Via The North Race

I don't know much about the enigmatic fellow behind Death Spray Custom besides the fact that his given name is David Gwyther and he's based in London, and his morbid moniker is simply "an identity that is used to front my adventures in surface design. It is intended to be a playful riposte to an often serious world of art, design etc." Per the same interview with CycleEXIF last year, he's "mostly self taught," and contrary to McLuhan, he believes that "the medium isn't the message, the painting part is a small fraction of the process. I'd like to add I'm not a bicycle painter by any means, just an artist who likes two wheels."

I'd known about his custom paint work for bicycles for some time, but true to his word, he comes up with wicked paint schemes for a variety of mostly speed-related objects—auto, helmets, tools, etc.—and executes them to dazzling effect. His portfolio is well worth a visit, from the Tool Box (featuring a slogan that is unprintable here) to a NASCAR-worthy Chevy Silverado and all variety of helmets and bicycle-related objets d'art.

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Image via Archidose

In celebration of the recent release of Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account (Damiani 2013), the New York Public Library recently hosted Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro, principals of the eponymous architecture studio—stylized as Diller Scofidio + Renfro, or DS+R—in conversation with MoMA's Curator of Architecture Barry Bergdoll. Among other topics, the participants attempted to define the object itself, only to conclude that the beautifully-printed tome is beyond categorization: it is at once an art book, literally overflowing with beautiful full-bleed photography (more on that shortly), and a scholarly record of the decade-long redesign of one of New York City's iconic public spaces. Indeed, Diller offhandedly characterized Lincoln Center Inside Out as "an architectural porno book," though Bergdoll contended that it is as encyclopedic as it is eye-catching.

So too can the book be perused in a number of ways: At over 300 pages, Lincoln Center Inside Out is comprised almost entirely of gatefolds—which, as the panelists noted, might very well be a first for a comprehensive visual and quasi-technical document of such size and scope. The first tenth of the book consists of introductory text and a series of nicely laid-out conversations between DS+R's Ilana Altman and various, followed by some 30 gatefolds, each of which spans eight normal pages. The exterior panels of the pages invariably feature photos—interiors, exteriors, details, wide angles and even a few process shots—by Iwan Baan and Matthew Monteith, concealing explanatory text and images within. Suffice it to say that Lincoln Center Inside Out (pun most certainly intended) is about as comprehensive as they come.

Photo at top: Alice Tully Hall, Iwan Baan, 2008

Bergdoll lauded the book's built-in experience of discovery as Scofidio acknowledged that the design serves as "a metaphor for the travails [of the project]," which looks immaculate on the surface but actually goes several layers deep. In fact, he later disclosed that the "archaeology of the space" was a challenge unto itself: By some accounts, upwards of half of the total cost went into bringing the woefully neglected substructure up to code (fun facts: there is a full gas station in the parking garage and there is a river underneath Juilliard).

The metaphor applies not just to space but to time as well: Diller commented that the highly tactile, physical construction of Lincoln Center Inside Out serves to slow readers down and take their time absorbing the dense vignettes, which cover everything from grass species for the 'hypar' (hyperbolic paraboloid) roof lawn to the form studies for the prow-like geometry of the new Juilliard building.

Adblock Plus, the "open-source community project to block obnoxious online ads," is pleased to announce their first Creative Challenge. Here's a short, um, promotional video of their product:

In any case, they've just launched a contest to further their mission to clean up the visual clutter that passes for websites these days, with the goal "to make the Internet a better experience for everyone by (ironically) encouraging advertising of a different sort."

As click-through rates have declined, advertisers get desperate and try to make more noise by making intentionally obnoxious and disruptive ads, which just further depresses click-through rates. We're in a downward spiral, and we want to reverse it with clever, creative, responsible ads that meet our Acceptable Ads guidelines.

In other words, it's not so much a wholesale boycott of advertising as a campaign to make ads better. As Till Faida, Managing Director of Adblock Plus, told the Times, "I am not against ads in general... just annoyed by the current state of ads."

In the interest of "getting more designers involved," Adblock Plus is challenging filmmakers to produce a 30–90-second video for a chance to win the grand prize of a four-week filmmaking workshop at the International Academy of Film and Television in the Philippines (or, if he or she prefers, a prize pack of video equipment of their choice.

The Adblock Plus Creative Challenge is open to would-be adbusters above the age of 16 worldwide; see full rules here and submit your entry by the May 31 deadline for a chance to win.

Artist: lunchbreath
More: View all cartoons

By now you've all seen the photo, above, highlighting the difference between the papal announcement in '05 versus the one from this year. At one point some design team figured out they could wedge a tiny camera into a cell phone, and it changed everything; anytime anything of note happens, the first thing people do is whip out their phones to record it.

As we mentioned in an earlier post, that means we internet denizens now get to see footage of things we couldn't have twenty years ago, like the disaster in Japan. In a country with cell phone penetration that high, hundreds of citizen journalists were snapping pics and video, which helped drive home to the rest of the world how terrible that tragedy was.

Monday's bombing in Boston reveals a new facet to this phenomena. In an effort to identify the bomber, police began actively courting anyone who had taken footage prior to the blast, as there were certainly more people holding up cell phone cameras or now-ubiquitous DSLRs than there were surveillance cameras in the area.

Bostonite Ben Levine works at a marketing and communications firm just steps away from one of the blast sites. Prior to the explosion, Ben was snapping pics of the marathon from the window circled in red below:

This is one of the photos he snapped a few hours before the blast:

Here's the same photo after hundreds or thousands of eyeballs had pored over it:

Here's a brilliant example of how a couple is using design, and cleverly exploting an existing system, to do some good in the world. British social entrepreneur Simon Berry is the founder and CEO of ColaLife, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting diarrhea. Don't laugh; diarrhea kills people in developing nations and is the second-largest cause of child mortality worldwide. The problem can be addressed with rehydration solutions—a combination of water, salt and sugar [Ed. Note: see our recent case study on Hydropack]—that are simple for us to create in the developed world, but the problem is getting these kits to the people who need them.

Realizing this, Berry and his wife Jane came up with the Kit Yamoyo. These are rehydration kits designed to fit neatly between the bottles, in the negative space, of a crate of Coca-Cola. Because Coke is already delivered everywhere in the world (except Cuba and North Korea) to a global network of eager distributors, the Kit Yamoyo enjoys the hard-won distribution might of one of the world's largest multinational corporations.

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Shel Kimen loves a good story, and hers is a tale of a grassroots effort to support a creative community in their time of need. She dreamt up Detroit Collision Works, a multipurpose boutique hotel, co-working space and venue for all-around awesomeness, in Summer of 2011, and they're hoping to Kickstart a prototype of a converted shipping container in time for Flower Day in the country's longest running farmer's market—exactly one month out, on May 18. With just 36 hours to go to raise $11,000 for First Container, Kimen was kind enough to take the time to tell us why we should care.

Awesome needs a place to be.

As people are all too eager to tell you, Detroit has some problems, with the economy, crime, and fractured communities. So when I was thinking about a move to Detroit after 14 years in New York City, I knew that whatever I was going to do had to address some real needs. Coming from the design world, I know that making a good product means understanding, intimately, the people that are going to use it. So the first thing I started doing when I got to Detroit was talk to people. Lots of them.

It started with a hotel. Amazingly, there was not a modern, boutique hotel in all of Detroit! Yet creative people from all over the world visit to work on design an innovation projects—for the auto industry, for bio-tech, for the city (we are an urban planners dream thesis), and to perform at or attend one of our legendary music festivals that combined bring in half a million people annually. Those are creative travelers!

So, ok, we need a cool hotel.

But a cool hotel isn't enough. We need a place for coming together, with our immediate communities, as a city, and inclusive of the many people who visit us. We need a place to accelerate the growth of our communities.

Collision Works is a creative space needed by the people living in Detroit now and the people coming to visit us. It's an artful 36-room boutique hotel, co-working facility, and public event space that uses storytelling to connect and engage travelers and locals alike. Our whole lives are stories—truth and fiction, history and imagination. Stories connect us, help us learn, and catalyze personal and community growth.

It's that time again—with ICFF and its ever-evolving constellation of satellite shows, New York Design Week is nearly upon us. We're certainly grateful that the City Council has seen fit to promote the first ever NYCxDesign 'week'—an 11-day extravaganza that includes Frieze Art Fair on the weekend before ICFF—but it'll always be NYDW to us...

Anyway, they've been doing a great job with their event guide, but we're looking to supplement their comprehensive listings with our own annual guide, which, as always, will serve as both an authoritative guide and a quick reference to the design ongoings around town.

As with last year, we've streamlined the event submission process so all you have to do is fill out the form at http;//Core77.com/NYDW and we'll process your entry shortly.

We're looking to go live with the NYDW guide—which, as some of you may remember, works as a mobile app—in early May, so submit the details of your event ASAP! (No worries if you're a few days late—we'll accept submissions on a rolling basis, so here's the permalink to the submission form, just in case.)

I've simplistically assumed we would advance from "dumb" paper with things printed on it to some smarter variant, where every sheet of paper is an iPad. But as researchers at Fujitsu Laboratories demonstrate here, there's still plenty of room to design new interfaces that are between those two extremes.

By combining an ordinary webcam, a computer and an off-the-shelf projector, Fujitsu's "FingerLink Interaction System" provides a new user interface that effectively turns a "dumb" piece of paper, and the table it's sitting on, into a touchscreen. Check out how they did it, and peep the CAD demo starting around 2:43:

One of the great joys of running a store is getting to meet and get to know people who are really in love with making things. Red Clouds Collective, who manufacture leather and canvas goods, have the spirit and industriousness that attracts both the eye and heart of us designers. We carry a range of their products and took the time last week to shoot some of them in context to help convey the vibe that their enterprise puts off first-hand.

Check out their products on their website and at the Hand-Eye Supply store!

A few weeks ago, we took a look at the 'work' of Ines Brunn, a German expat and trick-cyclist extraordinaire who has currently set up shop (literally) in Beijing. And while Prolly documented a fair share of gorgeous vintage steel in the People's Republic, it turns out Reuters TV beat him to the punch with this report from January of this year:

Ok, so the reporting is rather superficial—agency dude owns 30+ bikes; small-wheelers are setting up shop—but frankly any interest in cycling is good interest.¹ While the automobile remains the status symbol par excellence in China, the purportedly growing appreciation of the bicycle is certainly a step in the right direction, and I must say I concur with Yu Yiqun's comment: "For people who don't understand bikes, they ask, 'Are you out of your mind?' You could buy a car for the price of this bike. But we just have different ways of looking at things."

Those definitely ain't RMB... (photo via GoatLegSF on Flickr)

Not that even a highly coveted Gios (or Colnago, Tommasini, etc.) will ever have the same cachet as a Ferrari or Maserati, but at least it's a far more practical way to navigate a city during rush hour.² Case in point, this 2011 Streetfilms short on "The Biggest, Baddest Bike-Share in the World," in Hangzhou, China, which puts our almost-launched CitiBike to shame:

That's the Growth Table, by L.A.-based architects Tim Durfee and Iris Anna Regn. While it's not practical for say, a Manhattan apartment, who wouldn't love to stick one of these into an open-plan office and use it to reinforce hierarchy among co-workers?

The EU-funded SPREAD project on sustainable lifestyles in Europe in 2050 has come to an end, and all deliverables are now available.

Check out the videos: short movies present what sustainable living can look like in 2050 through the lens of promising sustainable living practices that already exist today, while video scenarios envision future societies that support more sustainable living.

If you like to read, you can indulge yourself in the project's publications section, where you can find the closing conference report [PDF], the future scenarios report [PDF], an EU Sustainable Lifestyles Roadmap and Action Plan 2012-2050 [PDF], the Final Policy Brief [PDF] presenting the Roadmap for Sustainable Lifestyles in 2050, the iFuture report with the outcomes of the people's forums that took place in Finland, Spain, Hungary, Germany and online with participants from all over Europe, The Future Issue [PDF] magazine, and much more.

The project partners are listed here and include some of the best sustainable design thinkers and researchers in Europe.

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Remember when the mason jar was actually a breakthrough in the American way of life? How the revolutionary new threaded lid offered an alternative to pickling, drying and smoking as ways to preserve our precious aliments? Yes, the mason jar certainly harkens back to a simpler time, before refrigerators and artificial preservatives, and now that we take those things for granted, canning has become something of a throwback jam (cue snare)—the vessel once dedicated to keeping and storing foodstuffs is now commonly used as a drinking glass or decorative object. Not that there's anything wrong with that: Unlike, say, the Edison bulb, the design of the mason jar has virtually no room for improvement, and its timelessness is certainly part of its appeal—as an object, it is imbued with nostalgia, thrift and (if you'll excuse another terrible pun) a can-do attitude.

Image via sha.org

Of course, the canning jar didn't come out of the blue (though we'll see that the color has some significance), and its current mass-produced form was refined over the course of several decades in the latter half of the 19th-Century. The term 'mason jar' is, in fact, a generic trademark—à la Xerox, Kleenex, Jell-O et al (fun fact: phillips, as in the screw head, and zipper are also in the mix)—named after John Landis Mason's clever 1858 patent, No. 22,186, for a zinc screw-top lid. The tinsmith's innovation was to create a seal inside the lid, as opposed to attempting to make a lid that was flush with the jar: glassmaking techniques of that era allowed for rough threading, but the tolerance wasn't nearly accurate enough to create the airtight seal needed to preserve perishables. By grinding the lip of the glass until it was nearly flat (known as a 'square shoulder') and inserting a simple rubber gasket inside the lid, Mason achieved a sufficiently airtight seal, and his namesake was born.¹

The Ball Bros circa 1913, via Ball State University

The Ball Corporation—which also provides funding for the eponymous state university—was among the companies that capitalized on Mason's invention when the patent expired.²As the story goes, Frank and Edmund—two of Lucius Styles Ball and Maria Polly Bingham Ball five sons (a sixth, Clinton Harvey, died in infancy)—borrowed $200 from an uncle to buy a kerosene can company in upstate New York in 1880. Although the vessels were made of tin, the cans were lined with a glass container to prevent corrosion. With the help of two of their brothers, they quickly expanded the glassmaking operation and decided to produce canning jars, for which Mason's patent had expired in 1879. When Frank heard about the natural gas boom in Indiana in 1886, they decided to relocate to Muncie (the fifth brother, Lucius Lorenzo, was a practicing physician prior to joining his siblings in 1897).

February 7, 1888, a Certificate of Incorporation was filed for the Ball Glass Works of Muncie. On February 18, fires were started in the furnace, on February 26, the blowers began to arrive and on March 1, the first products were made. The first products made in Muncie were coal oil containers and lamp chimneys, not fruit jars.

The rest is history: within three decades, they'd refined their flagship product into the form that is still produced today, and this year marks the centennial of the so-called "Perfect Mason." According to the press release:

Introduced in 1913 in Muncie, IN, the name "Perfect Mason" acknowledged the first-ever self-manufacture of each part of the Ball jar—ensuring a perfect fit and revolutionizing the home canning process by providing canners with matching jars, lids and bands in a single unit. The Ball Heritage Collection Pint Jars feature a vintage-inspired blue tint, period-correct logo and anniversary embossment.

Here's a sweet manu-vid (manufacturing video, for the uninitiated), which Ball has produced on the occasion of the 100th anniversary:

Way back in 1995, Core77 was just a baby, and designer Rolf Sachs blew the sawdust off of a new chair he'd designed. Two notes:

1. Had we had the blog up and running back then we'd have covered it, but it took two years before anyone even knew what a "blog" was.

2. As you can probably tell, these first three photos are indicative of 1995 image quality.

Sach's brilliant 3 Equal Parts chair, "an academic exercise in deconstructivism," consisted of three L-shaped pieces made from heavy, 28mm thick Doug Fir. All three pieces were identical, and the user could configure the chair in a couple of different ways.

Years later Sachs revisited the chair for an exhibition in 2008, adding a sexy little angle to the L and switching materials to Swiss stone pine. (Unsurprising, as the longtime Switzerland-loving Sachs had converted a Swiss Olympic bobsled facility into his holiday home and was presumably surrounded by the stuff.)

As someone who previously worked in structural package design (that's basically bottles and cans, for you hotshots in automotive or furniture), I freely admit there's a whole slew of products for which the aesthetics of the package design don't really matter. I'd never buy a bottle of booze or can of beer because of the way the vessel was shaped, or how pretty the label was, for instance; I'd buy them because I want to drink what's inside of them.

Beverage giant Anheuser-Busch InBev, however, disagrees. On May 6th they'll be rolling out the new Budweiser can you see above, shaped to resemble that brand's bowtie logo. Now before we get to the big question, let's take a look at how regular straight-edged beverage cans are made, a pretty fascinating process in its own right:

Cyclepedia on-the-go! (NB: Mounting an iPad with a Turtle Claw is not advised.)

We covered Michael Embacher's Cyclepedia back in 2011, when it made its debut in print, and the Viennese architect/designer's enviable bicycle collection was exhibited behind glass, so to speak, shortly thereafter. Although the iPad app—developed by Heuristic Media for publisher Thames & Hudson—originally came out in December 2011, they've since launched a new version on the occasion of the 2012 Tour de France, with substantially more content beyond the 26 new bikes that bring the total to 126.

The bikes themselves are indexed by Year, Type, Make and Name, Country of Origin, Materials and (perhaps most interestingly) Weight, for which the thumbnails neatly arrange themselves around the circular dial of a scale. Different users will find the different options more useful than others, though the small size of the thumbnails makes it difficult to differentiate between about 75% of the bikes, which are distinguished by more fine-grained details. (The lack of search feature is also a missed opportunity, IMHO.)

That said, the photography is uniformly excellent—the 360° views alone are composed of over 50 images each, as evidenced by the lighting on the chrome Raleigh Tourist—and the detail shots are consistently drool-worthy. Each bike has been polished to perfection for the photo shoot, yet the perfectly in-focus photos also capture telltale signs of age—minor dings, paint chips and peeling decals that suggest that the bicycle has been put to good use. (The rather gratuitous bike porn is accompanied by descriptions that are just the right length for casual browsing, as well as technical details such as date, weight and componentry.)