Here’s a post I just wrote for AIGA Voice about the virtues and vices of actual travel vs. Google Earth. Mostly, I adore Google Earth. Except I hate clicking on an icon thinking it will pull up a photo and instead getting one of these weird 3-D renderings people insist on attaching to a location where I know a lovely castle stands, in real life.
That’s better!
Clockwise from top left: Panoramic Camera, View Finder Camera, 35 mm Single Cut Camera, Micro Camera. Photos courtesy of Hyun-seok Sim
Sculptor/metalsmith Hyun-seok Sim crafts these incredible pinhole cameras from sterling silver and brass. Their name, CamerAg, is a portmanteau of camera plus Ag, the scientific abbreviation for silver. Each one is built entirely by hand, right down to the screws and dials. They all take pictures, but that’s almost beside the point. Many of the cameras lack viewfinders, meaning that composing an image relies on luck and chance more than anything else. But who cares? These work just fine as eye candy. To see the entire collection of 23 cameras, click here.
Photo by FortuneCookie/Flickr
Here’s a new post I just wrote for idsgn.com. I can’t help it. I love vending machines.
Ommwriter from Herraiz Soto on Vimeo.
I know, I know. No posts since October. Bad blogger! (what do you mean no one noticed? I’m going to overlook that snarky comment.) So I want to come back with something nice: take a look at this writing program. I just downloaded the beta and may seriously try it next time I have to work on something. It clears away all the visual clutter on your computer desktop, no toolbars except a few rollover options, and just lets you type over a snowy scene, with soothing electronic music. It’s its own little peaceful environment.
http://www.ommwriter.com/en/
This offers all sorts of creative possibilities: an online promo piece for British band the Editors places custom panoramic photographs of band members into various London locations via Google Street view, hacked for the occasion. I really wish I knew how to do that.
via Gavin Lucas, Creative Review
Karl Lagerfeld’s ‘peelable’ design for the Wallpaper* cover featuring model Baptiste Giabiconi. Photograph: IPC Media
Readers of the October issue of Wallpaper are in for some old-fashioned interactive fun. Peeling off the top layer of the cover designed by Karl Lagerfeld reveals the sultry Baptiste Giabiconi, naked, on a second cover underneath. Magazines have been trying hard recently to come up with covers that break traditional formats; remember Esquire’s light-up version in September 2008? Using e-ink technology and a battery, it wasn’t interactive or even attractive, and was a logistical nightmare—the issue needed to ship in refrigerated trucks to keep it in working order.
Wallpaper’s new cover reminds me of Andy Warhol’s iconic design for the 1971 Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers, which had its own production and practical issues (the real zipper broke through the plastic overwrap on the albums and sometimes scratched the vinyl when they were piled together in stacks). One key difference, though: your curious eyes couldn’t penetrate through the layers of image any farther than the briefs. —Angela Riechers
Bartlett Sher’s staging of Rossini’s “Barbiere di Siviglia,” shown in movie theaters as a live, high-definition video program, will be rebroadcast in the Metropolitan Opera’s free Summer HD Festival. Image from the Metropolitan Opera via the New York Times.
Video screens are such commonplace furniture of the modern designed environment that we barely notice them anymore; a friend calls them humming wallpaper. The presence of screens at live shows like concerts or sporting events is sticky, though: do they add to the viewing experience or completely commandeer your attention to the point where you should have saved the price of the ticket and hassle of getting there, and watched the event on TV at home? I’ve already taken a look at this phenomenon in a piece for the AIGA Voice (Smoke Screens) but was intrigued by a new twist on the theme, happening with Metropolitan Opera performances.
Brightness on the horizon: there are encouraging early reports on the Sony Daily Edition Reader, due on the market this December. Continuing to delve into my approach/avoidance conflict with electronic readers, I had a chance to test drive a friend’s Kindle this past weekend, and the verdict is in: I wouldn’t buy one. Like many other reviewers, I found the e-ink screen not contrasty enough. Trying to read dark gray type on a light gray background just makes me sad. And the clunky keyboard on a Kindle takes up waaaay too much real estate.
Photo: Angela Riechers
My idea of a perfect vacation involves gluttonous amounts of reading. But bringing enough printed matter for ten days away causes problems at the airport, as a friend recently learned when he packed so many books that the overweight luggage fees exceeded the cost of his ticket from New York to Portugal. The obvious answer is to get a Kindle2 from Amazon and load it with up to 1500 weightless digital titles, but I was reluctant to spring for the $299 device. Sneaking peeks at other people’s Kindles on the subway is creepy, but even the little I managed to see wasn’t encouraging; for one thing the screen seemed very murky-looking. Nicholson Baker’s excellent article A New Page in the August 3rd issue of the New Yorker gave me a great idea. There’s a free Kindle app for the iPhone, and it works exactly the same as the regular Kindle: buy a book and download it instantly from Amazon’s 3G network, and start reading within minutes.