Volvo’s New Child Car Seat Inflates In 40 Seconds. It's never a good urban parenting moment. You jam the heavy car seat you've lugged to the curb into the back of your car, while simultaneously jamming yourself half in, too. Then you twist into a pretzel to secure the seat to the seat belt. And there's no cutting corners. All 50 states require you to put your baby in a child seat and 48 states want you to use a booster seat as they get older, based on certain weight requirements. You have no choice. Today, Volvo revealed a new concept that could change the industry.
Rather than being constructed out of rigid plastic and metal, their seat uses heavy duty drop-stitch fabric--the same stuff you’ll find in outdoor gear such as inflatable rafts. The seat is designed to be rear-facing, which would imply that it’s designed for children up to about age three. While it’s certainly a compelling concept--it inflates like magic! That said, parents have a lot of gear. Would you try Gyeonggi Children’s Museum climbing... WIRT: A Sleek Storage Solution For the Hallway... From An Ex-Apple Designer, A Cozy Blanket Inspired By Origami And Science.
As chilly weather drags on, there's still time to curl up on the couch under a nice cozy blanket. But most blankets are just so...flat. Not in terms of color or impact, but literally, they're flat, because they're a flat piece or knit of fabric. Not so with the Bloom, an art- and science-inspired blanket that's currently on Kickstarter. Bloom was created by Bianca Cheng Costanzo, a Brazilian-born half-Chinese and half-Italian woman raised in California who dropped out of MIT (where she was a part of the famous MIT Media Lab) and worked as a designer at Apple (phew!).
All of that, she says, comes into play with Bloom: a blanket inspired by both the origami she played with as a child and the tessellations she explored at MIT, created from soft Italian fabric. Bloom is a blanket with a surprisingly three-dimensional design, constructed by sewing woolen tetrahedrons together. The final result is familiar, a pleasantly bumpy spread of pyramids that looks like a paper fortune teller.
Behind Google Maps' Intuitive New Design. First launched in 2005, Google Maps has helped hundreds of millions of people plot billions of trips worldwide. It's one of the most indispensable Internet services available: more than 54% of all smartphone owners in the world use it at least once a month. So how do you redesign Maps for the next decade, those next billion trips? You throw everything out and redesign it from the ground up with the future in mind--and not just the future of smartphones and tablets, but also the future of Google Glass, the iWatch, and self-driving cars.
Currently rolling out to all users internationally, Google's new Maps design is a radical overhaul of the service that most of us have grown familiar with over the years. Featuring a minimalist UI based off of Chrome, it's faster, more responsive, more personalized, and more integrated with related Maps services like Google Earth than ever before. "The old Maps was a lot like a Christmas tree," says Jonah Jones, lead designer for Google Maps. This Twitter Logo Redesign Takes Simplicity Too Far. First launched in 2010, Twitter's icon--a cheery blue bird--has become an important part of the micro-blogging service's visual identity.
At a time when pretty much every aspect of digital design is shifting toward flatter, more abstract designs, Italian designer Roberto Manzari has released a proposal to vastly simplify the Twitter logo by reducing it to just a few geometric shapes. But is such a vastly simplified logo really right for Twitter's brand? "The main idea of this logo is simplicity," says Manzari on his Behance page.
"As Twitter simplifies our ways of communicating, this logo reflects the value of Twitter giving it a recognizable and strong identity. " It's certainly a simpler design, so from that perspective, Manzari's effort is a success. Generally speaking, the instinct to simplify a logo down to its core elements is a good thing. That's what makes Twitter's identification with a bird in both its name and its logo so brilliant. RMLFVR : These bottle caps can turn... 4 Reasons We Love the New Vifa Wireless Loudspeaker.
We just got word about the new Vifa wireless loudspeaker and we love it so much we wanted to count the ways. #1. It’s Danish We give up. We love everything that comes out of Copenhagen. It’s even named Copenhagen. . #2. Well, we haven’t listened to it yet, but we can assure you they haven’t been making loudspeakers for the past 80 years if they’re not high-quality audio. . #3. I love the beatbox-style handle that the speaker has that doesn’t seem to be an afterthought. Copenhagen is connected via Bluetooth (aptX), Apple AirPlay or dlna (supports Wi-Fi Direct) to almost any cell phone, tablet and PC or Mac. . #4. Copenhagen comes in six selected colors; each with their own, vibrant character: Sunset Red, Sand Yellow, Ocean Blue, Ice Blue, Anthracite Grey, and Pebble Grey. Learn more about the Copenhagen wireless speaker here. 100 Years Of Olympic Logos: A Depressing History Of Design Crimes.
If you're not a fan of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games' minimalist logo, hey, it could have been worse. Much worse. For proof, consider this slide show of all of the Olympic Games logos between 1924 and 2020. There have been some beautifully designed logos throughout the Olympic Games' rich history, but sadly, that seems to be very much the exception, not the rule.
Traveling back in time on this Olympic carousel, it's interesting to spot design trends, and even more interesting to spot the design crimes. Starting in the summer of 1984, for example, a typographical mad man appears to have seized control of the International Olympics Committee, and in his subsequent 14-year reign of terror, lop the heads off any designer who suggested a typeface that did not come pre-installed with Microsoft Word. Okay, I kid, but bookmarked between what appears to be Sarajevo '84s tasteful Paralucent and Nagano '98s Amira font, the typefaces of this era are dreadful. / RMLFVR / • Balance watch: A philosophy in a watch... 12 Gifts For Brand Snobs. Design Snobs. You know the ones. They walk into the holiday party and immediately tally the host's inventory: Eames Chair? Check. Noguchi coffee table? Check. And oh my! Well, you're in luck. Design Leather laptop bag that transforms in a. Pinterest.
The Ikea Of Bikes Is Ready To Ship. With bicycle culture and craft in ascendance, bike fever has spread past the artisanal frame builders and fixie fanatics to infest the every man. To wit: the fall launch of the Sandwichbike (anticipated by us earlier this year) by Bastens Leijh’s Dutch design studio, Bleijh Industrial. Leijh set out to prove that there are legitimate new ways to approach bicycle design and put it in the hands of the consumer. “Having designed for several large bike brands, we concluded that the bicycle industry is a very rigid one, where the usual patterns of design, production, distribution, and sales are deeply ingrained,” says Leijh.
“The Sandwichbike was created to show that it’s possible to create a perfectly functioning bicycle by a different approach: made from different material, put together differently, produced differently, and distributed differently.” Those differences? Design Italian design & Japanese craftsmanship. The Design Studio Behind Xbox Reviews The PlayStation 4. Even if you don't know the design consultancy Teague, you know their work--ranging from the original Polaroid camera to the interiors of almost every Boeing plane to date.
They were also the firm Microsoft tapped to design their original Xbox, conceptualize controllers for the Xbox brand, and create the Xbox 360 racing wheel. Imagine our delight when they volunteered to apply their expertise in a critique of the Xbox's latest and greatest competitor, the PlayStation 4. --Eds. Sony’s path to the PS4 reads much like any classic story arc. Act I, PS1 upstaged its toy-like competitors by targeting a more tech-savvy and mature audience. Act II, PS2 literally destroys its competition, by bringing guns to a knife fight and becoming the highest selling console platform of all time. Act III, the point of conflict…PS3 was used as a trojan horse to push Blu-ray and 3-D TV technology platforms, theoretically to bolster additional offerings of the Sony brand.
All about the details. Not so premium. Show Off The Books You've Read on Balancing Bookshelf. I was on Etsy and stumbled on Cush Design Studio’s Etsy shop and Chris Cush’s cool Balancing Bookshelf. It’s such a simple concept and executed simply as well, yet its delicacy and craft requires someone who took the time to make sure it was done right. Stack your read books on one side and unread ones on the other side, or maybe fiction versus nonfiction, or classics versus modern… I’m sure you can come up with tons of creative ways to display your books using this shelf. Buy one here. ‘Game of Thrones’ Ladies As Mucha-Inspired Posters [Pics. I’m not a big fan of the Alphonse Mucha style, but these depictions by Elin Jonsson are pretty and graceful. (And yes, Commentors, there are some French errors.)
[via io9] This Company Wants To "Breed" The Perfect Chair, Using Eugenics. Imagine using computers to bring countless generations of chairs to life, then forcing them to mate with one another in an orgiastic rut of successive DNA pairings until you finally have the uberstuhl: a perfectly designed chair. It's not exactly a conventional approach, but that's what FormNation is doing with Chairgenics, a program to "breed" the ultimate chair thanks to a little help from eugenics and evolutionary theory. "Every designer I've ever met wants to design a chair in [his or her] lifetime, but when we were thinking of doing one, we questioned what we could do that hadn't been done before," FormNation's founder Jan Habraken tells Co.Design in an email. Favoring a Darwinist approach to design, Habraken and his team began looking to the world of evolutionary theory for a fresh approach.
Habraken was inspired by Plato's famous diatribe about controlled breeding in a chapter of Republic and started wondering if the principles of eugenics could be applied to chairs. Oxford Debuts A Library Chair To Last For Centuries. The Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford have housed precious literature and scholarly documents for the past 400 years. It's a special place, with its own special chairs--and over those last four centuries, only three chair designs have graced the Bodleian's halls.
The latest, designed by Barber and Osgerby, beat out competing designs by Herman Miller and four other firms. So how do you create a chair for the ages--something that can fit into Oxford's storied history while updating it at the same time? "After spending a day at the library it became apparent there are some pretty unusual requirements for the readers at the Bodleian Libraries," say designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby. For one, researchers may sit in the same chair for 12 hours straight, "so comfort was obviously very important. " Oxford's brief called for a chair that would offer sitters a 120-degree field of working. How Google Taught Itself Good Design. Happy Thanksgiving!
To keep you busy while you recover from turkey coma, we're republishing some of our favorite stories from 2013. Enjoy. --Eds "I had just assumed that Google was hostile to designers," says Matias Duarte one afternoon this summer. We're in a drab Google conference room at the Plex, and Duarte sports a red-and-yellow floral-print shirt, skinny khaki pants, and a pair of white sunglasses. Throughout his career, Duarte has won 37 mobile device patents. Three years ago, Google came calling. Then Duarte had a surprising conversation with cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Duarte took the job; he is now Android's design director. This is the story of how Google taught itself good design. And within the firm, all credit goes to Page. The implications of this transformation are enormous. We saw the first glimpse of this potential last winter when the search company capitalized on the failure of Apple's map app with an iOS map app of its own.
Users had also changed. Bill Gates admits Control-Alt-Delete was a mistake, blames IBM. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has finally admitted that forcing users to press the Control-Alt-Delete key combination to log into a PC was a mistake. In an interview at a Harvard fundraising campaign, Gates discusses his early days building Microsoft and the all-important Control-Alt-Delete decision. If you've used an old version of the software or use Windows at work then you will have experienced the odd requirement. Gates explains the key combination is designed to prevent other apps from faking the login prompt and stealing a password. "It was a mistake," Gates admits to an audience left laughing at his honesty. "We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't wanna give us our single button.
" Gates has admitted other mistakes too Control-Alt-Delete isn't the only recent mistake admission by Bill Gates. Verge Video: Bill Gates Interview - How the world will change by 2030. Lifehacker. The 3 Future Waves In Design, And How To Ride Them. The Rise of the Backyard Office. Design Duo: Burberry's Angela Ahrendts And Christopher Bailey On Trust. Griffin Walker: 15" laptop leather briefcase ... | things to put st... For $15, This Service Will Deliver A Quick Design Fix. #design 5-Foot Tall French Tower Clock by ... | things to have at home. Ikea's New Catalog Magically Transforms Into Furniture.
Viks. A intersection B by Kim Myung Hyun. The Ultimate Responsive Web Design Beginners Resource List » Target Local. A Pair of Pears: Finders Keepers: 105 Best Free Fonts. Photo by rmlfvr. #design Handmade wooden knives from Kyoto, Japan, A Visit to Folklore. / RMLFVR / • Engrain: a Kirckstarter campaign for a haptic... Things to have at home / Minimalist cordless kettle by Taodi #design. / RMLFVR / • There are a million ways to tell the time, by... Things to have at home / Kino Lamps: mushroom-inspired lamp design by Krizalid Studio's Emmanuel Gardin #design. Things to have at home / 'Homework' work table designed by Tomas Kral for super-ette #design. Things to have at home / Book binder by Christoffer Martens can free you from shelves #books #design. Is Cheap Furniture Worth Buying? Infographic: The Evolution Of The Batman Logo, From 1940 To Today. Things to have at home / Beautiful furnitures handpicked by PROMONTORIO Architects for l'AND Vineyards Resort, Portugal #design #travel.
The Skase tea cup set is the most beautiful #tea thing you'll see today #design. MAKE YOUR MARK : The Pen With A Twist by AJOTO. The Typography of Authority — Do Fonts Affect How People Accept Information. The 11 Winners Of Our Innovation By Design Awards. AOL May Have Invented Email's Next UI Paradigm. Things to put stuff in / #design The cork iPad case by pomm* design studio.
Handmade Desks, "Breathing Rooms" And Gross Happiness: Take A Look Inside Etsy HQ. CV Maker Creates Beautiful, Professional-Looking Resumes Online in Minutes. An Experimental New Starbucks Store: Tiny, Portable, And Hyper Local. Will Apple's Tacky Software-Design Philosophy Cause A Revolt? A houseboat on the eilbek canal.
A Hyper Cool (And Controversial) Rebranding For American Airlines. Dieter Rams. La Belle Échoppe. Startups, This Is How Design Works – by Wells Riley. The Simple Wooden Tokyo Home Office. London Underground map by Kyle BEAN made from. Un documentaire sur le Comic Sans MS. 40+ Vintage Posters to Inspire Your Next Designs Color Palette. Lego Wallets. Punctirus jewelry by Art. Lebedev Studio art-lebedev1 – TheTrend. THE MALCOLM » FASHION » MARC JACOBS USB KEY. One Shirt, No Shoes, No Service (SM) Bookbook - Bookbook. Old VHS turns into hard drives | Desktop. Marguerite Sauvage illustrations.