Happy Holidays from our family to yours. Coroflot member Jeremiah Berkheimer posted this gem and we thought it was a great way to celebrate our diverse and often hilarious creative community.

When you're Krampus, the European holiday goat monster known for stealing/beating children on Christmas, you get a pretty bad rep. Starting with a fuzzy red sweater, we decided to rebrand Krampus to appeal to...well, anyone.

Check out Jeremiah's video and to learn about his Krampus re-branding project, check out his dedicated website for more lore and videos.

Why does that ubiquitous Christmastime candy, the candy cane, have a bend in it? Here are three possible reasons:

1. Form Follows Function

As an industrial designer, I always assumed the bend in a candy cane was for a functional reason: So that you could hang it from the branches of a Christmas tree.

2. It's a Metaphor

One popular legend has it that a German choirmaster in Cologne commissioned the design of candy canes from a local confectioner in 1670. The story goes that he wanted to hand them out to the kids to keep them quiet during the Christmas service, but was aware that candy had no place in the sober environment of a church; thus he supposedly asked the confectioner to make them resemble shepherds' canes, to "serve as a way for the children to remember the story of the shepherds who came to visit the baby Jesus."

3. It's a Bloody, Inverted Letter "J"

Another story, which sounds totally apocryphal, has it that an Indiana-based candymaker invented candy canes to "[incorporate] several symbols from the birth, ministry, and death of Jesus Christ." This version of the origin has it that it was shaped like a "J" for "Jesus," and that the red stripes represent "the scourging Jesus received" and "the blood shed by Christ on the cross."

So which version is true? Snopes.com debunks #2 and #3, so as a biased ID'er, I'm going to stick with #1.

We designers are supposed to be familiar with production methods, and I enjoy guessing how various items that I'm unfamiliar with are produced. But whenever it comes to things like mass-produced candy, I'm always wrong. I'd never have guessed that producing candy canes by hand requires a 2,000-pound table to serve as a heat-sink, for instance. Watch as these two guys turn what looks like a vat of sugar lava into little crooked treats:

The procedures used in the handmade candy canes from the last entry were foreign to me. So here's a way to make candy canes that will appeal more to industrial designers, employing all of the big-ass mass-production machines that enable our profession:

Getting organized is the second most popular New Year's resolution, right after losing weight. While having the right products is only one part of making that happen, those products can certainly help. Here's a roundup of posts from 2014, with useful ideas and items for anyone aiming to get organized.

A key organizing principle is containerizing: grouping similar or related items together in a container so they are easier to store and to find. The HYVE system from Herbst Produkt is a wonderfully flexible way for doing just that; it's a modular system that can be used on both a tabletop or hung on the wall. HYVE was an active Kickstarter when we first wrote about it, and it's easy to see why it met its funding goal. Herbst will soon have a retail website available so those who missed the Kickstarter can buy the HYVE.

Another container with lots of possible uses is the toolbox from Vitra. It's one of many ways to organize a desktop, so that commonly used items (pens, sticky notes, scissors, etc.) are kept close at hand.

It's always easier to stay organized if it's easy to put things away. That's one reason organizers like hooks; they're easier to use than hangers, so there's a better chance things will be hung up rather than tossed on the floor. When it comes to hooks, users might want a single hook or a coat rack that's basically multiple hooks, such as this Leaf Hanger from Miniforms.

Those dealing with small spaces have special challenges when trying to find a place for everything—especially bulky things. Collapsible items such as the OXO silicone collapsible colander can help. The one concern: Make sure the item is easy to collapse and expand, and that functionality isn't being overly compromised.

Using furniture with built-in storage—beds or coffee tables, for example—can help in small spaces, too. This bed is part of the LAX Series from MASHstudios. Users could also put baskets or boxes under a bed if they don't have drawers built in, but the built-ins provide a cleaner look, and they relieve the user of needing to find containers that fit the space.

Making use of the walls is one more small-space organizing strategy. Examples include wall-mounted knife racks and wall organizers such as the Luis Organizer from Oli13. This is one more way to keep things close at hand and easy to find, even when flat surface space isn't readily available.

Bicycles can be stored on the walls, too, as with the The Bike Shelf from Knife & Saw. Many bike organizers are designed for top-tube bikes, but there are also some which work with diagonal-tube bikes or step-through bikes.

Cable clutter drives many users crazy, so looking into cable organizers might be wise. Anyone who's had unused cables slip to the floor and become difficult to reach will appreciate tools such as these Bluelounge Cable Drops. Other cable organizers help manage overly long cables or control cable clutter under the desk.

Some desks provide cable control, too.

Because some storage areas are hard to reach, having a good step stool handy in the home, office, workshop or garage can be critical for both retrieving items and making sure they get put away again. Folding steps, such as these from Hailo, can help save space.

Organizers are always concerned about discarding things that are no longer serving the user, rather than just storing such things nicely. Therefore, having plenty of wastebaskets and trash cans—and recycling stations— is a good organizing practice. (A shredder can come in handy, too.) The Ginebra bin from Made Design allows the user to collect both trash and recycling in the same bin.

Christmas doesn't come in July, and Sir Dave Brailsford is the Principal of Team Sky, a British cycle-based venture that does their racing on two wheels. So why was Jaguar handing him a set of new car keys earlier this year?

Well, it wasn't any old Jag. Since 2010 Jaguar has been sponsoring Team Sky with support vehicles, and for the time-trial stages of 2014's Tour de France, they'd cooked up a bike-hauling F-Type R. In addition to being loaded up with extra on-board batteries to power the communications gear inside...

...this nifty rack up top, and a specially-designed insert that replaces the car's rear window, enables it to haul a couple of bikes and spare tires.

Here's a video of the team putting it together:

That snazzy F-Type isn't the only bicycle racing support car that Jaguar provides for Britain's Team Sky, and you've probably noted that it only carries two bikes and two spares. For the heavy lifting they've got a pimped-out station wagon (as we Americans call it; to the Brits, a "shooting brake") in their XF Sportbrake, which can carry tons of gear and up to nine bikes.

While it's loaded up with the same communications gear as the F-Type, the XF has additional duties in serving as a "mobile race HQ for the team, a food and drinks station, wardrobe, rolling hospital and mechanic's workshop," according to Bike World News.

Here's a time lapse of crew members loading the XF up to hit the road:

Hit the jump to see the breakdown of all of the stuff they manage to fit inside.

I was just digging through videos for the Scrap Bin Wood Challenge, whereby participants try to make something useful out of their cut-offs, when this shop trick caught my eye. Woodworker Patrick Curtis (who's using scraps to turn his lathe into a disc sander, which seems crazy to me, but then I have an irrational fear of lathes) has put his planer on a turntable.

I've been in a fair amount of shops and have seen tons of in-shop videos, but I've never seen this done before. Obviously it would be a disaster if planing long boards, but for doing just a few small pieces like drawer panels and such, it seems as ingenious as it is space-saving, and obviates you having to walk around to the back of the planer to retrieve the piece.

So here's my question to those of you who spend more time in shops than I do: Why have I never seen this before? Please choose one of the following or give me an "E:"

A. "People who work shorter materials do this all the time; you've just never been in a shop that does."

B. "People who work shorter materials usually don't do this, because even though it looks handy, there is an issue with ______."

C. "This isn't typically done because it's only efficient for running a few pieces at a time; if doing 20 boards, for instance, the constant rotating becomes more work than it's worth."

D. "You've never seen this before because as unlikely as it sounds, to my knowledge this guy is actually the first to do it."

Feedback please.

And for those of you interested in the disc-sander/lathe, here's Curtis' entire video:

2014 began with a bang for all things food and drink as London based food (mad)scientists Bompas and Parr saw in the New Year with Charlie and the Chocolate factory-esque edible fireworks raining down on thousands of revelers in central London. Since then we've seen a vast array of awesome new tools and gadgets and any number of culinary curiosities at the intersection between food and object culture.

Global Food Feast

As ever, 2014 has been quite the education in global cuisine and food culture. In Milan back in April, we were treated to a remarkable 12 Course Tasting Menu of Polish Design alongside accompanying new furniture and objects on display. When the Core77 Design Awards rolled by again in August we fell in love with Hargreaves and Levin's 'Food Maps' (above), explorations of national and continental food identities with things-organized-neatly visualisations of local staples (hello, United States of Corn). Hell, we even learned how to read a cheese wheel.

New Tools

It never ceases to amaze us how every year we see a new onslaught of inventions and innovation in kitchenware—have we not run out of juice yet? Alas, some of the new releases this year sill managed to deliver that oh so bitter-sweet I-should've-thought-of-that sensation, with this year's most infuriatingly simple innovations including the brilliant 'Butter Up' butter knife redesign (above left) and ingenious Food Huggers (above bottom right) solving the age old problem (or perhaps, very contemporary symptom of increasing single living?) of keeping half a avocado/tomato/onion fresh. Cooking pans were given a long overdue dose of rocket scientist attention, the outcome being the new thermodynamic Flare Pans (above top right) designed to save up to 40% of energy with increased distribution—and hey, they looked pretty cool too. Whilst the market was rewarding such clever little innovations, our very own Core77 Design Awards Food Category showered praise on designers tackling food challenges of the future such as how to scan your food for radiation safety (a brave attempt to save local food production in Fukoshima) and how to breed insects at home in a future where protein supply may be scarce.

Purveyors of web-based procrastination-enablers Adult Swim have been treating online audiences to a series of ingenious infomercial parodies in recent months—from feature-creeping Broomshakalaka to the frankly pornographic Salad Mixxxer. The latest spoof from the series takes aim at the sitting duck of the connected/quantified/smart home/health/self start-up world—mocking the various absurdities of the industry well and truly in an 11 minute fictionomercial that is both amusing and terrifyingly believable.

For her "Making Studio" course at SVA's Products of Design program, designer Louise-Anne van 't Riet came up with a neat side table that encourages you to be neat. Called Infinitum, it's an object-sensitive side table ringed with LEDs beneath the surface; though the lights only run one layer deep, a combination of a mirror and a one-way mirror provide the infinity effect.

An Arduino sensor in the table picks up the vibration of an object being placed atop it, which kicks the lights on. The designer "wanted to construct a piece of furniture for people who never tidy up, and who leave their belongings everywhere. When objects are placed on the table, it lights up.... Users are encouraged to tidy up before they leave a room, since the light table will only switch off once everything is removed from its surface."

Hit the jump to see video of the table in action, and how she put it together:

Ten years ago, "drones" referred to Dilbert-like office workers, not quadrotors. But as they explode in popularity--or just explode, when in the gunsights of Johnny Dronehunter (see below)--there's been no shortage of drone-based news stories for 2014. For photography, weather control, domestic illumination, marketing, terrorizing, and even picking fruit, is there anything our flying friends can't do? Let's see what the year brought us:

Martha Stewart Loves Drones

Drones gained an unlikely champion this year: None other than homemaking maven Martha Stewart, who delighted in revealing drone shots of her expansive property. If this sounds trite, realize it ain't: If anyone has the pull to make acceptance of drones mainstream, it's Martha. If Oprah gets one too, forget about it, drones will be everywhere.

Johnny Dronehunter Hates Drones

Stewart's fandom aside, drones still have their detractors. And by "detractors" we mean "People who will shoot them out of the sky with a big-ass silencer-equipped shotgun." Utah-based SilencerCo, inventors of ""the first and only commercially-viable shotgun suppressor on earth" introduced the public to the company's superhero, Johnny Dronehunter.

Floating Drone Lamps

On a more gentle note, a collaboration between Cirque du Soleil, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and drone developer Verity Studios yielded these awesome floating drone lamps. While this was done more as an art piece than anything else, if the technology eventually becomes practical, we think there could be a revolution in lighting design.

On the one hand, taking notes during a meeting or lecture is crucial for later reference. On the other hand, the act of writing distracts us from listening and interacting. Thus the folks over at a company called SMART Technologies created the SMART Kapp, a dry-erase board that transmits whatever's written on it to nearby smartphones:

The $899 glass-screened device, which is only sold online, promises plug-and-play ease of use right out of the box; users download an app to their phone or tablet, turn the SMART Kapp on and it's good to go.

As useful as the SMART Kapp is for business or educational settings, I also think it'd be really cool for an art event. It would be neat to see an artist work up a one-off piece in real time that could be "captured," for a fee, on nearby patrons' phones.

Via Werd

Industrial designers do at least two types of sketching. The first is the messy kind where we're "thinking out loud," problem-solving technical details or quickly trying to explain a concept to a colleague. The second is the stuff we'll actually let clients see, which typically has to be a bit more polished. Because with the latter, whether you're using a Wacom or a Prismacolor, the goal is the same: You're trying to tell the client a story and/or persuade them of the soundness of your approach.

In Sketching, Product Design Presentation, a new book out this month, two pros discuss this latter breed of drawing. Koos Eissen runs the Industrial Design Engineering freehand and digital drawing classes at Delft University of Technology, and Roselien Steur, who runs design sketching workshops for professionals, lectures at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. In the video below Steur explains precisely what's in the book and why you might want to read it, and as she covers everything from the reptilian brain to rhetoric, you feel you're in good hands:

The Netherlands-based duo's website is Sketching NL, and you can snag the book on Amazon.

Oh what a year for wearables. Like every coming year until we run our civilization into the ground, 2014 saw a lot of growth in the tech-on-your-body department. From breakthroughs in affordably monitoring health to deeply aggravating displays of wealth, there was something for everyone. There was also a lot of bluetooth bluster and bad ideas. Here are our widgety favorites from across this year's wearable spectrum.

It was a good year for Google Glass, it was a bad year for Google Glass. Basically, Google Goddamn Glass came out and it was exactly whatever you decided to feel about it beforehand. To mask our mixed feelings of annoyance and intrigue we defaulted to Casey Neistat's use/review video.

Rain's excited pre-review of the Apple Watch captured why so many people wanted one so badly: good design means a product feels like Yours. While secretly an excuse to plug his adorable dogs and photo studio, he tapped into the watch's features that make it feel so personally tailored. Less fussily, Android Wear has rolled out its own simple, easy options. Personally, I'm leaning back from the increasingly networked and data-filled accessories, but there are plenty of options for that.

Palo-Alto-based designer Robby Cuthbert studied both sculpture and architecture. The melding of both fields has yielded his approach to furniture design: "I combine the careful planning and engineering mindset characteristic of architecture," he writes, "with the freedom of form allowed by sculpture."

One of Cuthbert's go-to materials is one we don't see too often in furniture: Steel cable. By exploiting the natural properties of cable, he's able to create pieces like his Contour Coffee Table, whose four CNC-milled Plyboo leg supports never actually touch each other, thanks to tensegrity:

His Sculptural Desk Chair applies the same principles to seating:

Following their recent three-year $90-million mega-renovation, the Cooper-Hewitt has been going all out to raise the game of their recently relaunched all important museum SHOP. As part of their efforts, curator Chad Phillips has allegedly commissioned a number of home-grown designers to create a range of "exciting new products that are covetable, gift-worthy, and affordable" to stock the shelves, inspired by collections at the museum.

One such object comes from Brooklyn based studio UM Project (standing for "Users and Makers" as their homepage will tell you), who contributed a range of mallets in a range of incongruous materials including brass, copper, marble-esque delrin and maple given a range of tasteful powder coating and lacquer finishes. Pretty and beautifully crafted though these "Mad Mallets" undoubtedly are (presumedly inspired at least in part by the museum's Memphis collections), we have to wonder—what is the sense in these faux-functional luxury tool toys?

The postmodern multi-material mallets could well be explained away as the simple whim of some over-zealous Brooklyn furniture designers, were it not for signs of similar stuff happening elsewhere. Beirut-based designer Stephanie Moussallem recently launched this range of handmade rolling pins (above) at the SMO Gallery Beirut (hmm, note the white wall natural habitats of these particular products) in a less colourful, but similarly luxuriously eclectic material palette.

Despite the Russian-sounding name, Laika is an American stop-motion animation company based in Oregon. You probably know their name from 2009's Coraline, which they produced, and earlier this year they released The Boxtrolls. The A.V. Club's A.A. Dowd reviewed the latter film by writing "In an age when most cartoon companies have traded pens for pixels, the magicians at Laika continue to create fantastically elaborate universes out of pure elbow grease."

Dowd is referring to this surprising scene saved for the end credits, which Laika's just released on YouTube. It gives you a good sense of how labor-intensive this type of animation is:

Did you notice how many times the animator's clothes changed?

For those of you that didn't experience this scene in the theater, Colossal's Christopher Jobson did with his son, and explains the crowd's reaction: "This single scene caused a more vocal response from the audience than any other moment in the entire movie. People were literally gasping, myself included."

Via Colossal

One more month to go: If you're looking for grad school, you might want to use some of the holiday break to polish up your portfolio and apply to the MFA in Products of Design program at SVA in New York City. You could be part of the class of 2017, studying with such design luminaries as Paola Antonelli, Sigi Moeslinger and Masamichi Udagawa, Jason Severs, Emilie Baltz, Ayse Birsel, Steven Dean, and dozens more. Classes take place in their spacious and sun-drenched Chelsea studio, as well as in the New York City-based offices of IDEO, frog, Material ConneXion, SYPartners, and Aruliden. Guest lecturers range from Michael Bierut and Tina "SwissMiss" Roth Eisenberg to Tim Brown and Aimee Mullins, and field trips take you to Google Creative Lab, Etsy, The New York Times, MakerBot and more. Here's a couple paragraphs on the program:

"The MFA in Products of Design is an immersive, two-year graduate program that creates exceptional practitioners for leadership in the shifting terrain of design. We educate heads, hearts and hands to reinvent systems and catalyze positive change.

Students gain fluency in the three fields crucial to the future of design: Making, from the handmade to digital fabrication; Structures: business, research, systems, strategy, user experience and interaction; and Narratives: video storytelling, history and point of view. Through work that engages emerging science and materials, social cooperation and public life, students develop the skills to address contemporary problems in contemporary ways.

Graduates emerge with confidence, methods, experience and strong professional networks. They gain the skills necessary to excel in senior positions at top design firms and progressive organizations, create ingenious enterprises of their own, and become lifelong advocates for the power of design."

Check out their list of "14 THINGS THAT MATTER: What distinguishes the MFA in Products of Design?" article for the highlights, and then jump over to their blog and student projects section to see the latest. The Apply page is here; applications are due February 1st.

Dumb Drum is the name of a group of amateur filmmakers in California. For years they've been making shot-for-shot "sweded"* versions of popular movie trailers--remember fellow filmmaker Dustin McLean doing this with Iron Man 3 last year?--and it's incredibly fun to watch how they simulate millions of dollars worth of special effects with household items.

Their Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer went up just last week. How did they handle the three-pronged lightsaber? Well, let's see:

You've gotta love that they do all of the music vocally.

So how faithful was the DD version to the real thing? Judge for yourself with this side-by-side comparison:

*Fun fact: The term "sweded" is taken from the Michel Gondry film Be Kind Rewind, where Jack Black's character accidentally erases all of the VHS cassettes in a video rental store. He and Mos Def's character then re-shoot the movies themselves, super low-budget style. As demand for the flicks grows along with wait times, the pair tell customers the movies are "Sweded," i.e. all coming all the way from Sweden, as a way to explain the delays.