The regular deadline for the Core77 Design Awards ends Tuesday April 10 at 9pm Eastern Time (6pm Pacific Time). Put your hard work, ideas and passion in front of our incredible multidisciplinary group of jurors from around the world. All winning, runner-up and notable entries will be announced live by the jury, live-tweeted, blogged individually here, publicized and finally, published in the Core77 Design Awards yearbook. And of course, the Professional and Student winner of each category will receive the trophy of trophies which celebrates teamwork.

So don't miss out. Submit and pay for your entries before we switch into our late deadline period. Register to start, or if you're already registered complete your entry. We want to see your work!

We understand if you need the extra time, so we've created a late deadline of Tuesday April 24; however, note that entries submitted and paid for after April 10 incur a late fee. Click here for details.

For as long as I can remember (Winamp, anyone?), visualizers have always had a bit of a psychedelic aesthetic; Benga opts for acetate instead of acid trip. The teaser clip for the dubstep producer's new single, "I Will Never Change," is a clever riff on the prevalence of the digital waveform, recreated in a stop-motion accumulation of custom-cut vinyl—a logical extension of, say, art hacker Gene Kogan's palm-sized extrusion of a Billy Joel track à la Makerbot, yet not as hacker-y as Ishac Bertran's cut-and-paste records.

While waveforms have long been familiar to sound engineers and (with the advent of software tools such as ProTools, Garageband, etc.) amateur musicians alike, music streaming site Soundcloud might be credited with the 'mainstream' popularization of these graphic representations of audio recordings.

via Hypebeast

There are certain adjectives that seem to take on a life of their own, suffering from buzz-friendly, pseudo-intellectual overuse to the point of becoming meaningless placeholders for a proper descriptor, and I daresay "organic" is one of them. I'll admit that I too am responsible from wringing the term of its meaning as a shorthand antonym for synthetic, contrived or otherwise formalist aesthetics of high modernism.

Where Tomas Ekström's "Dolly" might be an example of the latter, Maarten de Ceulaer begins with a similar cellular concept to arrive at the opposite result. The "Mutation" series, created on the occasion of the Salone, might well be described with the dreaded o-word. Indeed, the designer himself characterizes it as such, with a rather darker subtext than the bulbous, inviting forms initially suggest:

The pieces in this series look like they weren't made by hands, but have grown to their present form organically. They might be the result of a mutation in cells, or the result of a chemical or nuclear reaction. Perhaps it's a virus or bacteria that has grown dramatically out of scale. The Mutation pieces make you look at furniture in a different way. Maybe one day we would be able to grow a piece of furniture like we breed or clone an animal, and manipulate it's shape like a bonsai tree.

We've seen at least a couple designers tackle the higher-order o______ forms, such as arteries and veins or leaves, de Ceulaer's work also alludes to a taxonomical approach, subverting tufted cushioning:

The project can be seen as an experimental review of classic furniture upholstery. It reminds us of the famous and iconic deep buttoned (Chesterfield) sofa's, interpreted in a highly contemporary and sculptural way. Instead of upholstering springs and foam with leather or textile, these pieces are created by carefully composing patterns with cut-offs of foam spheres of various sizes, and applying them onto a structure. In the end the entire piece gets coated, with a durable rubber or tactile velvet-like finish. It is hardly impossible to ever recreate such a specific pattern, so every piece is completely unique.

Art Director, Digital Media
ESPN
Bristol, Connecticut (or New York, New York)

ESPN, INc., the Worldwide Leader in Sports, is seeking an Art Director to support their Digital Media Design team in maintaining an optimal user experience across platforms, including advocating for excellent user experience within ESPN mobile products. The ideal candidate has at least six years of experience in interactive media design and a demonstrated record of creating cutting-edge and original design solutions on tight deadlines.

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It's tough to compete with an announcement as big as Nike's NFL gear release, but last week another Nike product made a quieter debut: Their latest line of Free running shoes, which are inching closer and closer to providing the unrestricted range of motion of wearing no sneakers at all while still protecting your feet from the ickiness of urban streets.

In the promising trend we've seen recently across a multitude of industries, Nike has released a video of the actual designer responsible for the product discussing elements of his design. (It also doesn't hurt that Nike CEO Mark Parker started out as a designer himself.) Here's Senior Nike Footwear Designer Mark Miner:

With as much ink as Miner has on his arms, it's no surprise the man still draws. A lot. (Check him in action after the jump!)

Reporting by Christina Beard

Designers typically don't reveal their mistakes or share how they stumbled into a solution. But Alex Lin of Studio Lin did last week at his AIGANY talk hosted at the Museum of Art and Design. Through a series of Do's and Don'ts, Lin revealed some of his successes and failures in design, production and fabrication. Some of his most beautiful work was created when he had no idea what he was doing or through collaborations.

After graduating from the Yale MFA graphic design program Lin worked at 2x4 for 6 years before co-founding DEFAULT. A few years later he parted ways and created Studio Lin—a studio founded on a desire to explore new territory through challenging collaborations with creative visionaries in the fields of architecture, industrial design, art and fashion. In just a few years Studio Lin has created a body of work that provokes and inspires the design community.

Lin challenged the audience to get in over your head and take on more than you can handle. While at 2x4, he took on way more than he could handle, by totally jumping into projects and working long hours and weekends. Lin was unsure how to start a project designing environmental graphics for the student campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Feeling overwhelmed, he started to create simple pictograms of 'things students do.' Hundreds of pictograms he created were later transformed into 20-foot tall, vinyl portraits of Mies van der Rohe, welcoming the students as they entered the building. He confessed that he had no idea where he was headed.

As we saw in the post about bottle recyclingBWAY Corporation, which manufactures the Eco-Pail. It's an environmentally-friendly twist on the five-gallon buckets you've seen everything from paint to joint compound being lugged around in. Because they've replaced the standard metal wire handle with a Plastic Eco-Handle produced from recycled materials, the entire thing can be tossed into a recycling grinder, no separation required. (And yes, the handle is just as strong.)

Besides the Eco-Pail, BWAY has 270 containers of all shapes and sizes--drums, pails, cans, buckets, bottles, you name it--all made from recyclable metal or plastic.

Most of their product--roughly 75%--goes towards industrial applications, explaining the no-nonsense designs. Another 20% goes into food packaging.

And as for that remaining 5% of their business? They make some pretty bad-ass ammunition boxes.

The military-spec containers are air-tight, water-tight, stackable, and sturdy as hell. I badly want to buy some of these, but can't decide if I prefer the ones for 7.62mm ammunition or the larger bad boys designed to hold 81mm mortar shells.

The Savannah College of Art and Design is pleased to announce that three of its Furniture & Industrial Design students will be exhibiting at the SaloneSatellite in Milan next week. "New work from SCAD students Bradley Bowers, Alejandro Figueredo and Matt Gray will be displayed in a dedicated exhibition at the internationally renowned design fair from April 17-22 in Milan, Italy."

B.F.A. industrial design alumnus Bradley Bowers, an M.A. furniture design candidate from Texas and Savannah, Georgia, will show his unique tabletop vase "Om," crafted of paper and latex. He will also show "Mona," a multi-purpose tabletop vessel, and his innovative lounge, "Shell," which creates a sense of true balance when used.

B.F.A. industrial design student Alejandro Figueredo, from Caracas, Venezuela, will exhibit "Ligna," a tabletop lamp, and "Gira," a hanging lamp, from his lighting series that explores themes of balance and tension.

M.F.A. furniture design candidate Matt Gray of Dallas, Texas, will exhibit two pieces, "Li," a low table intended to encourage a new type of dining experience, and "Ante," a series of wall-mounted antlers that seek to create a juxtaposition between the natural world and manufactured objects, that can be used as a rack or serve as artful décor.

SCAD notes that "designs at the SaloneSatellite have been through a rigorous selection process and were chosen for inclusion by a committee of professionals from the fields of design, architecture and design media." Now in its 15th year, the SaloneSatellite focuses on designers under the age of 35—the three students will be exhibiting as design professionals under the moniker PLZ DONT TCH—with the timely 2012 theme of "Design ↔ Technology."

Good news in the battle against design rip-offs: After a two-year struggle, Joseph Joseph has pulled off a landmark victory against a group of Chinese companies that went above and beyond your average levels of product design piracy.

A company called Ningbo John and five of its subsidiaries not only blatantly copied Joseph Joseph's Index Chopping Board, but went so far as to patent it in China, claiming they owned both the design and the brand name. The ballsy step was followed by Ningbo John then producing the knockoff and selling it around the world, earning millions of ill-gotten dollars.

"We've taken many Chinese companies to task over product infringement, but this was the first time they'd dared to register our design and brand name as their own," explained Managing Director Richard Joseph. "When we challenged them on it they actually threatened to sue us because the products were 'their' design! They claimed to customers that they owned the design registration and brand name and therefore could sell the copies, which is just a blatant lie."

Joseph Joseph brought the case to a Chinese court, who eventually ruled in Joseph Joseph's favor and revoked Ningbo John's patent. This is an extremely encouraging sign that the Chinese legal system is willing to address design piracy, and will hopefully have a ripple effect on illicit operations looking to make a quick yuan.

In the meantime the battles, of course, will continue. The company reports there are still "a long list of infringers" they need to target and pursue. "We're totally committed to fighting copies head on wherever they appear and are determined to win however long that takes," said Joseph. "This case also forcefully demonstrates the necessity of fighting to the bitter end: If you really care about your brand name and design you fight until you win."

While not as intricate as floors done by Benjamin Lai (see some here and here) and without the found-object quality of Piet Hein Eek's furniture, interior design brand Jamie Beckwith has still managed to breath some new life into wood. Specifically through tiles.

The Jamie Beckwith Enigma Collection of floor tiles throws geometry at the problem of boring floors, providing over a dozen different shapes that add a visual effect trumping conventional parquet. They also just about guarantee the contractor will hate you.

A beautiful short film about Caine's Arcade, a 9-year-old's DIY cardboard dream arcade in East Los Angeles. Built out of his dad's used auto parts boxes, packing tape and pure imagination, it's a feel-good short that reminds us of the magic of making.

via boingboing

"We're a little different than your typical Bay Area start-up," says BRD Motorcycles CEO Marc Fenigstein. Right down the street from some of the most innovative companies in America, Marc and the rest of the BRD team are busy changing the face of the motocross industry through their pioneering electric bikes. The Redshift, BRD's flagship motorcycle, is 250 pounds of power and handling all wrapped up in a drop-dead gorgeous custom frame that charges in a wall socket. "Nobody needs electric motorcycles," says Marc, "but we found a way to make everyone want electric: by making them go faster."

On the test track, the RedShift is four seconds faster on a 1:10 lap than the KTM 250, a comparable gas-powered bike. "That's the difference between classes!" says Marc. "Motocross has two full-size classes, 250cc and 450cc. The 250cc is the larger market segment and the more appropriate size/power bike for most mortal humans." Where a gas-powered bike can generate 40 horsepower at its peak, the RedShift "can put down 40 horsepower anywhere."

Moreover, pro riders heavily train their arms in order to endure "forearm pump," the debilitating strain generated from shifting with the clutch with the left hand and cutting the throttle with the right hand. Using an electric motor helps to eliminates this strain, since the rider remains in the same gear the entire ride and only needs to "finely tune" the throttle. For average riders, this is a "huge advantage."

While BRD's motorcycles hold their own on the track, "We own the street," says Marc. Although the gas-powered competition "would never be street legal," the RedShift is built for riders to enjoy both on the dirt track and for trips around the city. Although you may not be able to hear the RedShift "going down the street from inside your house," BRD's motorcycles are "definitely not silent." Marc described the sound as something "like a podracer," with the pitch of the noise "always tied to your speed." In Marc's opinion, this is the "perfect product feedback for the user."

Read on for the full story:

I met Katrina Vonnegut (yes, she's related to Kurt) at her textile studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a small space in one of those perpetually cold industrial buildings. After we chatted and I ogled her vintage Brother sewing machine (see pictures), we traversed windy streets lined with faceless warehouses and side-stepped rotting animal carcasses (not joking) as 18-wheelers rumbled by on a nature walk, of sorts, that led us deeper into the heart of Bushwick to the woodworking studio where Brian Kraft, her boyfriend and business parter in the newly sprung furniture partnership Vonnegut/Kraft, works.

Origins

Katrina was Brian's neighbor before she became his girlfriend and business partner in a design studio that marries Katrina's background in furniture design as well as her skills as a textile artist with Brian's experience as a craftsman and builder. Katrina has a degree in furniture design from RISD, where she also studied and worked with textile designer Liz Collins (Watch this Cool Hunting video of her winning first place for her Cradle Chair in the Billes Products International Design Contest in 2008). After she graduated and moved to New York, she worked freelance building sets and making costumes for commercials and music videos. "I had thought I wanted to do that, but it's such a disposable industry. And it's such a fast turnaround you can't control quality as much as you might be able to on a longer project, like a film."

Oddly enough, Brian majored in literature at NYU. While he was kicking around job ideas post graduation, he began working part-time in a woodworking shop in Bushwick, and it just kind of stuck. Katrina describes him as "a traditional cabinetmaker. I don't know if he would consider himself a designer, but maybe more recently, since we've started to collaborate with one another he would."

Design Ethos

Though they both worked with furniture for years before teaming up, it's their collaborative effort that enabled a piece like the Maize bed, a design born out of necessity that has since become their most iconic product, fueling a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $6,000 to fund their booth at ICFF. When Katrina and Brian found themselves in need of a new bed, they saw it as an opportunity to design and build something together.

And it's not the only time new designs have sprung from a personal need. "I've made a few sweaters because I needed one or because I lost my favorite sweater," Katrina says. "I try and recreate a similar pattern but maybe with new colors. I think those are the best things, because you know that they're really genuine."

German designer Thomas Schnur is pleased to announce that he will be exhibiting three products at the 2012 Salone Satellite in Milan, including the noteworthy "Rubber Table."

The drain or plunger is an item, which, though it receives little attention, is actually extremely useful. Rubber Table adopts its idiosyncratic aesthetic and transfers it into a new environment. The rubber plunger has become a table leg—setting in motion a new way of looking at this ambivalent object. Manufactured with dyed foam rubber the color and the surface feel of the original object are preserved.

I imagine that the object has five legs for stability's sake, though this trait somehow underscores its semblance to a Martian quintaped: I wouldn't be surprised to get home late one night to discover my pet "Rubber Table" puttering around my living room with Roomba-like tenacity.

If you've ever used a Dyson vacuum, you know they transmit a strong sensation of product power as soon as you flip them on. (And if you haven't ever used one, stay tuned, we've got some reviews coming up.) The sensation of torque you get from a Dyson is similar to what you feel when wielding a good power tool—a lot of juice in a relatively compact package. Could that power generation be applied to transportation?

As an exercise in fun, Dyson's 650 UK-based engineers were asked to create the fastest model cars they could using old Dyson motors and spare parts. Here's what they came up with (and props to the guy who actually rode his design):

Artist: lunchbreath
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Entrepreneur Elena Baturina, who is Russia's richest woman and only female billionaire, believes in design thinking and started the creative think tank Be Open, an environment which should become "a space for communication between today's thinkers and tomorrow's doers."

Baturina, who is also the wife of the recently ousted Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov. defines Be Open as a "design think tank, exhibitions and an awards scheme that will bring together the great minds of the 21st century and the next generation of innovators from the arts, science and business, asking them to imagine and then build solutions for the future."

The think tank will launch during this year's Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan - in collaboration with Interni Magazine and sociologist Francesco Morace—with a series of speakers from the worlds of art, media, business and science gathering over three days to exchange ideas about how design thinking can respond to and find solutions for current and future social, environmental and economic needs.

Following Milan, Be Open is scheduled to travel to other creative hubs such as London for the September London Design Festival, with New York earmarked for their respective festival seasons.

Design, engineering and technology can achieve game-changing breakthroughs from industries that need to push the envelope and have massive budgets. The military gives us trickle-down innovations like GPS, and Formula One racing is used by manufacturers to develop new technologies that will eventually find their way into passenger cars.

Sports is another area where the budgets are large and a high level of innovation is demanded of designers. Clothing, accessories, vehicles, and even the structures these competitions take place in can bring us advances in materials, product configurations and production methods, enriching the design field as a whole. Examining this phenomena and its fruits is Design Museum London's forthcoming Designed to Win exhibition.

Designed to Win celebrates the ways in which design and sport are combined, pushing the limits of human endeavour to achieve records and victories of increasing significance and wonder. From the design of F1 cars to running shoes, racing bikes to carbon fibre javelins, the quest for enhanced performance and function is endless. Designed to Win explores the various way in which design has shaped the sporting world, celebrating the introduction of revolutionary new materials such as Neoprene and carbon fibre, new technologies, fashions and sporting equipment, all of which have transformed sporting enterprise.

Designed to Win demonstrates the process of designing sporting equipment and its various influences, including material innovations, sporting constraints, nature and science. With new innovations and continued refinement, athletes have become faster, stronger and fitter, in turn beyond the sporting arena and now encompassing areas as diverse as fashion, advertising, art, film, design, business and politics.

Director of Brand Strategy
PP+K
Tampa, Florida

PP+K (formerly known as pyper paul + kenney), a creative juggernaut in the Southeastern U.S., is seeking a Director of Brand Strategy who can join them in creating ideas that change culture. The Director will serve as a key member of the agency leadership team, partnering with their Executive Creative Director, Executive Media Director and Director of Account Management on all clients as well as being a driving leader on all new business victories.

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Here's an interesting take on flatpack: Netherlands-based Studio Mango's Spring Lamp, above, which arrives in the mail as a disc and unfurls into the shape of a bell.

Springs are magical little components, so much can be done with them, if you fold them flat they unfold themselves again and pop up. In today's world transport is becoming increasingly more expensive and there is a continuous challenge for designers to create nice products which perform and look great but are either stackable or have a minimal size during transport. This is what inspired us to create the Spring Lamp, it is small enough to be inserted in a letter box and when hung it unfolds itself like a full lamp shade.

Another circular lamp that will ship in a considerably smaller package than its end form is their Lygo Lamp. You get 12 dozen Lego-like Lygo blocks along with the lighting hardware, and after some elbow grease you've got a 50-centimeter-diameter shade.

Who doesn't remember the colorful playing blocks from their youth, LEGO an abbreviation of Leg Godt (play good) was transformed by Studio Mango in Lygte Godt: LYGO. A unique LYGO block was designed which curves into a 50 cm diameter circle, through stacking, combining and playing you are now able to design and build your own lamp. 144 LYGO blocks go into one lamp and the model becomes available middle 2012 in 5 colors to start with: white, black, transparent, red transparent and purple transparent.

These products are so new they're not yet up on Studio Mango's website, and the only info we've got on them so far are the paragraphs above. But we, and some of you, will know more by Milan; the Spring and the Lygo will be unveiled at the Salone Satellite design show.