porcelain vases that when cut along the edges reveal the profiles of people. Smoosh two together and you have instant ceramic love. See more of Tsang’s process over on his blog, and if you liked this also check out the Profilograph by Pablo Garcia.

Design Crush

Paintings by Dan May

Surreal and mysterious paintings filled with gentle creatures interacting with humans and other wild life around them. The works remind me of the illustrations of Maurice Sendak for his children's picture book Where the Wild Things Are. Dan's detail-intensive and imagination-driven works have become widely recognized for their ability to transcend the natural states of space and time.

Design Crush

Conceptual artist and illustrator Gediminas Pranckevicius posesses an imagination to covet. While most of his digital painting is centered around character design, his larger landscapes seen here are rich in detail, creating impossible but ingenious juxtapositions of water, land, and haphazard architecture. You can see more of his work over on Facebook, and all of these are available as prints via INPRNT.

From Tony Zhou, A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film.

Michele Tepper wrote about Sherlock's display of texts in 2011.

The rise of instant messaging, and even more, the SMS, has added another layer of difficulty; I'm convinced that the reason so many TV characters have iPhones is not just that Hollywood thinks they're cool, but also because the big crisp screen is so darn easy to read. Still, the cut to that little black metal rectangle is a narrative momentum killer. What's a director trying to make a ripping good adventure yarn to do?

The solution is deceptively simple: instead of cutting to the character's screen, Sherlock takes over the viewer's screen.

And just today, a trailer for Jason Reitman's Men, Women & Children, which movie seems to consist entirely of texting and social media interaction:

(via @tcarmody)

Tags: Jason Reitman   Men Women and Children   Michele Tepper   movies   Sherlock   SMS   Tony Zhou   TV   video

Your moment of Zen, Hengki Koentjoro

Tree House

Official

Winter’s Knight

All photos © Lindsay Appel for My Cool Shed

Architect and environmentalist Peter Bahouth designed and built this beautiful trio of treehouses linked by bridges in an Atlanta forest, which also happens to be his backyard. Inspired by the treehouses and adventures of his youth, the idea was to create a sort of fort for grown-ups. The three houses dubbed “Mind,” “Body,” and “Spirit,” include a living room and bedroom with a special bed that slides out for an improved view of the forest below. The photos here were taken for Jane Field-Lewis’ book My Cool Shed, provided courtesy photographer Lindsay Appel. (via iGNANT, CJ Who)

Susanne Ussing, I Drivhuset, Ordrupgaard Samlingen, 1980. Image Courtesy Carsten Hoff.

Artist Susanne Ussing (1940–1998) was a Danish visual artist and architect who worked in a variety of different mediums from photography and ceramics to large-scale installations and sensory exhibitions. One of her most impactful pieces was this 1980 installation titled I Drivhuset (In the Greenhouse) that was installed at the Ordrupgaard Museum in Copenhagen. The sculpture depicts a female figure who has seemingly grown too large for (or has become trapped by) a very tall glass greenhouse. Constructed from newspaper clippings, wood, and metal chimney vents, the figure is so large that her feet seem to penetrate the brick floor below. If Colossal had a physical manifestation, I imagine it would look almost exactly like this.

A retrospective of Ussing’s work titled “an Exhibition in the Midstream between Dream and Prosaic Reality” opened today at the Den Frie in Denmark. Image courtesy Carsten Hoff. (via Carnival of Dogs)

Illustrator and designer Akihiro Mizuuchi designed a modular system for creating edible chocolate LEGO bricks. Chocolate is first poured into precisely designed moulds that after cooling can be popped out and used as regular LEGOs. It’s hard to determine exactly how functional they are, it seems like he had success in building a number of different things, though I can only imagine how quickly they might melt in your hands, but I suppose that’s beside the point; this is two of the greatest things in the world fused together. If you google around there are numerous attempts at creating various forms of LEGO in chocolate or other food, but this appears to be the most detailed and well-designed of anything out there. (via Legosaurus)

Design Crush

Design Crush

Calvin and Hobbes

Many videos and photo projects promise a glimpse of life inside North Korea "as you've never seen it", but I believe this video by JT Singh and Rob Whitworth actually delivers the goods. It's one of those 3-minute time lapse portraits of a city that are in vogue, with the North Korean capital Pyongyang as its subject.

Time lapse videos are interesting because they show movement over long periods of time. The Western conception of North Korea is of a place frozen in time, so the time lapse view is highly instructive. (thx, jeff)

Update: Sam Potts, who travelled to Pyongyang and North Korea in 2012 and took these photos, finds this "deeply fake as filmmaking". From his Twitter acct:

Re the time lapse of Pyongyang video, it feels deeply fake as filmmaking, to me. Thus I mistrust it as a document of what real PY is like. You don't see any of the details to that reveal, even in PY, how very poor a country it is. Some of those buses didn't have tail lights. They had blocks of wood painted red to look like tail lights. And the library computers are incredibly poor quality.

Gizmodo's Alissa Walker also noted the propaganda-ish nature of the video. At the very least, the video is a dual reminder of the limitations of time lapse video in showing the whole story and of how manipulative attractively packaged media can be.

Tags: JT Singh   North Korea   Rob Whitworth   time lapse   video

A little sheet music, Einar Nerman

Office Safari

If you want to create detailed and imaginative flying machine sculptures that look like they’re about to take flight, cardboard is hardly the material to use. Unless of course you’re artist Daniel Agdag (previously), who has been toiling away creating a series of new works each more detailed and fascinating than the next. “The Principles of Aerodynamics” is Agdag’s first solo exhibition where his series of cardboard contraptions that portray his “ongoing pursuit of escape through the metaphor of flight” will be on display through Aug 31, 2014.

As he’s done in the past, Agdag forfeits all blueprints, drawings and plans choosing, instead, to work only from mind and scalpel. His industrial beasts–get close and you can almost smell the oil and smoke; hear the clanking and buzzing–come together only from sliced cardboard hinged with glue.