It's been just over seven months to the day since the Morpholio Project debuted their Trace app to much acclaim. By January of this year, they had added several new tools for designers beyond the original audience of architects, and now, just a few months later, they're pleased to announce a suite of new tools that constitute a major release. "The App Store's number one portfolio app re-imagines the portfolio as a design utility, moving it into the fast, flexible, at-your-fingertips device era. The project seeks to advance the ways that creatives access, share, discuss, and get feedback on their work from a global community of users."

By combining production and presentation software with web-enabled tools for sharing and critique, the app offers a fully-integrated platform for production and collaboration. To hear Morpholio's Anna Kenoff tell it, "Aside from making design production easier, we wanted to know if better tools could make it smarter by integrating the wisdom of crowds and capitalizing on the power of the touchscreen to capture feedback."

To achieve this, Morpholio had to become very sophisticated about all the ways that designers communicate—not just through language, but most importantly through their eyes and hands. Over the past year, the team of architects and programmers has collaborated with experts from various disciplines to build a robust design-centric workspace that could be used by anyone—from fashion designers to photographers, architects and automotive designers, even tattoo artists. It builds on research into human-computer-interaction to deliver innovations like a tool for image analytics called "EyeTime" and virtual "Crits" where collaborators can share images, and comment on each other's work via notes or sketches. Human behavior data-mining is essential to offering these forms of powerful feedback, letting you know how your followers are interacting with your work.

Core77's Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club is thrilled to present Half Iron Design's Matthew Reineck, industrial designer and fabricator of finely-crafted crafted guitars and ukeleles!

Tonight's talk starts at 6 at the Hand-Eye Supply store in Portland, OR. Come early and check out our space or check in with us online for the live broadcast!

Matthew Reineck
Half Iron Design: "Building from the Basement"
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR 97209
Tuesday, April 30th, 6pm PST

I plan to speak about my current work and how to build musical instruments on a small scale, at very high quality and with limited space and resources. I'll talk not only about building wood products, but about taking full advantage of what's around you and where you live to keep the creative spirit alive. I've lived in one bedroom apartments, shared spaces, houses and in each I've been able to build and craft goods from prints, to textiles, to musical instruments. I'll share my experiences and knowledge to help people build no matter where they are in life.

Late in high school, seeking alternatives for creativity outside of the school environment, Matt began woodworking with his grandfather. The instant passion that was formed lead to the discovery of industrial design and to a degree from The Ohio State University. Upon graduation, Matt moved west to Seattle and built his first basement guitar in 2002. Rather quickly that turned into a career and Matt has worked for music companies Dusty Strings, First Act Inc. and at music video game producer Harmonix as an industrial designer. More than ten years later, a constant in Matt's life has been building, no matter the living situation or resources at hand. Half Iron Design was started in late 2012 with an emphasis on building electric guitars and ukuleles. But in the basement, anything can be built.

Artist: lunchbreath
More: View all cartoons

One of the things I miss most about being in art school was... the casual graffiti. Students of all stripes have a tendency to make flyers, deface signage and scribble on bathroom walls, but no student does it with the flair of an art student. From the relatively lowbrow "Pratt Industrial Design Diplomas - Take One" drawn over the toilet paper roll in the men's bathroom, to more intricate fare like a flyer in the dorm stating "I lost my keys - they look like this" hovering over a photorealistic drawing of their entire keychain, there was plenty of creativity going on outside of the classrooms.

As for in-classroom creativity: While these may or may not be from art students, Student Beans has compiled a list of the best textbook and exam-paper defacements they could find from around the globe.

They vary in quality, but they all have that twisted art school vibe. Click here to check them all out, but beware that some are outright disturbing—we've posted the tamer ones here—and many are NSFW!

There are six billion people on the planet, and something like 2.5 billion camera phones. Facebook alone gets more than 3,000 photos uploaded to it every second; since you started reading this entry, another 10,000 have gone up. Capturing images, once such a difficult and expensive process, has become something we unthinkingly do with little more than our thumbs. Photos are disposable. Forgettable.

Two years ago, photographer Daniel Carillo took a daguerreotype workshop at Rochester's George Eastman House photography museum. Seattle-based Carillo fell in love with the process, which is about as opposite to digital photography as you can get: An image isn't a quickly-captured string of code that lives on a website, but something that has been painstakingly burned into a shiny, solid piece of metal using alchemy and elbow grease. It took Carillo a year just to acquire the tools and materials needed to produce a single daguerreotype.

In the video below, fellow shooter Patrick Richardson Wright captures Carillo's process. It's so beautiful, you'll want to pull your cell phone out and snap a picture of it.

Via PetaPixel

wants a Copywriter
in New York, New York

When a company posts a job with us that is this so well written, so funny and so perfectly targeted at their dream hire, we can't help but share.

Vimeo is looking for an exceptionally talented Copywriter who possesses a total badass mastery of the English language, the verbal skills of the most articulate Wu-Tang member and the intestinal fortitude to say "no" to things he or she doesn't believe in, among many other delightful characteristics and strengths.

Don't take our word for it. Apply Now to read the entire description. You won't regret it.

This spring, Poltrona Frau is pleased to partner with Parsons The New School for Design on a Product Design Studio with a focus on responsible design. With the guidance of instructor Andrea Ruggiero, students will design and develop new objects using leather scraps at Poltrona Frau's factory in Tolentino, Italy. For the first time, the brief is to design everyday leather goods for the home and office, elevating waste material into a premium product.

See Part 1 here.

Reporting by Jenny Hsu

"How many students does it take to work a sewing machine?"

Although a classmate humored us with this joke (while observing four others attempt to operate an industrial sewing machine without much success), the reality is that all of us are somewhat new to working with some of the tools of the trade in our collaboration with Poltrona Frau, in which 15 Product Design juniors at Parsons are creating concepts for premium leather goods out of materials leftover from the manufacturing process. The industrial sewing machines are also temperamental—they stop functioning properly with the slightest abuse, complicating the process. Those who have worked previously with these machines understand how they should perform and behave, but with others adjusting every knob in sight, something bad is bound to happen...

We are now four weeks into the project: Deadlines are rapidly approaching and we are trying to maintain our sanity before the chaos hits the fan. We try to keep our minds clear and focus on two objectives for our first deadline: working hands-on with the leather, and creating concepts for our design review with Federico Materazzi and Sara Gobbo, the executive vice president and senior marketing manager of Poltrona Frau USA.

Aaron Chan presenting his concepts

During the design review, my classmates and I had proposed concepts that range from home, office and travel accessories to toys and electronics. Federico and Sara, helped us narrow these ideas down to ones that truly define Poltrona Frau and complement their brand. A magazine rack, piggy bank, picnic basket and a wineglass tag are just some of the prototypes that we will present at the final juried review on May 10. Throughout the decision-making process, it became clear that Poltrona Frau is looking beyond just aesthetics but is really invested in tactility, and how that will be integrated into the final product. In short, do our small leather goods capture the essence of Frau?

Alex Li presenting his concepts

So it seems like software developers have all the cool toys—and they are really good at sharing. Design software on the other hand, can be a little clunky and, as anyone who has tried to share a rhino file with a classmate can tell you, it can be difficult to directly collaborate in most 3D modeling software.

Enter Sunglass a collaboration tool you can use in conjunction with most 3D modeling software to share, review and access your (and your coworkers) files from anywhere. Sunglass stores all of your 3D files in the cloud allowing both private and public access through the open API. Their tag "Think GitHub for 3D" is a powerful statement for those familiar with the web-based hosting service for software development projects. Sunglass has quite a buzz in the start-up realm, but designers are the ones who will really benefit from the browser-based software.

Revisions are logged and can be seen by any of the contributors

MIT-educated founders Kaustuv DeBiswas and Nitin Rao developed the platform for sharing and syncing of 3D model files over the could allowing access sharing for clients, coworkers and contractors all over the world. As design studios spread further across the globe—not to mention manufacturing moving to every corner of the universe—the software seems like a touch of brilliance in terms of keeping track of workflow.

Sunglass offers plugins to sync with 3D modeling software

Sunglass offers a free version (allowing unlimited public projects) on their site that is great for group projects in design school. The entire platform operates with plug-ins to interface with a wide variety of 3D modeling software (including all our old friends: Rhino, Solidworks Autodesk and sketch-up among others). The professional version, available by subscription for $20/month, offers more features for private projects and more features.

Review tools offer ability to comment and accept changes

Last week Arnold Wolf, the former head of audio company JBL, passed away. Wolf was one of the few industrial design pioneers that not only formed his own studio back in the '50s, but who would also, unusually, be later asked to take over a client's company as CEO.

Wolf's career path was atypical from the start. "There is inherent irony in my having been elected to [the Academy of Fellows]," he told the IDSA upon winning that honor in 1983, "or, indeed, to my being a member of IDSA in the first place. The reason is that I have never studied industrial design formally, and so can be regarded as a largely undetected impostor."

After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in the early 1940s, Wolf worked as a radio actor specializing in European dialects. (He presumably had a good ear, which wouldn't hurt for his later work with JBL.) By the mid-'40s Wolf was putting his natural drawing skills to use doing "commercial art" for a Hollywood studio, and later got into advertising and theater art. By the mid-1950s he formed his own studio in the relatively young field of industrial design.

That same year, 1957, Wolf landed a rather important client: James B. Lansing Sound, Incorporated. JBL was developing a crazy, and huge, new type of speaker built around audio principles developed by sound engineer Richard Ranger.

Wolf was called on to design the nine-foot beast, which was centered around a large, curved piece of wood that the mid-range drivers fired towards; the resultant audio reflection "[created] a wide, spacious stereo image."

The Paragon, as it was called, was a success. It had an almost absurdly long production life, remaining part of JBL's offerings until 1983, and today remains a sought-after collectible among audiophiles who can restore them.

We've been proud to partner with the School of Visual Arts' Design Criticism department over the past several years, and 2013 is no exception. The curriculum for the two-year MFA program culminates with an afternoon-long conference in which the graduating class presents their thesis research alongside the likes of faculty members Paola Antonelli and Adam Harrison Levy, as well as guest speakers such as Michael Bierut, Julie Lasky and Rob Walker to name a few.

counter/point: The 2013 D-Crit Conference, moderated by NPR's "The Takeaway" host John Hockenberry, and featuring graduating students of the SVA MFA in Design Criticism, will take place on Saturday, May 11, 2013 at the SVA Theatre in New York City.

Paola Antonelli, senior curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, will deliver the keynote lecture, launching an afternoon of rich, polyphonic exchange between the D-Crit Class of 2013 and a headlining roster of design curators, practitioners, theorists, critics, educators, and planners. D-Crit students will be presenting their thesis research in counterpoint with: Walker Arts Center curator of Architecture and Design Andrew Blauvelt; British interaction design firm Dunne & Raby co-founder Fiona Raby; architect and theorist Mark Foster Gage; director of the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City Toni Griffin; and architect and activist Michael Sorkin.

Topics to be addressed include: the persistence of segregation in today's built environment; the problems inherent in exhibiting graphic design; the spectacular framing of nature in the urban environment; product design's social and participatory dimension; and how some emerging architects are using literal representation in new ways.

As always, the D-Crit Conference features an all-star lineup of speakers, but the students themselves have remarkably diverse backgrounds and each is a sure to make their voice heard within the design criticism community. Thus, Counter/Point is the perfect opportunity to see these rising stars present their latest work as they look forward to their next endeavors.

SVA D-Crit presents
Counter/Point
Visual Arts Theatre
333 W 23rd St (between 8th & 9th Ave)
New York, NY 10011
Saturday, May 11, 2013
12:30–7:00pm
http://dcrit.sva.edu/conference2013/

Hope to see you there!

RISD grad and graphic designer dad David LaFerriere has a creative outlet that starts before he hits the office: Each morning he draws a new illustration on his kids' sandwich bags before they head out for school. "Each drawing is done just after I make the sandwich," LaFerriere writes. "The challenges are coming up with an idea and then drawing quickly and directly on the bag, every line counts."

Having been at it since 2008, LaFerriere has produced thousands of daily drawings, which he began uploading to Flickr. After being profiled by that website's video series last month, word of his exploits exploded across the blogosphere. Here's the original vid:

Part of the fun of being an industrial designer is getting to spec out different materials, like chefs assembling ingredients. For Cygnett's WorkMate line of protective cases, ID'ers Shannon Brown and Haydn Smith have whipped up a tasty stew of thermoplastic polyurethane, silicone and deliciously rubberized polycarbonate. The combination was chosen to pack a lot of shock absorbency into a slim package while still providing a measure of ergonomics; the rubbery texture means it's less likely to fly out of your hand, but if it does, the protective design does the rest.

[The WorkMate] is a tri-material extra protective case [featuring] an integrated tough TPU inner chassis with a rubberized PC shell with silicone inlay.... It has impact absorbing corners and textured panels for advanced grip....

...The silicone inner is spark-etched and treated with oil paint to repel fingerprints and minor marks. It sits inside a heavy-duty polycarbonate shell, coated with rubber paint for a matte finish. The silicone has inner ridges to create a cavity at the rear of the device and disperse point of impact shocks. The silicone protrudes beyond the polycarbonate on the front and back to create non-slip 'feet' and reduce wear to the polycarbonate.

Larger and more protective than a traditional polycarbonate case, the WorkMate is intended to be included on a tool belt or construction site. The treatments and finishes reference industrial machinery, the triggers and housing of power tools and tread plate steel.

Putting their money where their mouth is, Cygnett had Brown and Smith drop a WorkMate-swaddled Samsung S4 from increasing heights onto a concrete floor:

It's not quite design, but seeing as Evangelia Koutsovoulou of Daphnis and Chloe is one of our esteemed jury members for the Food Design category of this year's Core77 Design Awards, let's just say it's a chance to get to know her a little better. (Our awards team is busy reviewing the entries and preparing to send them to the jury teams at the moment; we'll be announcing the live broadcast schedule shortly.)

The video, illustrated by Oscar Bolton Green, is a winsome example of visual storytelling—in fact, both the art direction for the company and the Kickstarter campaign are superbly well-executed

Koutsovoulou has five days to make about 3,800 quid to distribute her delicious herbs—check out the Kickstarter project here.

wants a Product Designer
in Portland, Oregon

Helmets, body armor, jackets, footwear, bags, and even custom motorcycles. When you work at ICON Motosports as a Product Designer, you work on every type of project. Their core mission is to protect the most at-risk riders with superior motorcycle riding gear, and to do that, you'll need above average level of Industrial design and apparel design skills.

If you happen to love motorcycles, have heavy graphic design and branding skills, and a knack for working with vendors to produce the best product possible, well, this job is waiting for you.

Apply Now

Around California, I've been seeing more and more solar panels. Solar panels installed subtly on people's homes. Solar panels on wireless keyboards. Solar panels atop lights. In such a sunny state, these solar panels make perfect sense.

On my return to northern Uganda, I started looking more carefully at the different ways people use new technologies, such as mobile phones and computers. But with an emergent civic infrastructure, access to the electric grid in the region remains limited. So while I was focused on how people used technology, I had to wonder: how do they charge their devices at all?

I soon learned that enterprising citizens in rural northern Uganda often purchase solar panels. They then offer phone charging services at a range of what I observed to be around 400–500 shillings per charge. That's about 20 US cents. The panels themselves, often coming from India and China, can cost as much as 200 US dollars, so it obviously takes a while to pay back that investment. But as one person told me, there is always someone who needs to charge his or her phone. Any freelancer can appreciate the value of a steady gig.

What seemed new to me was a practice already many years old. As I poked around the web to understand the mechanics of solar panels, I came across a 2010 New York Times article talks about solar panels in Kenya:

As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.

You've gotta love this company's name: Taken from the biblical anti-war phrase "...they shall beat their swords into ploughshares," NYC-based Sword & Plough takes ex-military materials—and people—and turns them towards the production of useful civilian goods.

Sword & Plough was started by two sisters—Emily Nunez is an active duty Intelligence Officer for the U.S. Army who serves as company CEO, while sister Betsy is the Creative Director—and together they gather surplus military materials, like tents and parachutes destined for landfill. They then employ veterans to sew the materials into items they've designed, like bags and iDevice sleeves.

The sisters' goal is to be a "quadruple bottom line" company: They help vets re-enter the civilian workforce; they manufacture useful products; they repurpose existing materials for the environment's sake; and yes, they plan on making a profit.

So yesterday, what you see above happened in the studio. I guess the photographer really wanted to buzz the model in, and somehow shattered the plastic housing in his eagerness.

The $18 part was easy to replace, and on the backside of the old one you can see a simple four-wire hookup and the speaker:

If I was a little more hacktastic I'd take the still-functioning speaker and try to do something with it, as so many others have. Remember the BoomCases we spotted a few years back?

Or Devin Ward's handsome hacks on Etsy?

Now we've caught wind of a German outfit doing the same thing. But like the BoomCases and Ward's work, Hamburg's Soundpauli company has their own quirky aesthetic.

As part of MoMA PS1's forthcoming EXPO 1: New York exhibition, a "large-scale festival exploring ecological challenges," the contemporary art center is bringing rAndom International's "Rain Room" to its sister organization in Midtown Manhattan.

Rain Room is a hundred square metre field of falling water through which it is possible to walk, trusting that a path can be navigated, without being drenched in the process. As you progress through The Curve, the sound of water and a suggestion of moisture fill the air, before you are confronted by this carefully choreographed downpour that responds to your movements and presence.

The digitally-inclined art/design collective is pleased to bring "Rain Room" to MoMA following its debut at the Barbican Center in their hometown last fall, where it recently closed after a five-month engagement. We can only assume that some of our readers have already had the pleasure of seeing the installation in London, but we're definitely looking forward to experiencing it in person.

wants a Sr. Visual Designer
in Fairfax, Virginia

ThinkGeek is looking for a dynamic graphic illustrator intern with pop-culture sensibilities and wicked cool design styling.

They want someone who understands Geek culture and gets passionate about product, style and design.The right candidate for this position will do sketches and illustrations of possible designs for plastic toy products, create decals or artwork to be applied to custom products and do amazing t-shirt designs.

Sounds fun, right? How about expanding your design portfolio by working on properties from Star Wars, Minecraft, Doctor Who, Aliens, Portal, Star Trek, Firefly, etc? ZOMG!

If you're interested in diving geek first into this opportunity to show off your strong work ethic and take complete ownership in exchange for creative freedom, these geeks and their dogs want to hear from you!

Apply Now

Another day, another design, another multi-hour stretch to focus focus focus on your design work. If you're like me, you vacillate between needing the total silence of an empty studio and the busy-ness of working in a cafe. But what if you need to be in the studio? Perhaps all the cafes are closed, or perhaps you have a few hours before your next meeting, and it doesn't make sense to pop out for a quick cafe work session.

While some studies suggest that background noise can negatively affect concentration, most freelancers I know have found that working in a cafe provides just enough external stimuli to force them to concentrate. While office banter involves people we know, cafe banter is usually done by strangers, and so we're less likely to want to listen in.

Enter Coffitivity, my new favorite web site for those moments when the office is either too quiet or too loud. The site simply recreates the ambient sounds of working in a cafe, that slight murmur of voices and random clinking of glasses that makes a cafe a cafe. They point to a study from the Journal of Consumer Research that suggests the link between creativity and this sweet spot:

We argue that noise distracts people but that the degree of distraction induced by various noise levels will affect creativity differently. A high level of noise may cause a great deal of distraction, causing individuals to process information to a lesser extent and therefore to exhibit lower creativity. A moderate (vs. low) level of noise, however, is expected to distract people without significantly affecting the extent of processing. Further, we reason that such a moderate distraction, which induces processing difficulty, enhances creativity by prompting abstract thinking. We predict, in sum, that a moderate level of noise will enhance creativity relative to both high and low levels of noise.