We can debate all day whether or not, given proper infrastructure, bike helmets are necessary. Regardless, in America, the infrastructure isn't there, which makes helmets something everyone should wear. But we don't, for a variety of reasons: because they're bulky to lug around all day, because bike sharing programs like CitiBike don't offer them, or because we're thoughtless assholes with a god complex.

If you fall into the latter category, the Fuga Helmet by Closca probably isn't going to change your mind about bike helmets, but for the rest of us, it makes the prospect of carrying one with us at all times a lot more palatable. Featuring a contemporary design that comes in black or white, the Fuga can collapse down to less than 50% of its normal size when not in use, making it small enough to slide into a briefcase, purse, or backpack.

Although some portable helmets manage to achieve a smaller form factor by cutting down on the internal foam padding—thus leaving your skull more vulnerable to trauma in case of a crash—the Fuga actually has a similar foam volume compared to regular helmets, good enough for a Consumer Product Safety Commission certificate. It also managed to garner a 2015 Red Dot Award for design ingenuity.

The Closca Fuga helmet is now available for preorder in black or white for $100 here. It might not have the same cutting-edge features as some of the other helmets we've featured here on Co.Design, but it's small enough it'll be with you when you need it, which is, at the end of the day, the only thing that counts.

If you use an e-paper Kindle, good news. The "Bookerly" update—which includes an improved layout engine and a new default font—is finally starting to hit the majority of devices.

Typography on the Kindle has always sort of sucked, with fonts that seemed chosen higgledy-piggledy and a layout engine that was obsessed with fully justified text. Bookerly—which you can read more about here—changes all that. Not only does it introduce a highly readable new font designed for the Kindle for scratch, but it finally solves the Kindle's typesetting problems with an all-new layout engine that introduces better text justification, kerning, drop caps, image positioning, and more.

Up until now, though, these advances have only been available on Amazon's iOS and Android apps, or the 2015 Kindle Paperwhite. Thankfully, though, the update is now starting to hit older e-paper Kindles, such as the Kindle Voyage, Kindle Touch, Kindle 7th gen, and older versions of the Paperwhite.

Speaking from experience, the Bookerly update is a huge improvement over the stock Kindle reading experience. It may still take a bit for the the software update to actually hit your Kindle, but if you just can't wait, you can always manually update your Kindle using your computer by downloading the latest version of the Kindle software directly from Amazon. In this case, I'd say it's worth it.

To read more about how the new Bookerly update improves the Kindle reading experience, read our previous story about it here.

The mouse cursor—that oft-pixelated, 2-D arrow that's constantly hovering over your computer screen—hasn't really changed much since it emerged from the labs of Xerox Parc. But the mouse cursor is getting long in the tooth. On mobile touch screens, it's already obsolete. And as for the virtual interfaces of tomorrow, well, how can a 2-D pointer control virtual 3-D worlds?

But Tomás Dorta, an associate professor of the University of Montreal, doesn't think the days of the mouse cursor are over quite yet. The man responsible for collaborative VR design tools such as Hyve3D, Dorta thinks that the mouse cursor of the future will be an avatar for the smartphone we hold in our hands.

At the 2015 SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, Dorta unveiled a new approach to the mouse cursor that reimagines it for virtual worlds like Hyve3D. His approach uses a smartphone or tablet as a sort of 3-D mouse to a connected screen or headset, which shows a first-person view of a 3-D interface—whether Hyve3D, some Oculus Rift game, or even a 3-D operating system. It works by turning your mouse cursor into an invisible avatar in a 3-D world: imagine playing Doom without the gun. By using multitouch gestures on the device's screen in combination with its built-in accelerometers, you can control your cursor in three-dimensions, tapping on things and grabbing things that fall in your crosshairs, which opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities without specialized hardware.

It's probably more useful to talk about the 3-D cursor in terms of what it can do. Within Hyve3D, Dorta says that the 3-D cursor allows multiple designers or engineers to interact with a virtual space simultaneously, using their individual smartphones to grab objects, copy and paste them, rotate them, sketch in the air with them, and so on. This is a big step forward, because previously, Hyve3D required users to use specialized iPads with attached joysticks to navigate the program's VR design space; now, they just download an app.

But Dorta says that the possibilities for his 3-D cursor go beyond Hyve3D. For example, imagine his technology paired with something like an Oculus Rift. Instead of having to wear specialized gloves, stand in front of a Kinect, or interact with virtual reality through something like an Xbox 360 controller, his 3-D cursor can allow everyone to manipulate and maneuver through VR worlds with whatever smartphone they have in their pockets.

"What we've done is evolve the cursor into an avatar for a 3-D world," Dorta tells me by phone. "It's no longer just this little arrow, bouncing around on your desktop. Instead, it can now be a powerful tool for seeing inside and modifying virtual worlds." Right now, you send someone a file by attaching it to an email; in the future, using Dorta's 3-D cursor technology, you might literally throw it to someone across cyberspace using your smartphone as a pitcher's glove.

You can read more about the 3-D cursor at Hyve3D's official site. Dorta says that Hyve3D users will be able to try the 3-D cursor for themselves later this year by downloading an iOS app.

For whatever reason, violins are often at the forefront of futuristic design. But no matter how crazy a violin looks, the only thing that really matters is how it sounds. So while the 3Dvarius, the world's first 3-D printed electric violin, probably isn't as good as the Stradivarius after which it is named, the fact that something printed from a CAD file could come anywhere close to mimicking its namesake is notable.

Designed with the help of violinist and music artist Laurent Bernadac, the 3Dvarius is a fully playable electric violin designed to emulate the acoustic qualities of the Stradivarius. It doesn't look much like one, though: without its strings, the 3Dvarius looks more like some sort of translucent, deep-sea creature. But tucked under a trained violinist's chin, it sounds pretty good, even if it's more electro jazz funk than classical.

The 3Dvarius was designed to be as lightweight as possible, as well as to feel great in a musician's hand, and to properly resonate in a violinist's hand. It also needed to be custom tuned so that it was strong enough so that the strings could be tuned, and held in tension through a performance. That's something more challenging than it sounds: 3Dvarius went through multiple prototypes before the optimal design that could both withstand the extreme rigors of a violin performance and still be printed out from a CAD file a dollop of polymer at a time.

It's still not entirely 3-D printed, though. The design requires both standard violin strings and a wooden bridge to work. But the body itself is totally artificial, and opens up the possibility in the future of printing off 3-D reproductions of designer violin bodies, stringing them up, and performing on them, without ever hitting the music shop. And until its creators finish fine tuning the spec, the 3Dvarius will remain a prototype.

[via Gizmodo]

Hermit crabs are famous for making a home of anything even remotely shell-like: old cans, shoes, toy buckets, and so-on. They're the trailer trash of the crustacean world. Japanese artist Aki Inomata has made a calling of trying to class up hermit crabs by 3-D printing elaborate designer shells for them, but her latest work of crab art might be her best: a translucent recreation of a European-style cathedral, complete with parapets and flying buttresses.

Borrowing elements of both Gothic and Romanesque architecture, "White Chapel" is the third in Inomata's Why Not Hand Over A Shelter? series of hermit crab shell designs. Although the 3-D printed church design looks European, it's actually the kind of church you often see in Japan: the artist notes that despite Christians only comprising 1% of Japan, 60% of all Japanese weddings happen in Christian-style churches, even if the ceremonies are Shinto or Buddhist. So it made a perverse kind of sense to Inomata that a Japanese hermit crab get to live in one.

Beyond the whimsical nature of the work, the artist says that she intends "White Chapel" to function as sort of a commentary on cultural osmosis, especially in Japan. "When I visit Western countries, I sometimes notice [the origins of so many Japanese styles of] architecture, habits, foods, etc. In Japan, they would be transformed into local styles. And I ask myself, "Are we Japanese living in a mimicry of western world?" For me, these imitations, or I would say reproductions or rearrangements, of Western-style architecture seem to reflect an identity of post-colonialism inside of [the] Japanese people." With her work, the artist seems to ask: isn't every Japanese person, in his own way, walking around inside a shell that mimics a culture that isn't quite his own?

[via Faith Is Torment]

You've drank your way through the beers of the world, you lush you. That wasn't good enough for Brooklyn's Pop Chart Labs, though. On the heels of their Ultimate Beer Infographic, Pop Chart wants you to drink your way through the multiverse of fictional beers, from the Simpsons' Duff to the Lord of the Rings's Ent-draught.

Pop Chart Lab's Fantastical Fictive Beers chart features 71 fictional beers from literature, television, film, video games, and even radio. On display are bottles of Grand Theft Auto's Logger Beer, cans of Married... With Children's Girlie Girl Beer, a forty of Saturday Night Live's Cold Cock Malt Liquor, and even a pint of the radio comedy group Firesign Theater's famous house draft, Bear Whiz Beer.

Like all of Pop Chart's posters, the Fantastical Fictive Beers chart is printed on 100 lb. archival stock and pressed on an offset lithographic press with vegetable-based inks straight from their facility in Flatlands, Brooklyn. It can be purchased online for $30.

If you've got an electric car in the United States, the distance between charging stations could make a long road trip fraught with anxiety. But what if the highway you're riding on recharged your car as your drove it, no stops required?

The U.K., through a group called Highways England, is about to begin trials on electric highways which will see inductive charging equipment fitted underneath roads. When electric cars drive on them, their batteries would be juiced up as they drove by wireless technology running under the asphalt.

Transport Minister Andrew Jones says the U.K. government is committing around $780 million over the next five years to develop rechargeable low-emission vehicles, aiming to "keep Britain at the forefront of this technology." As part of this overall initiative, the off-road trials will start later this year, and last for 18 months, while the government figures out the cost and feasibility of bringing it to the nation's highways.

So it'll be a while before Brits can drive their Teslas indefinitely down the M25 without stopping for "gas." But the U.K. is not the first country to look into smart highways. A similar project in the Netherlands imagined a Smart Highway that could charge electric cars as they drove. This is clearly a path more than one country is considering pursuing.

From a civic standpoint, it makes sense. Not only are electric vehicles more environmentally friendly than traditional combustion engines, but they cost less money over time to actually keep on the road. An electric highway would presumably come with some sort of toll, allowing cars to slurp up the government's electricity as they drove; this, in turn, would help the government bring in more revenues. The toll booth of the future might not be all that different from pulling into a gas station today.

The U.K.'s flirtation with electric highways is part of a $17 billion, five-year plan undertaken to transform England's existing "brutal, crass, and ugly" ecosystem into something "beautiful and award-winning," according to transport minister John Hayes. "We want roads to be based upon principles of good design, he said. "From maintaining the right proportions in construction to use of street lighting, signage and other roads 'furniture' and from delivering better air quality and biodiversity."

Wouldn't it be nice if America, which has been letting its own infrastructure crumble for decades, tried something similar?

[via Designweek]

Bill Murray is one of the most elusive and enigmatic actors in Hollywood, but what does he smell like? Cook Your Own Food is a new scratch and sniff tribute to the Ghostbusters and Scrooged actor that allows you to bask in Murray's fragrant, ever-changing musk. It's the literary equivalent of sticking your head under Murray's armpit and inhaling deeply.

Published by the self-described "nomadic publisher" Sugoi Press, Cook Your Own Food - A Bill Murray Scratch And Sniff features 10 different pages drawn by 10 different artists featuring 10 different smells inspired by an assortment of Bill Murray films. It's the next best thing to using a time machine to travel back to the set of his best movies and smell him for yourself.

One page illustrated by Grace Danico featuring Bill Murray's Suntory hawking character in Lost in Translation might smell like whiskey; another page, illustrating the scene from the same movie when Murray and Scarlett Johansson go out for dinner, would smell like sushi. Other pages feature smells from Moonrise Kingdom, Groundhog's Day, The Life Aquatic, What About Bob? and more.

But why Bill Murray, of all people? "Bill Murray really lends himself to re-interpretation," says John Jarvis of Sugoi Press. "He has everything: the sadness, the hilarity, the weight. You just need to turn on your laptop and you're bombarded with illustrations of him. We wanted to add a layer on top, bring people closer to him. So now you can eat sushi with him, chomp on apples with him, and eat a Baby Ruth with him."

You can buy a copy of Cook Your Own Food - A Bill Murray Scratch And Sniff now from Sugoi Press for a little under $10 here.

We've seen many, many, many times before how projection mapping can be used to create mind-blowing optical illusions. But what happens when you add 3-D glasses to the mix?

That was the idea behind Diplopia, a 3-D , projection mapping piece created by Onionlab, a Barcelona-based multidisciplinary art studio dedicated to motion design. By putting on a pair of anaglyphic 3-D glasses, like the ones you used to wear to the theater, the audience at FIMG was able to experience a show in which a physical building morphed, bubbled, and blew apart, right in front of their eyes.

Created for the second annual International Mapping Festival in Girona (or FIMG), this year's festival had "Contradictions" as a theme. Asked to headline the show, Onionlab was challenged to come up with a piece that explored opposing concepts like light and darkness, flexibility and rigidness, dryness and wetness, noise and silence, and so on. To get these concepts across, Onionlab decided to embrace a technology that is relatively unexplored in projection mapping: anaglyphic 3-D, which is, in and of itself, an exploration of contrast—namely, how light projected in different colors in each eyes can trick the mind into thinking 2-D light is transforming, three-dimensional space.

You could take any 10 seconds of the above video, and transform it into an astonishing GIF. In the hands of Onionlab, a facade in the heart of Girona explodes, bubbles, ripples, and shatters. It's an excellent demonstration of projection mapping's illusionary power even without the 3-D, but if you have a spare pair of anaglyphic 3-D glasses around—maybe from the '90s? Breathtaking.

According to executive producer Joel Mestre, Diplonia has lit a bit of a fire under Onionlab to further explore the limits of stereoscopic projection mapping. "We're really looking to find new territories to visit in Europe, the U.S. and Asia," he says. He hints that Onionlab would really like to use this technology to bring rock concerts to life. "We love music and we'd love to produce some big shows to tour around the world."

Maybe projection mapping is the next Tupac hologram.

[via PSFK]

Staring out a train window as the countryside blurs by is one of the quintessential pleasures of continental travel. These are the moments of zen that London-based artist Rolf Sachs has made the subject of a new series, which takes the stunning high-speed vistas and freezes them in time.

Camera in Motion shows images of the landscape along the Rhaetian Railway line from Chur in Switzerland to Tirano in Italy, as part of the Albula and Bernina railway lines. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, these two lines are known for their spectacular views. The Albula line stretches for 39 miles across 55 bridges and 39 tunnels, and overlooks vistas of the Swiss alps as high as 5,820 feet above sea level, before transitioning into the Bernina railway to pass into Italy, where it reaches a height of 7,392 feet above sea level.

The 13 images that make up Camera in Motion were taken in 2012, as part of a one-year project to photograph the view from the window of a Rhaetian Railway train traveling from Chur, Switzerland to Tirano, Italy. He used a Leica S camera to achieve shots of breathtaking clarity, even accounting for the speed and bounciness of the train.

Although the Swiss-born artist dabbles in areas of design that range as far as architecture and furniture, Sachs says photography is his first creative love. "I had my first proper camera with 14. It was a Fuji and operated manually, which helped me to learn the intricacies of photography," he says.

As for Camera in Motion, Sachs says that he wants people who look at his photos to think about the fleeting, but painterly beauty that surrounds us. "The images I took capture a fleeting moment in time, portraying the striking landscape through the changing of the seasons," he says. "While the foreground of the photographs is blurry, the background remains in focus, giving the photographs a painterly quality."

To Sachs, we'd all be better off if we spent more time staring out a train window. But if you can't, these photos are the next best thing.

Camera In Motion will be on exhibition at the Leica Gallery Salzburg until October 17.

When most design firms change offices, they set up an address forward. But when Stefan Sagmeister & Jessica Walsh of the eponymous Sagmeister & Walsh were finally driven out of their New York offices by vermin and cockroaches, they set up shop in the Flatiron district and announced the change of address with their own eccentric panache: stripping down naked, getting dirty, and covering themselves in bugs.

We decided to reach out to Stefan & Jessica and ask them a few questions about the move.

So how bad was your old place really? Give us the nitty gritty.

Sagmeister: Well, there were mice. And a happy ending massage parlor downstairs. With table showers.

Walsh: We tried to make our old studio look nicer a few years ago by painting everything white. It looked good in photos but after a few years the paint was chipping off and furniture started falling apart. The floors were uneven which was giving us all back pain. There was also a family of mice that would hang out in the studio even during the day. We had roach infestations which would not go away even when we sprayed for them. I think the tipping point was earlier this year when our ceiling caved in from a toilet leak and a gas leak that filled the studio with carbon monoxide. It was definitely time to move on!

And how does it compare with the new office?

Sagmeister: Not.

Walsh: It's twice the size of the old space. We've been doing a lot of photo-based work so we built out a photo studio as well as a larger conference room. It's not super fancy, but it's nice enough to bring a client now.

Who took the photos? And how many of those cockroaches are real?

Sagmeister: Our old friend Henry Hargreaves took the pictures. All cockroaches are real. Some of them are not so alive during photo taking.

When I saw your moving announcement, I remarked to my editor that I'd never seen a designer naked before. (I was not aware that nude staff photos are a long and proud tradition at Sagmeister & Walsh.) He responded: "Sagmeister & Walsh are the horniest people in design, bless them." What do you think of that label?

Sagmeister: Unbeknownst to your editor, there is an actual difference between naked and horny.

Check out Sagmeister & Walsh's one of a kind moving announcement here.

Everything looks cooler when you blast it with X-rays. The photography of Roy Livingston makes electromagnetic radiation his muse; in his colorful series, X-Ray Visions, the skins of alarm clocks, toy robots, old Crosley radios, and more bubble away to reveal their candy-colored X-Ray cross-sections.

X-ray photography is hardly a new thing. Amateur photographers popping inorganic knick-knacks and tchotchkes into an X-ray machine to see what they look like inside as long as the X-ray has been along itself. But X-rays are usually monochrome, which is what makes Livingston's work so captivating: his X-ray photographs are as psychedelically colorful as a Beyond the Valley of the Dolls dream sequence.

Based in Louisville, Kentucky, Livingston tells me that he didn't always take such colorful X-ray photographs, but after experimenting with digitally adding color to his work as part of a study called "36 Robots,""the flood gates opened." Each of his photos begins on the analogue side by taking an X-ray and developing it. He then scans it into his computer in ultra high-resolution, manually cleaning the image as he goes. After cleaning, he creates hundreds of color variations in Photoshop—"I learned about saving large documents in Photoshop the hard way," Livingston notes—then, after giving the project a few weeks to simmer, goes back to figure out which color paths he likes best.

When it comes to deciding what to X-ray, Livingston says its all about design. "I'm a big fan of all kinds of industrial design whether it's new or old," Livingston tells me. "It's incredible when you see the thinking, craftsmanship and machining that goes into creating some of these objects. They are works of art by themselves." If there's anything he's trying to get across with his work, Livingston says, "it's that the simplest things can be beautiful."

You can purchase prints of Livingston's X-ray art here.

You might know it from childhood, or you might know it from its recent cameo in Netflix's Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp: The Lite-Brite is a classic electronic toy that let kids plug small colored plastic pegs into a black board to create analog pixel-art. First introduced in 1967, you can still find the original Lite-Brite it in stores, but it's getting a little long in the tooth.

San Francisco-based firm Hero Design thought they could come with a bigger, better, more contemporary take on the Lite-Brite, to help invigorate and refresh the minds of its hard-working designers. So they did. The Everbrite is a massive interactive mood board, 42 times larger than a Lite-Brite to be exact, covered in 464 individual dials that can be custom tuned to any LED color, just by twisting them.

Using a custom LED boards each of those knobs has a small display embedded in the surface. When one is twisted, the display can be tuned like a radio dial to colors along the RGB spectrum. The high-contrast surface has been designed so that ambient light won't make the Everbrite pick up glare: it should look as good in a dark room as it does with one filled with bright windows and overhead fluorescents. Resetting the Everbrite is as simple as pushing a button on the side, erasing the canvas and resetting the dials to default. It also has a screensaver mode, allowing the Everbrite to display pre-baked animation loops.

Although Hero Design built the Everbrite for its own offices, they're pitching it as the perfect collaborative creativity tool, suitable for other offices, schools, lobbies, and events. All you need is a suitable wall. If you think a grown-up Lite Brite would be suitable for your workspace, Hero Design will sell you one, ranging in price from $14,000 to $50,000.

[via Designboom]

When you walk down the streets of New York City, you aren't walking just through the present. You are surrounded by the canyon walls of the past, and the signage around you—the building names, the business signs, the faded slogans—are actually fossils, peeking out from the strata of decades gone by into the present.

An adjunct professor of design and typography at the Cooper Union School of Art, Alexander Tochilovsky considers himself something of a paleontologist of these signs. By wandering around the streets of Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood, Tochilovsky was able to point out what the billboards, building names, house numbers, and mailboxes that surround us say about New York's past.

In this fascinating video for Quartz, Tochilovsky goes over some of the peculiar typography and signage you might see in Brooklyn on any given day, and decodes it for viewers. "Signs are about communication," he says. "If you can decode them, you can understand a city much better. Even old signs have something to communicate to us."

Pointing out one example, he notes how the hollow metal letters of garment cleaner's sign indicate that they used to contain neon, and that the the A's and N's were designed to accommodate the tubes, which is why we call such a style 'gaslight'. Stumbling upon another building, he explains the period at the end of an apartment complex's name—The Clinton.—was a typographic mark broadcasting respectability in the 19th century, just like the current Wall Street Journal wordmark.

Born in what is now Ukraine, Tochilovsky says that looking at the signs around him helps him feel closer to his adopted home city. "It kinda sounds hokey, but it's a way for me to touch history," he says. But really, it doesn't sound hokey at all.

[via Quartz]

If we're not using our smartphones, most of us have alarm clocks counting down those precious minutes of remaining sleep using either analog dials or LED displays. But designer Zelf Koelman of the Eindhoven University of Technology has created a new kind of alarm clock, one where the time bubbles up from the bottom like a monochrome lava lamp.

The Ferrolic is an alarm clock which uses ferrofluids—a liquid that is highly sensitive to magnetic fields—not just to show the time, but to display a sort of ambient, Rorschach art. Koelman calls these ferrofluid bubbles 'Ferrolic creatures,' and on the clock's website, describes how it works:

In the front, the display has a basin comparable to an aquarium in which Ferro Fluid can move freely. Behind the scenes powerful electromagnets enable Ferollic to influence the fluid's shape, to pick it up and move it around. Both modules, the basin and the electronics, sit secure in an aluminum frame.

Ferrolic is also "hackable," so new information and animations can be created and transmitted via a web app that connects to the clock. "In this way users can assign "the creatures" to display time, text, shapes and transitions," Koelman writes.

The finished product isn't just a timepiece; it's a mesmerizing piece of side table art. Only 24 gave been made so far, and they are quite expensive—around $8,300 a piece. But if you want a Ferrolic clock of your own, you might be in luck: the official website hints that a Kickstarter for the device might be down the road. Consider my ferrofluid obsessed fingers crossed.

[via Boing Boing]

There are plenty of (bad) ways to visualize nuclear atrocity, but when Pentagram designer Harry Pearce was asked to design a poster for a new exhibition about the legacy of Hiroshima 70 years later, he decided to give it his all: his blood.

For his poster, Pearce was inspired by a visual he had previously explored in another project: the memorable image of a drop of ink slowly diffusing its pigment through water. "I was looking at ink drops underwater, for a completely different project, and when I turned the picture upside down I saw the mushroom cloud," Pearce says.

After being approached by the University of Maryland Art Gallery to design a poster for an upcoming exhibition exploring the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pearce decided to embrace this idea, replacing Noodler's Ink with a bright ruby drop of hemoglobin to create a bloody, ghostly simulacrum of a nuclear cloud.

To create the poster, Peace teamed up with photographer Richard Foster; the two worked together to experiment with the perfect blend of blood, ink, water temperatures, and drop heights to attain the finished image. Although the duo took hundreds of photographs, it was the very last image on the very last day of shooting that made it on the finished poster.

The finished poster bears the title It's All Our Blood, and for good reason, Pearce says.

"The title comes from my belief that what we do to others we are really doing to ourselves, and Damocles' Sword still hangs firmly over all our heads," he says. "I used my own blood to illustrate that in the end all our blood was symbolically spilt that day. We all still live under the cloud of what was done, and what could still be done, to us all. It's a humble expression of empathy."

The Questioning the Bomb Exhibition will open this fall at the University of Maryland.

Compared to today's CGI-laden sci-fi shows, the original Star Trek was about as minimalist as it gets: the sets were cardboard, the aliens all rubber and grease paint, and the uniforms little better than sweatshirts. In homage to the original spirit of Star Trek, graphic designer Mark Gonyea has launched Minimal Trek, a new Kickstarter of 78 minimalist poster designs for every episode of the original series.

According to Gonyea, Star Trek was his first graphic design muse. "I have great memories growing up, spending Sunday afternoons sitting on the floor too close to our TV, sketchpad and pencil in hand, watching Star Trek reruns," he remembers. "It fueled my imagination and later in life as I became a graphic artist, it inspired my aesthetic of what I think good design is: simpler shapes, bold colors, and high contrasts."

Gonyea has since gone on to launch seven successful Kickstarters, including two mathematical series of previously featured on Co.Design. When it came time to choose his next project, a tribute to Star Trekl seemed like the perfect fit, especially since the series' 50th anniversary is coming up next year.

Minimalist Trek is partially inspired by Juan Ortiz's mock movie posters for the original Star Trek. Where Ortiz's designs were all shades of Saul Bass, Bill Gold, or Joaquin Pertierra, though, Gonyea favors a much simpler, pared-down aesthetic, trying to distill each original series episode into one simple image.

"When I started each design, I'd think back on the episode and just jot down some ideas. What images, concepts, and emotions that have stuck with me over the years?" Gonyea says. "I'd flip on Netflix and re-watch a particular episode, working on and tweaking the designs as it played. Although the images were going to on the simplistic side of design, I still wanted them firmly rooted in the show and to not rely entirely on memory."

Available now on Kickstarter as a series of posters and postcards starting at just $10, Minimalist Trek has some of the same problems that all minimalist posters do: most of these designs won't mean anything to you if you're not already a Star Trek fan. But if you are, each of Minimalist Trek's three posters is like a whole season of memories to hang on your wall.

Saul Bass is best known for his amazing title sequences (The Man With A Golden Arm, North By Northwest), film posters (Vertigo, The Shining), and corporate logos (AT&T, United Airlines). Compared to his best known works, this short 1968 film, Why Man Creates, is relatively obscure, but it's one of Bass's most playful and thought provoking works.

Why Man Creates is a lucidly titled film. Divided into eight parts, it explores the process, results, and social and philosophical implications of creativity. Divided into eight segments (The Edifice, Fooling Around, The Process, Judgment, A Parable, Digression, The Search, and The Mark), each one feels both totally unique and yet distinctly Bassian. "The Edifice," for example, is the entire history of human creativity from the lever to the industrial revolution in three minutes, done in a Rocky and Bullwinkle-style animation style. A later segment, "A Parable," features a bouncing ping pong ball which eventually bounces all the way into space.

Created in 1968, Why Man Creates has a curious sci-fi connection: it was co-written by screenwriter and playwright, Mayo Simon, who is probably best known for writing Futureworld, the sequel to Michael Crichton's Westworld. Years before star Wars and THX-1138, a young George Lucas also served as a second-unit director on the project. But there's nothing sci-fi about the concept, a paean to the power of creativity, and the importance of creating, in which Bass himself explains his creative process: "Where do ideas come from? From looking at one thing, and seeing another. From fooling around, from playing with possibilities, from speculating, from changing, pushing, pulling, transforming, and if you're lucky, you come up with something worth saving, using, and building on. That's where the game stops and the work begins."

Late last month, social bookmarking site Pinterest announced a hiring coup: they were bringing on Susan Kare, the legendary designer behind the original Mac's icons and fonts, as a product design lead. Although Kare has spent decades contracting for Silicon Valley companies like Microsoft, NeXT, and Facebook, this will be Kare's first full-time design position since her stint at Apple in the 1980s. So how did Pinterest woo her, what will she be working on, and what similarities do Pinterest and Apple share? We caught up with Kare on the phone to find out.

You haven't worked full-time for a company since Apple. How did you come to join Pinterest?

I can't say I was actively looking for a full-time job, but I'm always thinking about what to do next. A friend was shocked I hadn't met Bob Baxley, Pinterest's design manager. We have the Apple connection in common—Bob managed the design of the Apple Online Store for eight years. So I went in to meet him, and immediately, I just liked him. He told me: "I want Pinterest to be the very best place for a designer to work in the valley." I also met the design team, and it blew me away. It's not huge, but it's mighty.

What does 'best place for a designer to work in the Valley' mean?

I think what is articulated here, and this strikes me as true when I think about my colleagues, is that Pinterest is looking for really, really strong designers who are also nice. They really use that word in the hiring process, nice. It's just refreshing . . .

I was struck by the talent pool and spirit of collaboration, and saw the imaginative office as a metaphor for the product and company. I also thought it would be fun to join a company with about 600 people—small enough to be agile about design decisions. And of course, it really appealed to me that one of the founders is also a very hands-on creative director.

As a designer, I'm already finding that Pinterest is a great place to work because the product and culture is all about inspiring users. There's an ongoing effort to expand the extremely diverse group of designers, and everyone is able to focus on an area of interest, and contribute as part of a small team made up of designers, engineers, and product managers.

So what are you working on?

It's early, but I'm working on the product design team to improve the core experience of Pinterest. I'm starting out by taking a look at things like the home feed and the dozens of icons with the goal of adding meaning and clarity.

Icons seems like a natural fit.

Yeah, It's a logical place for me to start, but I'm also definitely part of the product design team as a whole, so I don't feel like my design input will be limited to that. But it's still very early.

Do you see any similarities between Pinterest and Apple?

It's really hard to compare, but at Pinterest, I'm working team with a lot of people of different ages, experiences, and disciplines in an agile team, which is similar to how I worked at Apple back in the day. It's a good creative environment with just the right amount of structure, which again appeals to me, hearkening back to Apple.

Ultimately, though, what seems most similar to me is how user-first both companies are? When we created the original Mac, we made a really sincere effort to make a computer for the rest of us, and give it a friendly, accessible UI. I see the same thing here at Pinterest, where our slogan is: "Put pinners first." Just like when we created the Mac, Pinterest is putting a really strong focus on thinking about the user at every stage in the design process.

Here at Co.Design, we've got a soft spot for design aimed at pets, but it's rare that we see anything designed for dogs and cats that even animal haters would drool over. You could want to see every cat on Earth spayed or neutered and still love the Catable 2.0 by Lycs Architects. These groovy mod cubes aren't just a modular cat playground; they'd look great in any MCM-inspired home.

Designed by Ruan Hao, the Catable 2.0 debuted at Milan Design Week 2015. Considering the fact these bookshelf-like cubes aren't particularly similar to a table, the name seems like a non-sequitur at first, until you realize that Lycs designed them to accessorize the Catable, a gorgeous table hewn out of wood in 2014 with several nooks and holes perfect for a cat to hide in.

The Catable 2.0 takes the original Catable's sinuous, honeycombed design approach and runs with it. It comes as a series of four wooden cubes, each with a slightly different configuration of hideyholes, which can be fit together to form long tunnels, crannies to explore, and napping nooks. The cubes are designed to be stacked any way you want, so you can use them as a cat playground, side tables, stools, or even a book shelf. They look pretty stupendous by themselves, even without the original Catable.

I'm allergic to cats. How allergic am I? After just a few minutes in the same house with one, this is me. Never the less, I would fill my house with these cat cubes in a heart beat, if they were available for sale. Who needs a cat to enjoy design this gorgeous?

[via Designboom]