Times New Ramen is a new font by the perpetually tongue-in-cheek designer Ryder Ripps, creative director of the progressive brand marketing agency OKFocus and New York Times profiled net artist: a goofy Twitter joke turned into a nigh-illegible typeface that you can actually download. The website claims that the weird font was "endorsed" by Kendrick Lamar, the rapper behind March's To Pimp A Butterfly, so we decided to reach out to Ripps to ask some questions about the genesis of his noodly new font and whether Lamar was really as much of a typography lover as it seemed. Without further commentary, here's what Ripps had to say:
Co.Design: Where'd the idea for Times New Ramen come from?
I wrote a tweet that said this:
I originally conceived of this tweet years ago when I used to race Formula 1 for Halliburton, I would often read the Financial Times over a bowl of hot Ramen when I would race in Naha, Okinawa visiting my dear friend Felix Rohatyn.
What was the design process like?
I believe that the best way to get something done is to involve as many people as possible. So we hired several of the most cutting edge agencies to help out including BBDO, DDB, Huge, Crispy Potter, KFC and Mother.
Kendrick Lamar's endorsement, as seen on timesnewramen.comvia Times New Ramen
Q: Is that Kendrick Lamar quote real? How'd you get it?
I don't understand the question.
Obviously, Times New Ramen is a gag font, but can you see it being used in the real world? (Outside of ramen joints, that is)
Gag font? That's what they said about the original Times New Roman font when it came out in 1931. Everyone was like, this is neither Roman nor New. I just think as a society we need to become more open to change. In the words of the great Steve Jobs, "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." And in the words of Margaret Thatcher, "Oh my God, oh my God, If I die, I'm a legend. Oh my God, oh my God, if I die, I'm a legend."
Unless you're a musician—and sometimes, not even then—you're probably not very comfortable with reading musical notation. Sure, we might be taught in grade school music class. We might be able to plod along, but we hardly find it intuitive.
The same can't be said for this animated score of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto (K.622, Second Movement, Adagio) as performed by Bruce Edwards of the Fulda Symphonic Orchestra. It makes following a complicated classical performance as simple as the old Follow the Bouncing Ball cartoons, and as fanciful as Walt Disney's Fantasia.
The animation uses colored diamonds, dots, lines, and waves to distinguish between clarinets, cellos, and other instruments. It was created by Stephen Malinowski, whose program, the Music Animation Machine, a nearly 40 year computer project to make music notation more intuitive to follow.
And if you like that? You can watch hundreds more on this YouTube channel. Because, from Mozart to Metallica, any piece of music can be animated this way.
The Music Animation Machine is free to download on Windows here.
Once you really understand them, typefaces can be powerful. A properly chosen font can either give your words authority, or totally undermine them. Even a typeface as openly reviled as Comic Sans, which is ludicrous in the context of an email from your boss or as the typeface on a business card, can be extraordinarily powerful in the right context.
And when you're first learning about type, determining which font is appropriate for which situation is confusing. For those who've just started really thinking about fonts, the "How To Choose A Typeface" poster from the Design Deck seems like a good flowchart to hang above your desk.
Featuring 43 different typefaces (including popular ones like Bodoni, Futura, Garamond, Helvetica, Gotham, and Baskerville), the poster walks you through the decision-making process on how to pick an appropriate font. Need a funky, standout font for a modern looking body text? Try Rockwell, PMN, or Caecilia? Or want something stylish, neutral, and professional? Give Futura or Gill Sans a try.
For $20, it's a good primer on how to use typefaces, but it's just skimming the surface of the galaxy of type. If you need something more detailed, though? Hey, we've got you covered.
Think of an automobile factory. It's a cacophony of whirring robots, massive clunking steel stampers, spark-spitting welders, and buzzing drills. But separate all the steps that go into turning a lump of metal into a shining automobile, convert them into 20 separate GIFs, and the process goes from cacophonous to serene, from chaotic to ballet-like.
At a Toyota automobile line assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, every day starts with the workers doing a series of group stretches. From there, each vehicle is literally pressed out of 8,000-pound blank sheets of steel by being fed through a series of customized presses. Those presses apply over 4,600 tons of pressure to bend the sheets into shape. After they're inspected for quality, the pieces are racked up, and welded together by humans and robots. From there, a 15,000-pound robot (called "Godzilla" by team members apparently) picks up each car, which at this point weighs over a ton, and hauls it to the inspection line.
The GIFs were created by New York City-based marketing agency 360i for a musical web app that turns a Toyota factory into a sort of DJ mixing board. If you go to the Gifony website, each GIF is accompanied by an isolated sound from the automobile process: the sound of the frame being stamped out of a steel, for example, or the noise of a car's doors being attached or re-attached. By clicking the GIFs, you can make your own sound mix.
Check out the slide show for more on how cars are made, or read more here.
At the University of Michigan, conceptual artist Adam W. Brown has assembled an installation of glass beakers, hot plates, and rubber tubes. It doesn't seem terribly imposing—it has the look of random props left behind on a mad scientist movie set—but what Brown is trying to do with this assemblage of lab equipment is nothing short of profound: it's called ReBioGeneSys, a self-contained world, and it's designed to create life from nothing, then set it on its own distinct evolutionary path.
ReBioGeneSys was inspired by the works of chemist Stanley Miller. In 1955, Miller discovered that by filling a beaker with hydrogen, methane, and ammonia gases, then striking them repetitively with a lightning-like electrical discharge he could produce several different types of amino acids, which are the most basic building blocks of life. In 2008, Brown adapted this experiment to a piece called Origins of Live, Experiment 1.x. He discovered that by constantly resupplying the system with fresh gas, water, and minerals, he could create all of the basic chemical compounds necessary for a cell to form, as if from nothing.
The only problem? Brown's Origins of Life experiment was a chemical Eden where there was no reason for his amino acids, sugars, fatty acids, and lipids to do anything but chillax. For life to evolve over time, though, these building blocks need a more challenging environment to kickstart the process of natural selection. As Miller showed, it's relatively easy to make amino acids in a primordial soup, but if you want nucleic acids, which are critical to replicating molecules like DNA and RNA forming? You've got to stir things up.
ReBioGeneSys is designed to constantly torture the chemicals within in the hopes that more complex life will eventually form. With the help of fellow U. Mich scientist Robert Root-Bernstein, the system was designed so that it constantly blasts the chemicals with electricity and UV rays, freezing them, heating them back up again, dehydrating and then rehydrating them. "Think of it like soup," Brown tells me. "The more you boil it down, the deeper the flavor becomes, because the molecules draw closer together."
All together, that means that the ReBioGeneSys system can simulate any possible environment in the universe to see if it could generate life, from the red deserts of Mars to the frozen seas of Europa. The only thing that is missing is enough time to see whether or not life can evolve in whatever conditions Brown sets up.
Unlike other experiments to create synthetic life or recreate RNA from scratch, ReBioGeneSys is meant to be as much science as art, Brown says. "In the scientific world, it's hard to get funding for an experiment that might not show any results for 1,000 years," he tells me. "They want things to be less fuzzy than that." ReBioGeneSys, then, is just as much about trying to build life from scratch as it is a commentary on the nature of time. "If you think about time in terms of five, 10, or even 100 years, matter is strictly binary: it's either alive or dead," Brown says. "But if you look at it from the perspective of geological time, over millions of years, the matter of whether something is alive or dead becomes much fuzzier."
So what would happen if you left ReBioGeneSys in some self-sustained underground bunker somewhere to run for 1,000 years? Would you come back to it and see a self-contained alien world inside, teeming with life that had evolved from nothing? "The artist in me wants to say absolutely, but the scientist in me has to be much more reserved," Brown says. "It's an important question, but for me to answer it, it's kind of an art spoiler. Asking that very question is why I built this in the first place."
Cremation urns usually only hold the ashes of a spouse. With his new work 21 Grams, Dutch designer Mark Sturkenboom reimagines the urn as an interactive memory box for widows. It doesn't just hold the ashes of a departed spouse, but his scent, the moment he proposed, and even his favorite music. Oh, and not to bury the lede, it also contains a big glass dildo full of your spouse's ashes.
The 21 Grams memory box is made from hand-sanded wood, painted a pale gray and then locked with a brass key that a widow wears around her neck. When the lock is turned, the box unfolds to reveal a blown-glass dildo full of cremated ash, which can be used to revisit intimate memories of a deceased loved one. The box also contains a small ring holder for a widow's wedding ring, which can be popped open to relive the moment of proposal, as well as a built-in perfume diffuser, which a widow is meant to fill with her spouse's scent. A small drawer in the box can be used to hold keepsakes, while a built-in amplifier allows you to use the memory box as an iPhone dock.
The 21 Grams memory box gets its name from the widely discredited "research" of early 20th century physician Dr. Duncan MacDougall, who argued that the human body lost around 21 grams of weight (representing the soul) after a person died. In Sturkenboom's project, 21 grams is the amount of ashes interred inside the glass dildo.
As a husband myself who dreads the idea of outliving his wife but also doesn't want to leave her alone in life, I find myself strangely torn about 21 Grams. It seems almost like a tasteless joke at first blush, but according to the Utrecht-based designer, the inspiration for project is deeply rooted in respect for the grieving process, as well as the role of sex and masturbation within it. Sturkenboom says he was inspired to design his memory box after noticing the disconnect between the devoted, loving way an elderly widow of his acquaintance spoke about her dead husband, and the hideous monstrosity in which she stored his ashes.
"In that same period I read an article about widows, taboos, and sex and intimacy," Sturkenboom told Dezeen. "Then I thought to myself: 'Can I combine these themes and make an object that is about love and missing and intimacy?'"
Here are the five things Ussai says UI/UX designers can learn from Walt Disney, according to Ussai.
Walt Disney Pictures
• Feedback. To Ussai, good feedback in a UI corresponds to Disney's principle of exaggeration by clearly demonstrating the result of a user's interaction. In Beauty and the Beast, the titular Beast might drop his jaw and bulge his eyes when Belle refuses to go to dinner with him. Likewise, good UI feedback should be more pronounced than it would seemingly need to be, like the almost head-like shake the iOS password screen makes when you enter your pin wrong.
Clear
• Feedforward, corresponding to Disney's principle of anticipation. In a Disney cartoon, a diver might bounce a few times on the diving board and comically wiggle his butt before diving in, thus creating anticipation. Similarly, a good UI prepares users for what is about to happen. A good example can be found in Clear, an iOS list making app which allows users to create a new list entry by pulling down on the top of the screen. In Clear, you can see this new entry start to appear even before you've pulled the element halfway down.
Stellar
• Spatial awareness, corresponding to staging. In animation, staging creates the expectation that empty space will be filled. For example, if a character is standing far left with nothing to the right, you expect something to happen in the blank space. The same is true in apps. Ussai gives Calendar, an iOS calendar app, as an example of staging in UI done right: days in the app are positioned right next to each other, and when you change dates, the entire interface slides left and right, just as you'd expect them to.
Pinterest
• User focus, corresponding to Disney's unwritten 13th principle of animation, clarity. The idea here is never to leave your users behind, by putting emphasis on whatever element is most important at a given moment. In a Disney cartoon, this might be accomplished by making the hammer Mickey suddenly pulls out nearly as big as he is; in UI, this can be accomplished as simply as in the Pinterest app, where contextual controls appear on screen the moment a user touches a pin.
• Brand tone of voice, corresponding to Disney's principle of appeal. An app's UI should reflect the brand of the company that made it, not just looking but moving like you think that brand might move. Ussai points to Snapchat, with its whimsical ghosts playing in the app's UI margins, or how the UI of Nike+ app feels almost like it runs as much as you do.
The latest cover of Vangardist Magazine, a progressive men's publication, is bound to stand out at newsstands. "This Magazine Has Been Printed With The Blood of HIV+ People," it reads, and it's true. It has Over 3,000 copies of the spring issue have been printed with ink containing a small amount of infected blood, as an attempt to end the social stigma of HIV in Europe and abroad.
Designed with the help of Saatchi & Saatchi, the spring issue of Vangardist is timed to coincide with the Life Ball, the biggest AIDS and HIV charity event in Europe. According to the publisher and CEO of Vanguardist, Julian Wiehl, printing a copy of the magazine in blood seemed to be the most expedient way to bring attention to a social stigma around HIV that is just as strong today as it was 30 years ago.
"We believe that as a lifestyle magazine it is our responsibility to address the issues shaping society today," Wiehl says in a press release. "With 80% more confirmed cases of HIV being recorded in 2013 than 10 years previously, and an estimated 50% of HIV cases being detected late due to lack of testing caused by social stigma associated with the virus. This felt like a very relevant issue for us to focus on not just editorially but also from a broader communications standpoint."
The magazine is perfectly safe to handle. The ink is mixed at a ratio of 28 parts ito 1 part donated blood, donated to the Vangardist by three HIV+ individuals. The blending of ink to blood was overseen by doctors at Harvard University and Innsbruck University, who certified both before and after that there was no possible way HIV could be transmitted by the magazine. Which, even without their assurances, would be quite the long shot: HIV is very sensitive to changes in alkalinity, and can't survive the pH level of ink.
Printing books in blood is nothing new, of course. Saddam Hussein famously commissioned a copy of the Q'uran written in over 50 pints of his own blood, and the '70s rock band KISS famously used red ink mixed with their own hemoglobin to print the premier issue of their comic book back in 1977. But the spring issue of the Vangardist might be the first publication to tap blood-derived ink for a more noble purpose.
The spring issue of Vangardist shopped out to subscribers on April 28th, and will be available on newsstands or online starting next week.
Japanese design house Nendo has been busy experimenting with front doors. But these aren't normal doors. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of Abe Kogyo, a fabled manufacturer of wooden doors for homes, Nendo has designed a collection of seven odd, almost surrealist, doors. Doors that break apart into tessellated wire frames of themselves, for example, or magnetic doors you can hang shelves on.
Appropriately enough, the collection is called Seven Doors. If there's a common theme, it's that these designs challenge us to re-examine the very idea of the entryways in our lives. They are:
• Wall — A door covered with shelves and picture frames, becoming an extension of a household wall. The door has been carefully designed that it can still be opened and closed, even though shelves and frames overlap the jamb.
• Hang — A door fitted with an internal magnetic sheet, allowing you to attach accessories like trays, dust bins, flower pots, vases, and other containers.... or, you know, slap your refrigerator magnets all over it.
• Baby — Paraphrased, the idea here seems to be: "What if babies had their own door to enter a house?" Just use the doggy door, kid.
• Kumiko — Named after the Japanese technique of assembling wooden lattices without nails, this tessellated door gradually assembles it from the lower-right corner upwards into a smooth, uninterrupted surface.
• Lamp — A door and a lighting fixture in one. The lamp is powered using the same wiring techniques used in electronic locks.
• Slide — Like a window blind, the idea behind this door is that it contains various panels which can be slid out of the way. To identify who's ringing your bell, for example, or to let some light or breeze through.
• Corner — This one's my favorite. It's a door built right into a corner. It's clever in a Willy Wonka sort of way already, but Nendo says the design has an unexpected benefit: the corner design makes it slightly easier for people in wheelchairs to get through the door.
None of these doors are available for sale, but Nendo claims they still shouldn't be dismissed as one-off products. The Seven Doors collection has already inspired Abe Kogyo's engineers, who are looking into adapting some of Nendo's ideas and innovations for the consumer market.
Avengers: Age of Ultron has arrived alas, adding three new superheroes—Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, and Vision—to the core team of Earthy's Mightiest Heroes: Captain America, Hulk, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Iron Man, and Thor.
But as the latest infographic from Brooklyn-based Pop Chart Labs amply shows, the team still has a long way to go before the 9 Avengers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe this roster can match the chaos of the seemingly infinite Avengers lineups in the comic books,
Titled Assembled!, the poster tracks every single iteration of the Avengers from the first issue in September 1963 all the way to day, using hand-drawn head icons to represent each hero. So far, there have been 87 Avengers in all, including some surprising heroes from the comic books that, for licensing reasons, can never join the Avengers on the big screen, like Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and X-Men's Wolverine.
All in all, there have been 44 different iterations of the Avengers lineup in its 50-plus-year history. And that's only if you count the core Avengers, and not their substitutes, replacements, sidekicks, or hangers-on. If you add in Avengers spin-off teams like the West Coast Avengers, the Young Avengers, the Dark Avengers, the Great Lakes Avengers, and even the Pet Avengers, there would probably be hundreds more.
Like all Pop Chart Labs prints, Assembled! is printed on 100 lb. archival stock and is currently available for pre-order for $35. Buy one here.
Everyone loves fan movie posters. They're a great way for fans to lick their graphic design chops while paying tribute to a much beloved film. They're big business too, with companies like Mondo raking in cash hand over fist selling fans after-market posters for popular cult films.
Unfortunately, most of them are just fan art, and not really better than the originals in any real way. Although the Internet has generated a seemingly endlessnumber of listicles for alternate movie posters that are supposedly better than the real thing, most are unnecessary at best, terrible at worst.
So I decided to try my hand at putting together a gallery of some great alternate movie posters, along with an explanation on why I think it's better than the original. To make things at least a little bit less arbitrary, here's my methodology:
1) The poster has to genuinely be better designed than the original. That means if the original movie poster is iconic, we're not touching it. There's lots of great alternate posters for Star Wars, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, and so on, but you're going to be hard pressed to find anyone to seriously argue that they're better than the originals, all of which have imprinted themselves upon popular culture.
2) A great alternate film poster can't just be fan art that references to something that happens in the movie, or a collage of such references (ahem, Mondo). It has to illuminate central themes of the film, evoke its mood, or be notably clever to warrant a place on this list. It also has to depend on visuals, not words, to convey the spirit of the movie.
3) Almost every movie has numerous "official" posters. For the purposes of this list, every alternate movie poster is being judged compared to the "official" poster listed at the top of its Wikipedia entry.
It's a short but sweet list, but that's by design: hundreds of posters failed ot make the cut according to the criteria above. Hopefully, it'll at least give prospective designers some food for thought on how to go about their work.
If you know an alternate movie poster that you think is better than the original according to the above methodology, submit your own in the comments below.
The original poster for Steven Soderbergh's 2011 medical drama Contagion is your standard collage of beautiful Hollywood heads, dramatically looking off-camera. There's no real encapsulation of the themes, here: if you took the words off the poster, you'd have no idea what this movie was about. "Okay, in the poster, Lawrence Fishburne and Kate Winslet are both talking on the phone, so maybe they talk on the phone to each other during the movie? And Marky Mark's waving bye-bye to someone. Maybe it's Gwyneth Paltrow? She looks sick. Is this a movie about GooPing?"
Joel Amat Güell's poster is much better. The eerie image of an outstretched hand, with smaller hands growing out of the tips of each finger, conveys a sense of sickly horror, pandemic, and dread. Juxtaposed against the universal language of biohazard symbols, Güell's poster memorably conveys both the tone and the plot of Contagion, all without words.
Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 apocalyptic thriller, Children of Men, is a modern day masterpiece. It deals with a world of global human infertility, in which Theo Faron, a former political activist who lost his faith after the death of his son, is charged to protect the life of the first pregnant woman in 18 years against a background of social breakdown.
To be fair, the original movie poster gets all of these ideas across, but artlessly. Without the tagline, the Children of Men would just be Clive Owen looking at you through a broken glass window. Did he break it, or was he hired to fix it? Noah Hornstein's poster, on the other hand, beautifully conveys the movie's essence with one single, haunting image: a chiaroscuro pool of blood shaded with humanity's family tree, trickling down to just a single branch.
Ryan Gosling turned in a mesmerizing performance as the nameless, cipher-esque driver in Nicholas Winding Refn's 2011 neo-noir masterpiece, Drive, but you'd never know it from the official poster. This is a movie about fast driving, ultra-violence, and the operatic allure of the city in the dead of night. But the poster is seemingly about Ryan Gosling waiting patiently for a Big Mac at a McDonald's drive-thru window.
We're not quite sure who designed this alternate poster for Drive (please leave a comment if you know, so we can give credit where it's due), but it's a vast improvement. Using the markings on a shift stick to spell out the film's title is clever, as it putting them in the shape of a hammer, a reference to one of the film's most memorable (and bloody) scenes. The neon pink skidmarks outlining the knob, meanwhile, gives a nod to Drive'sMiami Vice style color schemes.
Darren Aronofsky's 2010 film about a high-strung ballerina who cracks under the pressure of looming success is a film about duality that owes much of its nightmarish feel to the Italian giallo genre: mysteries or thrillers with often fantastic visual languages that also incorporate elements of horror and/or eroticism.
The original poster is okay, but I really like Daniel Norris's version. Not only does it tap into Black Swan's central theme of duality by counterbalancing a white dancer's hand with the silhouette of a blood-drenched swan, but it screams giallo. This poster looks like it could have hung up outside of an Italian movie theater in the 1970s.
For my money, there's no better werewolf movie than John Landis's An American Werewolf in London: a film that manages to be comic, tragic, and horrifying, all at once. But let's face it, absolutely none of this is conveyed in the original theatrical poster on it, which looks like it could be a page from a Patagonia catalog during the puffiest point of the early-1980s.
Olly Moss is a master of "minimalist poster" re-designs, and he gave American Werewolf the tribute it deserves. The way he uses negative space in the silhouettes of the British Isles to create a werewolf face is just brilliant. Moss makes it look effortless, but seriously, this is expert graphic design work.
Let's look at this 1954 poster for Rear Window shall we? Holding a pair of binoculars that are easily three times as big as his head, Jimmy Stewart obsessively spies on something, oblivious to the half-naked woman about to be murdered in the building behind him. Meanwhile, Grace Kelly looks smug, silently mocking his gigantic binoculars. "Men!" she seems to be saying to herself. "Always compensating for something!"
Comparatively, French illustrator Laurent Durieux's poster for Rear Window is perfection. On opposite sides of a reflective pane of glass, Durieux's drawing expertly conveys the essence of the film's plot, setting, protagonist, and antagonist. It's just dripping with mood, mystery, and dread.
If you ever walked through the horror aisle in a video store in the late '80s or early '90s, you probably know the poster for The Visitor, if not the movie itself. An Italian/Egyptian sci-fi horror movie directed by Giulio Paradisi in 1979 and re-released by Drafthouse Films a few years ago, Film.com's David Ehrlich said The Visitor was like a remake of The Bad Seed as reimagined by Alejandro Jodorowsky."
I love the pure cheese of the original The Visitor poster, but Jay Shaw's trippy poster for Mondo really brings out the psychedelic, Jodorowsky-esque elements. This is like The Visitor filtered through the mind of Mœbius, which really brings out the movie's weird, Jesus-is-an-alien allegories.
Compared to flashier visualization methods, the pie chart is hated by data viz designers, but home decorators might be more forgiving: the Times 4 Coffee Table by Goncalo Campos uses a quartered pie chart as a sexy way to keep your living room organized.
Designed for French design site Polit.fr, the Times 4 is half coffee table, half Lazy Susan. The idea is that you can rotate the table's top to expose a quarter of the interior storage space at a time. Each section is color-coded, allowing you to keep what's on—or, in this case, in—your coffee table organized.
There are four sections, which you can use to store and categorize your magazines, books, remotes, game pads, coasters, and so on. To reveal a section, just twist the table top.
Having your buddies over? You might choose to expose the section of coffee table with all your video game controllers. Is a date coming by? Twist the Times 4 around the dial to the space you devote to sophisticated coffee table books.
The Times 4 coffee table's top is made of a solid beech surface, varnished in a white matte. Inside, you'll find a laquered tray painted in powder blue, gray, light green, and rose. You can order it for around $1,600 from Polit here.
Most people hate getting jabbed with even a single needle, but Georgia Tech's Mark Prausnitz thinks the future of vaccination is to jab people with a hundred needles at once. But it's not as terrifying as it sounds; in fact, Praustnitz's design for delivering vaccines is as easy as slapping on a band-aid.
Just a fraction of a millimeter long, up to 100 microneedles can be applied at once to painlessly vaccinate patients against the flu, rubella, or the measles. Using a cocktail of sugar, vaccine, and a polymer (to keep the needles stable), each patch contains a single dose of vaccine. To apply it, you just slap it onto someone's skin like a sticker. The tiny needles then painlessly puncture a patient's skin, where they dissolve. 20 minutes later, and you can throw the patch away, fully vaccinated.
Although needles are most effective way of vaccinating someone, they have a lot of problems, especially in the developing world. Not only do they hurt, but require special training to mix and administer the vaccine, which itself requires refrigeration to keep viable, says Dr. James Goodson of the Center for Disease Control.
Conversely, the patch requires no training to apply, no refrigeration to keep the medicine viable, and early cost estimates say that it will be no more expensive than a traditional vaccine, which in the case of measles and rubella is about $1.30 per dose.
That's why the CDC is so interested in Prausnitz's technology, which it is currently working (along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) to implement into measles and rubella vaccines, and is on schedule to begin human trials in 2017. Although the CDC is trying to eradicate measles and rubella by 2020, 145 thousand people a year still die of these easily preventable diseases.
"Measles vaccination rates have stagnated at around 84% over the last five years," Goodson tells Co.Design. "We think innovations like the microneedle vaccination patch will help us get over the hump."
But the microneedle patch isn't only for measles and rubella. Prausnitz tells me that they've tested the technology with a dozen different vaccines so far. Georgia Tech is even working with the National Institute of Health to develop a flu version of the microneedle patch, which is even further along than the measles and rubella version: it's undergoing clinical trial this year. "I think people will start seeing these patches during flu season in the next three to five years," Prausnitz says.
Both Prausnitz and the CDC think the microneedle patch has a good chance of saving a significant number of lives in the developing world. Asked, though, if microneedle patches could help woo over America's anti-vaxxers, Prausnitz seemed skeptical.
"If you think, against all evidence, that getting a vaccination is dangerous, the microneedle patch won't change your mind," Prausnitz says. "But if you're not vaccinated because you're scared of needles, or don't want to have to make a trip to the doctor, the microneedle patch could help."
And is the microneedle patch really painless? "Patients feel like something is being pressed into their skin, but they don't find it objectionable," Prausnitz says. "Pain isn't a word anyone has used, although it's hard to describe the sensation exactly." You just have to try it for yourself.
Last week, investment management startup Wealthfront announced that former Facebook design director Kate Aronowitz would be joining the company as their new vice president of design. Formed in 2008 as one of the new wave of financial robo-advisors, Wealthfront aims to largely automate the investment process, making it painless for users to invest their money even without knowing the first thing about the stock market. With Aronowitz now joining the company, she becomes yet another high-profile Silicon Vally designer joining the finance world. We asked her why finance, of all things, had managed to draw her back into the design scene. Here's what she told us.
What have you been doing since you left Facebook?
80% of it has been being a full-time mom to my 10-year-old. Other than that, I was involved in the bridge program with Designer Fund, and I offered coaching to design managers and directors. I also just spent a lot of time trying to just help people get jobs: there's just no shortage of companies out there trying to fill design leadership positions right now.
Any similarities between Wealthfront and Facebook?
Totally. Both companies are committed to design. Both had relatively small teams in place when I joined them, but were committed to growing into a world-class design organization. Both companies like to move fast, and have big missions.
Why did you decide to join Wealthfront?
There are a lot of parallels between Wealthfront and other companies I've worked for. Just like Facebook wanted to connect the world and eBay (where Aronowitz worked as a senior manager for user experience and design until 2007 - ed.) wanted to democratize commerce, Wealthfront has a big mission to make investment approachable for anyone. I really want to help them build this fantastic company, especially since it exists in this area—finance—which is virtually untouched by design.
Can finance really benefit from design?
Absolutely. Financial investment seems, on paper, pretty logical, but in reality, it's extremely emotional. When you look at other finance companies, no one is using user experience to make investment less intimidating. Instead, their interfaces are all just overwhelming, unless you already have financial experience. Design can have a huge role in helping people know what they want to do with their money, and help manage it.
What do you plan on doing at Wealthfront?
Best to tell you in six months after I've gotten my hands dirty. But basically, I'm going to pick up what they're already doing, and accelerate it. I know we've got a couple redesign projects we're working on, and we want to deepen our focus on mobile even more than we've already done. But really, when I did consulting over the last year, I realized that what I like to do more than anything is just find these growing brands with a great market fit, and accelerate them. This is the earliest I've ever joined a new company, so I can't wait to see where we go from here.
Ryder Ripps is an artist, programmer, and creative director who the New York Times once called "the consummate Internet cool kid, as fluent in HTML and JavaScript as in the language of conceptual art."
His latest project is Times New Ramen, a hilarious gag font based on the noodle shapes in a bowl of ramen, but Ripps has a serious side too: as the creative director of OKFocus, Ripps has done work for Nike, Red Bull, Phillips, and more.
We caught up with the tongue-in-cheek yet passionate 28-year-old designer to talk about the cowardice of corporate America, the way social media is gradually turning us less human, why design is important, and Ripps's dream of totally redesigning Facebook to be a site you'd actually want to use.
What was the first thing you ever designed?
I started using Photoshop in 1996 when I was 10. I think my first "design job" that I took "very seriously" was an attempt to create a logo for my mom, Helene Verin's design company, 2C. (You can see it here.) My mom is also a designer, and her most popular design was the Keds Baseball shoe in the '90s, which they recently reissued. I also designed a lot of graphics for WaReZ groups and H4X0R stuff like that.
What is your daily work routine like?
Feed the cows at 6 a.m. Tend to the grain by 8. Spend an hour on Instagram. Start fun work around 11 a.m. Brush up on Formula 1 racing around 7:30 p.m. Finish the day up over a couple cups of port around 9:50. Exhausting.
What is your biggest challenge as a designer?
Jay-Z once did an AMA on Twitter. Someone asked: "What's the biggest entrepreneurial tip you've learned?" He responded: "Don't listen to anyone. Everybody is scared." Clients being scared is the biggest challenge. Convincing people to put out good work, not just safe work, is the biggest challenge I have I spend half of my time working on stuff that no one sees because of corporate America's inefficiency to innovate. There's just not enough incentive within large corporate structures to be different.
What's your favorite thing you own?
My cat Sally—she's sweet and cuddly. Other than that, my various collections. I collect promotional pharmaceutical objects (here, here, and here), as well as paper stock certificates of dot com companies that went out of business in the late '90s. Most recently, I have been collecting daguerreotypes, mostly from the 1860s, which are photos on metal that are totally unique, and have no negatives.
What is the worst job you've ever taken, and what did it teach you?
The worst jobs I've taken are ones that don't pay well, doing work that I don't enjoy. I'll work for free (and often times have) if the project is cool/inspiring/innovative/socially challenging and the client is respectful. The worst jobs are the ones where clients hire you because you can do things they can't, and then they boss you around. If you hire a creative person who you believe is talented to make something, it's best to not interfere with them. Sit down, shut up, and let them fix your problem!
If you weren't a designer, what would you be, and why?
Well, I also have an art practice, which is a huge aspect of who I am, so I'd probably be doing that. With my partner, Jules LaPlace, our company OKFocus gives me the ability to make the art that I want to make—not art for an imagined art market. All the while I can still apply my creative genius and skills for clients—which is much more rewarding than having to work a job that stunts creativity. I also believe most business owners are creative people—for instance I think opening a successful restaurant or minigolf course takes a great deal of creativity—so besides art, maybe I'd do one of those things.
What do you think the biggest challenge facing the world is that design can help solve?
For me, good design relieves people's minds of subconscious problems that make us unhappy. For instance, a really ugly and dysfunctional faucet drips all day and makes you say "ew" every time you see it. It's taking up up space in your brain that shouldn't be occupied by faucets. A dysfunctional health care website wastes people's time and the frustration from using it makes people less bearable to deal with in real life. These are the types of issues design can address in a very real way. Yet the biggest real challenges in the world are probably climate change, nuclear war, poverty, and laziness caused by vanity. These are challenges that design should ultimately be addressing but I'm just not sure how.
If you had an unlimited budget to design one thing, what would it be?
An unlimited energy source with zero environmental impact would probably be most useful thing for the world to be honest. Besides that, I guess a really cool handbag?
If you could rebrand any company, which would it be, and how would you do it?
Assuming this isn't like a real client-like job (LOL), I would probably rebrand Facebook to be just a web host where its users would be forced to learn HTML and create web pages from scratch because I think it would be pretty interesting to see what would happen. If this was a real client job, the answer would still be the same, but I'd try to make the Facebook website simpler, more functional and with a more innovative model than their current feed. For example, I want Facebook to connect me with people I don't know but should, not people who I do know. To me that's the most powerful ability of the Internet.
What is the worst thing on the Internet?
Laziness. Infinite information is at everyone's fingertips and yet content's quality and modes of communication are regressing. The problem with the Internet today is the gamification of the feed. We spend most of our time on the Internet playing a game and not realizing it. The reward systems of social media are ruining society by gamifying interactions: in other words, by rewarding the fastest, most binary, easiest to understand interactions. We are becoming a society of clueless finger-pointing, one liners, our emotions deduced to emojis and incessant obsession with self. The worst thing about the Internet is the dehumanizing effect of rendering us all as media.
When Amazon first announced the Echo—an always-on speaker slash Siri-in-a-can tied into the company's services—we were bullish about it. Although the Echo couldn't do much at release, we saw it as a step towards the ambient computer science fiction has been promising us for a years: a JARVIS-like voice UI at the center of our future connected homes. All it needed was some extra connectivity to let it drive more than just Amazon's service.
Now, six months after release, the Amazon Echo is starting to get that connectivity. It's all thanks to IFTTT, an Internet recipe site that lets you connect various Internet services together in logical workflows: if this, then that. IFTTT is now tapping into Amazon Alexa, the voice engine that powers the Echo, and allowing you to connect it to other services like Gmail, Evernote, Twitter, Google Drive, and more.
Right now, IFTTT's Alexa channel focuses entirely on supercharging your Echo's to-do list functionality. So, for example, you can set up a recipe that takes any item you tell your Echo to add to your shopping list (let's say, adult diapers), and have it automatically emailed to your spouse ("Please pick up adult diapers on the way home"), synced to your Evernote, or even blasted out on Twitter ("Help! I'm out of adult diapers!").
This is a very small first step to turning the Amazon Echo into a true ambient computer, true. In our original story, we talked about how, one day, the Amazon Echo could tell you where family members are in your house, call you an Uber, or even start playing music to lighten your mood automatically based on the sound of your voice. Although support is still remedial, the fact that IFTTT can now interact with the Echo at all opens the door for all that to happen down the line, even if Amazon doesn't program the Echo to do that themselves.
In the world of comics, it's not unusual for superheroes and supervillains to hold political power. The Fantastic Four's nemesis Dr. Doom is the king of Latveria, while Captain America has been elected U.S. President in at least one corner of the Marvel Universe.
In the real world, though, world leaders are about as far away from superheroes as you can get. That's something Alessandro Rabatti wants to change. In his Facebank series, the Florence, Italy-based artist takes icons of the world economy, cuts their likenesses out of currency, and then modifies them to look like popular Marvel and DC Superheroes.
Alessandro Rabatti
Cutting out parts of the dollar bill, pound sterling, and Chinese yuan, Rabatti mixes and matches the faces of leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Chairman Mao to create the likeness of Iron Man, Spider-Man, Dr. Doom, Wolverine, Hellboy, Catwoman, and more. According to the artist, the project aims "to reflect and convey the symbolic value of money and inspire thoughts about the current economic crisis."
Even if you don't buy that, it's a lot of fun seeing Captain America on the front of the dollar bill. You can see more of Rabatti's work here.
What if you could change your body just as easily as you changed your clothes? The body suits of textile artist Chloe Cooper imagines a future of fashion in which people don't just buy clothes to improve their status or sense of style, but to improve their health.
A student in Rhode Island School of Design's textiles department, Cooper developed her Future Suits as part of her senior year thesis project. There are four concepts in all: a stomach suit, a muscle suit, a lung suit, and a metabolism suit. When worn, each hand-knit suit looks almost like someone yarn bombed a Body Works exhibit.
study 1
"My designs were all prompted by the question: 'If you could change a part of your body for a functional reason, what would it be and why?" Cooper tells me by email. After watching the TED body talks of Hugh Herr, a designer of bionic limbs, Cooper wondered if the same approach might someday be accomplished with textiles.
Her first design was the stomach suit. Inspired by her sister's difficulties with gastric reflux, Cooper researched how cows' stomachs worked, and designed a piece with four external stomachs that could help her sister digest food more efficiently. From there, Cooper created herself a muscle suit, as a reflection on her own lack of physical strength which uses a melted plastic yarn in order to look more corpuscular. She also created a lung suit (perfect for asthmatics), as well as a metabolism suit, for those who want to burn off calories faster.
"The idea is that people would be able to custom order these suits, and they would fuse to their body to enhance its natural abilities," Cooper explains.
Obviously, Cooper's Future Suits is less science than science fiction in textile form. Yet the artist feels like it's only a matter of time before her idea becomes reality, and fashion becomes as wild as her Future Suits.
"As design and science become more connected, I think there will be a lot more advancements tailored towards specific body needs," she says. "There are already just so many new textiles being created that challenge our perceiption of what clothing is and what can be worn on the body. I think that will only continue."
Wireless charging is officially starting to take off. With the new Apple Watch, the world's biggest gadget maker supports the technology; so does Ikea, which has released a furniture line that also doubles as wireless chargers. But what few designers are considering is how wireless charging can change the way we interact with gadgets, and with each other.
Designed by Mayela Mujica, a graduate student pursuing her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Illume lamp only turns on when two smartphones have been placed on the base to wirelessly charge, giving off what Mujica describes as a "soft light [to] facilitate uninterrupted conversation." Constructed out of cypress, glass, and nickel-plated brass, it might just be the smartest take on how wireless charging could be integrated into furniture.
It's a simple interaction, but a moving, almost symbolic one. All too often in our always-connected lives, couples come home from work to spend the next few hours looking at their phones as they are plugged into the wall. But to make this light turn on, both you and your partner need to put down your phones. The Illume shows how wireless charging can be leveraged as not just a control mechanism, but as a way to bring two people closer.
The Illume is currently a student project, so sadly, you can't buy one. But personally, I'm far more captivated by this approach to integrated wireless charging than what Ikea is doing. Maybe when she graduates in 2016, the Swedish furniture maker can give her a job.
Few would argue that Manhattan's Penn Station is anything but a big fat architectural goiter. Yet it wasn't always that way: The old Penn Station, demolished in the 1960s, was one of New York's crown jewels. Now, Richard Cameron and James Grimes of Brooklyn's Atelier & Co. design firm want to bring back the original Charles Foster McKim-designed Penn Station, which opened in 1910. It might be impossible, but at the very least, they have a plan.
The modern Penn Station is a depressing monstrosity, confusing to navigate, weirdly dirty and humid, and almost entirely underground. Seeing it, it's hard to believe that Penn Station used to be beautiful. But it was—a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style. "...[U]ntil the first blown fell, no one was convinced ... that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance," the New York Times wrote in 1963, as it was destroyed. In the words of architectural historian Vincent Scully, formerly "one entered the city like a god." Now, "one scuttles in like a rat."
Atelier & Co.'s plan is laid out in a feature published in the April issue of Traditional Building magazine. Describing the post-1963 iteration of Penn Station as "one of the greatest civic blunders ever committed," Atelier & Co. wants to demolish the "depressing warren of gloomy passages" and replace it with the Corinthian columns, vaulted ceilings, and marble floors of the magnificent original design. The New York Historical Society still has 353 original drawings of the design, as well as countless pictures of what it looked like inside, that the architects could use for reference.
In Atelier & Co.'s plan, the area surrounding Penn Station would get a facelift, too. McKim's original vision was for Penn Station to be like Rockefeller Center: a world-class destination that would stand as the centerpiece of New York's own version of the City Beautiful movement. Atelier & Co. imagine "creating a great urban outdoor room on the northside of the station" that would turn the surrounding area into a "beautiful urban ensemble." Oh, and Madison Square Garden, the sports arena built right on top of Penn Station, would have to go, too.
According to Atelier & Co., the new Penn Station would largely devote itself to the needs of local commuters, either riding the subway, or taking the New Jersey Transit and Long Island Railroad. They estimate the effort would cost $2.5 billion. A steep budget, to be sure, but in the grand scheme of things, isn't that a small price to pay to transform 600,000 passengers a day from rats back into gods?
