What if you could design the way an object responds to being dropped?
What happens when you drop a piece of rubber? Simple: it bounces, an effect caused when the rubber deforms, and then reforms rapidly upon impact. This quality of rubber, and similar so-called viscoelastic materials, makes it great for superballs and the like, but the bounciness has drawbacks when you use it as a dampening material, like in an iPhone case. Sure, the deforming qualities of rubber will protect your iPhone on the first bounce, but subsequent bounces can increase the odds of you breaking your device, especially if it lands wrong. If only there was a way to "program" that rubber to cushion, but to not unpredictably bounce, right?
That's just what researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (or CSAIL) have figured out. They've developed a technique to 3D print soft, viscoelastic materials—like rubber and plastic—which deform in predictable ways, essentially allowing MIT to control how they bounce. But CSAIL isn't just pitching this as a way to design better iPhone cases. They see it as a method of protecting robots, drones, and even professional athletes, as well.
MIT calls the technique "Programmable Viscoelastic Materials," or PVMs. The basic idea is this: instead of using existing injection-moulding processes, which are normally used to shape custom parts out of materials like rubber, the researchers 3D print them instead. The fine-grained printing process allows them to control the exact distribution of elasticity in the finished part. As they print, they can build a sort of skeleton inside a viscoelastic part, controlling the exact way in which it will deform and reform by mixing solid materials, liquid, and a flexible rubber-like material called TangoBlack+ in the same design. The result? Objects which bounce in completely predictable ways—or not at all, if you prefer.
The researchers think the technique could have a diverse range of applications, especially for robots and drones. To test it, they 3D-printed a cube robot that moves by bouncing. Then, they fit it with shock-absorbing skins, printed using their technique. Those skins ended up reducing the amount of energy the robot transferred to the ground with every bounce by around 250%. "That reduction makes all the difference for preventing a rotor from breaking off of a drone or a sensor from cracking when it hits the floor," says CSAIL director Daniela Rus, who also points out that this material could extend the lifespan of delivery drones, like the ones being developed by Amazon.
There are other innovative uses for these programmable viscoelastic materials, too—and plenty that could end up making their way into our everyday lives. Take running shoes, which could be designed to better absorb shocks and cushion your joints. PVMs could even potentially be used in helmets, perhaps getting us one step closer to that mythical concussion-proof NFL helmet. But for many of us, the most obvious innovation is clear: they could end up making their way into the nigh-invulnerable Otterboxes of the future, which bounce in such a way that your iPhone lands safely, with its screen pointing up, every time.
Read MIT's paper on programmable viscoelastic materials here.
Retina, the tiny, ultra-readable font designed in 2000 for The Wall Street Journal, gets its first retail release.
As wearables shrink display sizes, type designers are responding with a growing array of typefaces that are meant to be legible at really small sizes. It's a very old problem for type designer Tobias Frere-Jones.
In 2000, long before the first Apple Watch was even a gleam in Steve Jobs's eye, Frere-Jones created Retina—a typeface designed especially to help The Wall Street Journal cram as many stock indexes into its pages as humanly possible while maintaining legibility. Now, Frere-Jones is releasing Retina as the second retail release of his new type foundry, Frere-Jones Type, following December's release of Mallory.
It's been nearly two decades since it was designed, yet Retina has enduring relevance in today's world of tiny screens. The sans serif is optimized for ultimate legibility over any other concern. The smallest version of Retina, called MicroPlus, was designed first. It's also visually the oddest version, distinguished by the strange notches that are sliced out of each letter, making it look lumpy. The Standard version, which was later commissioned by the Journal in 2005, loses the notches, creating a version of Retina that looks good in headlines and body copy.
The story behind Retina's design goes back to 1990, when Frere-Jones was a student at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). At the time, RISD had no organized type design program. "I had to find my own way in understanding workflow and technique, and what we expect letters to do," Frere-Jones tells me. So he began creating experimental typefaces, often based upon some absurd challenge that was meant to put impossible strain upon the letters. For example, a typeface where every letter is designed to overlap with the one next to it. By creating these typefaces, Frere-Jones was hoping to learn what, in his words, made each letter "uniquely itself, and not something else."
In the late '90s, Frere-Jones had an opportunity to dust off these early experiments when the Wall Street Journal came to him with a new commission. An upcoming redesign would shrink the physical size of the newspaper; at the same time, the Journal wanted to include even more stock listings per page. "The two parts of the brief effectively contradicted each other," Frere-Jones remembered. "On the one hand, they wanted to put more content on the page; on the other, the page was shrinking. And it all needed to perform better than what they were currently using, Helvetica Condensed."
When creating Retina, Frere-Jones started by identifying the "essential gesture" of each glyph and amping it up to 11. For example, with a capital "R," the most unique element is the leg that juts out. "It's the most 'R' part of the 'R,'" explains Frere-Jones, saying that no other letter has anything like it. Likewise, the arm that crosses a capital "G" has nothing like it in the rest of the alphabet, and distinguishes it from an "O" or a "C." In a capital "D," there's not as much to work with—it's almost a "B" and almost an "O"—so it's fundamental asymmetry becomes its most unique identifying design characteristic.
At the same time, Retina was also designed to take into account the vagary of newsprints. The odd notches in the MicroPlus version? Those are actually meant to serve as wells that can fill with excess ink during the printing process, without smudging the letter into something unreadable. It gives Retina an interesting dappled quality when viewed digitally, although the effect is nowhere near as visible when you're squinting at it on a half-smudged stock page. It looks odd at large sizes, though, which is why Retina comes with a Standard version. "Retina MicroPlus looks like total chaos if you try to set it in a larger size," admits Frere-Jones.
Another interesting characteristic of Retina's design? Each character is the same width across multiple weights. This isn't the same as a monospace font, in which each letter is exactly the same width. Rather, in Retina, a bold "M" will be the same width as a regular "M" or an italic "M," within the same point size. "Given the sizes Retina MicroPlus was designed to be printed at, I had to make sure that each character was always the same width, no matter what the weight," says Frere-Jones. "In The Wall Street Journal, if a line gets 1/64th of an inch longer because you change the weight, it could break the entire page."
Since it debuted in The Wall Street Journal, Retina has been adopted by numerous other newspapers, which use Retina for stock listings, sports scores, classified ads, movie listings, and more. It's also been inducted into the Museum of Modern Art's collection. However, the new release by Frere-Jones Type marks the first time it can be purchased and downloaded online. As part of the release, Frere-Jones is also expanding Retina's character set, allowing it to support over 200 languages, from Acehnese to Zuni.
The Frere-Jones Type Retina release is notable for another reason. Before Frere-Jones's highly publicized split from Jonathan Hoefler, Retina used to be licensed out exclusively by Hoefler & Frere-Jones (now Hoefler & Co.). Frere-Jones wouldn't directly acknowledge whether or not he had regained Retina as part of the terms of his out-of-court settlement with his erstwhile business partner, only acknowledging: "Frere-Jones Type now owns Retina." Nonetheless, perhaps other former HF&J typefaces will soon find a home at Frere-Jones's new type foundry.
[All Images: courtesy Tobias Frere-Jones. Retina designed by Tobias Frere-Jones. Contributions by Graham Bradley, Nina Stössinger, Tim Ripper, Dave Foster, Octavio Pardo, Ksenya Samarskaya and Colin Ford]
In the '60s and '70s, the lurid, fanciful covers of science-fiction and fantasy paperbacks didn't usually waste much time with typography. Instead, the designers put all of their efforts into illustrating the bizarre worlds contained within. So look back at the original cover for Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 and it shows a space station; Dune the scorching surface of the dessert planet Arrakis, and so on.
For Penguin Galaxy's new box set of six different classic sci-fi and fantasy books, it's taking a different approach—letting the typography do the talking. All the covers feature a multi-lined decorative font across a colored background; and with only one exception, that font is the same for each of the books. Yet despite this seemingly simple recipe, what's notable about the Galaxy box set is how well this short combination of elements can illustrate a book's plot and themes.
Consider, for example, the Penguin Galaxy cover of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Implying the monolith, the cover prints the title vertically, in a rectangular block, with a black background, referencing both the monolith's cover and the emptiness of space. The orange cover to Frank Herbert's Dune makes each letter in the book's title resemble a sigil, seemingly representing the novel's four main factions: House Atreides, House Harkonnen, House Corrino, and the Fremen. The cover to William Gibson's cyberpunk classic Neuromancer is a Matrix-like affair where the cathode-green letters of the title glitch out. Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand Of Darkness has the same font overlaid upon itself twice, symbolic of the gender-switching natives of the planet Gethen, which feature prominently in the novel. Using a red color-shift through the title's letters, the cover of Stranger in a Stranger Land evokes the red sands of Mars. And lastly, the sole fantasy novel, T.H. White's A Once And Future King, gets a heraldic font, worthy of an Arthurian legend.
[Photo: via Penguin Random House]
All of the covers were designed by Alex Trochut, who also created gorgeous multi-lined icons for the back covers of these editions, tying into the typography while further illustrating their plots and themes. So even if you don't love classic sci-fi and fantasy but you do love gorgeous graphic design and great typography, you still might be willing to pay $225 for this jewel lucite-encrusted box set when it comes out on November 15, 2016. You can preorder it here.
[All Photos (unless otherwise noted): via Alex Trochut/alextrochut.com]
From a gun that records bullets to the blockchain to a framework for the Internet of Cities, here are some of IDEO's most provocative new ideas.
The world is constantly being exposed to new technologies, but how those technologies can be leveraged by designers isn't always as clear. Take blockchains, for example. The backbone technology of Bitcoin, a blockchain is an encrypted database that inseparably links every Bitcoin transaction to the one that preceded it, making the whole database tamper proof. Useful in finance, true, but it's a technology that has also been put to good use well-beyond its original cryptocurrency purpose, as a tool for doing everything from verifying web images to protecting sneakers from counterfeiters.
To help get a jump on how new technologies will impact the world beyond their immediate applications, renowned design firm IDEO created the coLab, which pairs inhouse designers with outside organizations like Citi Ventures, Nasdaq, Target, MIT Media Lab, and more. Headed up by Matt Gerber, Joe Gerber, and Reid Williams, the mission of coLab is to mash up emerging technologies with problems in the energy, money, mobility, food, and health spaces. The resulting prototypes aren't ready for primetime, but with some more development, they could end up informing the next transformative, multi-million dollar business.
Last month, IDEO threw open the doors of the coLab for its Blueprint 2016 event, offering members a chance to explore what they and their partners have been working on over the course of the last 12 months. Here are four of the most intriguing, potentially transformative prototypes.
Since we already mentioned blockchains, we might as well stay there. One of the great things about blockchains is they offer an immutable digital record that is impossible to tamper with. For example, you can tell how many times every individual Bitcoin in the world has been spent, and trace it all the way back to the person who created it.
Ideo's idea? Why not take blockchain technology and apply it to something else where you want an immutable, tamper-proof public record: police shootings.
"Glockchain was inspired by what's happening with police violence in this country," Williams says. "There's this amazing potential for blockchains to be more than just a ledger for Bitcoin, but to act as a shared record for what's happening in the world." And hopefully, dissuade police officers from being so trigger happy.
In the case of Glockchain, IDEO created a (nonfunctioning) firearm capable of automatically recording to a blockchain every time it was unholstered, or fired. "These events are already supposed to be documented by paper-based means, but we wanted to explore what it would take to do it automatically, and what the implications of such technology might mean for police forces, oversight agencies, and local communities."
The Internet of Things has put Internet-connected sensors in everything from flower pots to refrigerators. With Nomad, IDEO imagines extending that concept outside of our smarthome, where the Internet of Things becomes the Internet of Cities.
Inspired by the InterPlanetary File System, a peer-to-peer distributed file system that works like an Internet-scale Bittorrent swarm, Nomad is a platform for all IoT sensors to publish information to the web, and subscribe to updates from other sensors.
For example, let's imagine a city on a sunny day. On one side of town, a bank of fog rolls in. Solar panels on that side of town would publish to Nomad that the amount of sunlight they were converting to energy was dropping. Meanwhile, a nearby power exchange might subscribe to that information, combine it with a weather forecast, and predict that all of the town's solar panels might be at low efficiency within four hours, thus kicking up some more generators to make sure that they're ready for the surge.
"The value of the Internet of Things is when the data it collects is broken free of its silos," says Williams. "It got us thinking what a living network built upon the IoT might behave like."
How much do you know about the food you eat? Probably not a lot: the brand, the price, and maybe what it says on the nutritional label—which can also be misleading. The truth is that most of us are pretty blind to what we're putting into our bodies.
With Pickl, IDEO thinks that augmented reality can be tasked to help solve the problem. The idea is that you should be able to just point your smartphone at some food you want to buy, and have the Pickl app tell you everything you want to know about it.
For Blueprint, IDEO showed off the concept with an apple. When scanned by Pickl, you could learn anything you wanted to know about that fruit. Not just its nutrients,its type, or how many calories it is, but how much energy it took to grow it, the path it took to get to your supermarket, how much CO2 it is responsible for, and even what its specialties are: for example, if it's a better apple for baking than juicing.
When you have a car accident, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops to resolve the insurance claim. In some circumstances, insurance companies may need to read police reports, conduct interviews, examine footage, and send investigators to the scene to determine who is at fault.
With Claimbot, Ideo imagined a system that could use AI and crowdsourcing to automate as much of the claims process. When you crash your car, Claimbot leverages data from your car's sensors to let the insurance company know what happens. Meanwhile, nearby pedestrians are encouraged to pull out their smartphones and use the Claimbot app to upload footage of the accident, where they are digitally paid for their troubles.
The hopeful end result, if something like Claimbot became a real product? A more efficient, profitable, and consumer-friendly insurance industry.
IDEO cautions against expecting too much out of its coLab prototypes. "These are all more intellectual prototyping exercises than product prototypes," explains Reid. But by employing a cross-disciplinary approach, and mashing up new technologies and industries that don't seem, at first, like they go together, IDEO hopes that they and their coLab partners will have a leg up on the competition when it comes to solving tomorrow's multi-billion dollar problems.
Amazingly, you can thank Henry David Thoreau and his family for this SAT must-have. The more you know!
Anyone who has ever taken an SAT has had the sacredness of the No. 2 pencil drilled into them. But what makes a No. 2 pencil what it is? What separates it from a No. 1 or No. 4? And what makes a pencil—well—a pencil, anyway? This video, from NPR's excellently named Skunk Bear science channel, offers all these answers and more, in a great, four minute explainer that harkens back to the best of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood's"Picture Picture" segments.
What makes a pencil a pencil is graphite, of course, a crystalline semi-metal that was once known by the fascinating name "plumbago." Like oil, coal, and diamond, graphite is an allotrope of carbon; in other words, it's formed when a carbon deposit undergoes a certain amount of pressure over time. What makes graphite unique is that the various sheets that make up its crystal-lattice atomic structure have a tendency to shear off under friction.
That's a quality that 16th century farmers took advantage of, when a lightning storm uncovered a massive deposit of graphite in Cumbria, England. As Skunk Bear's Adam Cole explains, the farmers sound discovered that chunks of graphite allowed them to mark their sheep, separating one flock from another on the rainy English hills. They mistakenly started calling the material lead. The name stuck, the natural philosophers of later eras—most notably Henry David Thoreau—soon realized graphite was its own thing entirely. Thoreau discovered that you could make cheaper, more dependable pencils by mixing inferior-grade graphite with clay. You could also control the lightness and darkness: "Harder pencils" contained a greater clay to graphite composition, leaving lighter marks; softer pencils left darker marks because the ratio was reversed.
Cole explains that it was Henry David Thoreau's father, John Thoreau—owner of a pencil factory—who began classifying the softness of pencils by their numbers. No. 1 pencils were the darkest; No. 2 were the second darkest, and so on. Today, that scale includes 21 different grades, but No. 2 pencils are still the ultimate "tweener" pencil: the perfect middle ground between hard, light pencils and dark, soft pencils... and the perfect pencil for standardized test reading machines, too.
Check out Skunk Bear's full, fascinating history right here.
Stash is a great new service that automatically categorizes all the links you save.
The internet bookmark aspires to be the digital equivalent of the sticky note you paste on an important page in a college textbook. But that's where the metaphor falls apart. If the internet is a college textbook, it's an infinitely dense one, where every chapter covers a different subject, and someone has stuck a sticky note on every page.
The problem that nearly every bookmarking site inevitably needs to solve is one of organization. Pinterest does this with boards; other bookmarking services, like Pinboard, do so with tags. All of these solutions, though, require users to rigorously categorize their own bookmarks... which when you think about it, is kind of the equivalent of asking someone to bind and title every physical book in their library before they actually put a bookmark in it.
Stash is a new bookmarking site that has an innovative solution to the whole organization problem. Stash gives your bookmarks its own AI librarian, which uses machine learning to automatically categorize all of your bookmarks in different categories: for example, articles, or recipes, or products, and so on. From there, if you want to further classify your bookmarks, you can add tags, but even if you just follow a "throw everything into a bucket" school of bookmarking, Stash will make it easy for you to browse your bookmarks by category, as well as search for them later.
Founded by Rahul Shah and Christopher Goes out of Ithaca, New York, two years ago, Stash wasn't always a bookmark manager. It actually started as an analytics engine for the news and media industry. "Our goal was to help publishers qualitatively understand their audience by analyzing the meaning of the content they were reading," says Shah. "In the process, we had built some pretty solid technology for parsing and understanding the meaning of webpages." About eight months ago, they realized that the AI Librarian they had built was better applied to consumer tech, "to help us keep track of the webpages that we were finding on a daily basis—which were a complete mess."
Besides its AI Librarian (LibrAIrian?), Stash has some other handy features. A social component allows you to send bookmarks to other people. Bookmarks sent to you, meanwhile, go into an inbox, where they can be accepted or deleted. Accept an incoming bookmark, and you can even search for it by the person who sent it to you, useful for when your significant other asks if you read that article she sent you a few months ago yet. Stash even borrows some tricks from email apps like Mailbox and Inbox by Gmail to give you the option to "snooze" bookmarks. Don't have time to read something now? Stash will remind you about it in another week.
Stash isn't perfect. Contrary to what some hyperbolic headlines have claimed, it doesn't streamline formatting to give articles a better reading experience, so if you do a lot of internet reading, you'll still probably rely on services like Pocket or Instapaper. But the mobile app is surprisingly great, allowing you to easily add any link to your Stash through your device's share menu. If you juggle a lot of bookmarks, sign up for Stash's waiting list here. It might just become your new default bookmarking site.
MIT's Bradley Hayes has a bold suggestion: how about an AI programmed to act like Donald Trump? That's the tongue-in-cheek idea behind DeepDrumpf 2016, a new crowdfunding campaign to raise money for girls in STEM, disguised as a mock presidential run for one of Twitter's most infamous bots.
As we reported in March, DeepDrumpf is a Twitter bot that uses machine learning to copy the baby-fingered potato man's quote-unquote "style" of tweeting. By training DeepDrumpf on an archive of actual Donald Trump tweets, Hayes was able to simulate with remarkable efficiency the actual misfiring neurons, chemically-imbalanced hormonal make-up, and low impulse control of the real-life GOP nominee.
In fact, as the newly launched DeepDrumpf 2016 website makes abundantly clear, the Twitter bot may even be more articulate on where it stands on the issues than the real GOP nominee. For example, while Donald Trump's take on domestic policy begins and ends with "Make America Great Again," DeepDrumpf has a real plan for America, starting with the Garden State:
Similarly, DeepDrumpf knows what to do about the lagging gap between America's education systems and the rest of the world's:
He even has a plan for renegotiating America's international trade agreements:
You can, of course, argue with the specifics of DeepDrumpf's policies. What can not be argued with, however, is the fact that any of the above tweets is easily a more fleshed-out plan for America's next four years than whatever stochastic word salad is currently being bloviated out of Donald Trump's moistly puckered policy hole.
Sadly, unless the Republican Party initiates emergency proceedings to replace Trump with his kinder and gentler digital doppelganger, you can't vote for DeepDrumpf. However, you can symbolically vote for him, by donating money to DeepDrumpf's GoFundMe "Victory Fund", with all proceeds going to the charity Girls Who Code to help get more women involved in computer science.
And you should do so! Because between Donald Trump and DeepDrumpf, there's just no contest: DeepDrumpf is easily the better human.
The world wants to know where Clinton and Trump stand on ISIS and climate change. Abortion and gun control? Not so much.
Trapped in the domestic echo chamber of this year's frankly insane election season, it's easy to forget that the entire world is watching. But it is. And depending on the country in which you live, the biggest issues in the U.S. presidential election may not be email servers and genital grabbing but foreign policy, global warming, or the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
To help put the way the rest of the world is viewing the election in perspective, Google News Lab and Milanese design studio Accurat have put together World POTUS, a tool that helps visualize the volume of search results for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's policy stances on various issues. The idea is that the more often a country or territory searches about a candidate's standing on a particular issue, the more that country cares about it.
For example, take a search for Donald Trump and oil. By default, World POTUS does not include results from the U.S. in its visualizations, so when you click on the "Oil" tab under the Donald Trump section, you can see that Canada was, perhaps understandably, the country most interested in Trump's oil ambitions, followed by (perhaps more inexplicably) New Zealand and Ireland.
When you add the U.S.'s results to the visualization, though, things become more interesting, because it turns out that Canada is, on average, more concerned with where Trump stands on oil than America itself! At least as of this writing. World POTUS's visualizations change every day, so some of what drives it is a nation's own domestic news cycle. If New Zealand publications are posting more stories about Donald Trump's oil aspirations that day, for example, you might potentially see a surge in the results.
When viewed this way, it's easy to see the issues that are of great importance internationally, compared to the ones foreigners care less about. The candidates' stances on abortion, for example, is pretty much only of interest to Americans. That's also true for Black Lives Matter and gun control. But click on ISIS, refugees, global warming, or the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the list of countries searching becomes a lot more diverse. In the end, it makes for an excellent tool for identifying which issues really are national issues, versus which ones are of critical interest internationally.
Given the fact that these results can always change, there are other fascinating takeaways within World POTUS. For example, at the moment, Donald Trump garners considerably more search requests in Africa than Hillary Clinton does. Oceania is responsible for the bulk of the non-U.S. search results on same sex marriage, regardless of candidate. Across the board, every continent is fascinated by where Donald Trump stands on Brexit. And as for the candidates' positions on health care? Pretty much nobody outside of the North American continent seemingly cares whether Americans get affordable health care or not.
Can a change in perspective make brainstorming more productive? Nendo thinks so.
Ever been confounded when you walk into a meeting and find the room doesn't have a whiteboard? Japanese design firm Nendo has an answer to that: a giant, circular whiteboard that you can wheel into any room you want when it's time to brainstorm (or brainwrite).
As part of the "Rolling Workspaces" installation at the Orgatec 2016 furniture fair in Cologne, Germany, Nendo decided to take a look at redesigning the whiteboard. The decor of any two offices are often radically different, but Nendo noticed that no matter how weird an office got with its furniture, the whiteboards remained the same.
That struck Nendo as odd. The primary purpose of a whiteboard, after all, is to spark creativity, but there was nothing creative about the whiteboard. Everywhere you went, they were white, rectangular, flimsy, and decidedly immobile: the most boring and uninspiring way to be creative imaginable.
That's why Nendo's whiteboards are different. First of all, they're big and round, like giant wagon wheels, making them easy to move into any room. To set these circular whiteboards up, you just tilt them against the wall. But the circular pattern isn't just for transport. Nendo hopes that an oval whiteboard will convince you to write in spirals, not only encouraging new brainstorming patterns, but allowing users to just turn the whiteboard when they need more space.
As part of this concept, Nendo also envisions an associated desk with a large slit in it, which can be used to "park" a whiteboard (or, for that matter, a bicycle) when it's not in use. The opposite side of the whiteboard, meanwhile, is covered in colorful felt coming in shades of aqua, slate gray, and even black. This allows the whiteboards to double as sound dampening panels when they're not in use, helping keep an office space quiet.
All told, Nendo says the point of its circular whiteboards was to help create a dynamic work space that would allow people to "rotate" their brains, inspecting hoary old problems from fresh points of view. Or, failing that? A really great pair of googly eyes to wheel into your office windows.
The technology would let historic or protected buildings install "invisible" solar panels.
Solar panels can drastically bring down the energy footprint of any building on which they are installed. But existing solar panels can't be used just anywhere. These flat, fragile, and transparent panels are best placed on roofs, where they can collect the most sun without being damaged—and where they also draw plenty of attention to themselves, aesthetically altering the appearance of the buildings on which they are installed. For historic buildings, solar energy is often simply not an option.
Now, a family-run Italian solar business called Dyaqua thinks it has an answer to what some might call the architectural blight of solar panels. The company has invented what it calls "Invisible Solar" panels, though that's a bit of a misnomer. These solar panels aren't so much invisible as they are indistinguishable from more common construction materials, such as concrete, slate, stone, terracotta, and even wood.
Solar panels are traditionally made up of a couple parts. First, they usually contain a photovoltaic module, which generates electricity from direct sunlight. But since these modules are fragile, they need to be encased in a housing to protect them—and because those housings must let in light, they are usually made of transparent materials, like glass. Dyaqua's Invisible Solar system works by using a special polymeric compound for this housing. This compound is opaque to the eye, and can be designed to resemble traditional materials, but it lets just enough sunlight through to power the photovoltaic module within.
According to Dyaqua's spokesperson Elisa Quagliato, the Invisible Solar technology was originally prototyped back in 2009 by her father, Giovanni, an expert in plastics and electrotechnology with decades of industry experience. He started the project in order to create a solar panel that could be installed on any of the thousands of historic buildings that dot the Italian countryside. These buildings could not have existing solar panels installed by law because their original appearance needed to be maintained. But what if a solar panel could be devised that blended in with their original architecture?
Beyond their chameleon-like aesthetics, Dyaqua says its Invisible Solar panels have many advantages over traditional photovoltaic panels, like excellent resistance to compression and impact, which allows the flat stone-shaped panels to be used as flooring or even in driveways. They also don't have to be laid flat, which means they can even be used in walls.
But there's also one big disadvantage: They aren't as efficient as traditional panels.
Asked how they compare, Quagliato insisted that it was an apples-to-orange comparison, because Invisible Solar panels are designed to be used in places where you wouldn't normally install them because of solar's visual impact. However,compared to a typical photovoltaic solar panel, Dyaqua's panels appear to collect only about 25% as much electricity per square meter—a seemingly massive disadvantage, until you consider the fact that you could theoretically cover almost every surface of a building in these, and no one would know the difference.
After seven years of development, Dyaqua is now taking sample orders for their solar panels on Indiegogo, in an effort to ramp up wide-scale production. Check out the campaign here.
The graphic design great Ikko Tanaka, who died in 2002, defined Muji's anti-branding. Now, his work is getting an exhibition.
One December day in 1980, the readers of one daily newspaper in Japan opened it up to discover a simple one-page ad, featuring a thick, monochrome line drawing of a hand, holding a name tag for a new brand: Mujirushi Ryohin, or "No-Brand Superior Items." Although the Mujirushi Ryohin started by selling humble items like canned salmon and dried mushrooms, today it is known by a more familiar name, Muji—a worldwide phenomenon that specializes in selling items that convey a traditional Japanese aesthetic by emphasizing the utmost richness of plain, simple design.
But back to the ad. It was created by Ikko Tanaka, a Nara City-born graphic designer, who followed up this ad with dozens of others, which would ultimately do just as much to convey the philosophy of the Muji brand to customers as its products itself. These prints have now been collected and will be on display in London and Milan through November, in honor of Muji's 25th European anniversary.
According to Motoki Kuketsu, the curator of the exhibition, Tanaka's influence on the Muji brand was hardly limited to its print ads. "[His] visionary ideas for the brand, beginning with monochromatic packaging, have remained at the core of Muji's product design, packaging, and marketing—really Muji's entire identity."
For example, as a reaction to the excessive packaging design of Japanese products in the 1980s, it was Tanaka's idea to package Muji's products in recycled paper. By not bleaching the paper, Tanaka was able to simplify its manufacturing processes and lower costs, while simultaneously drawing attention to the beauty of the raw, natural product. Designed with this paper in mind, Tanaka also created the Muji logo, specifically choosing its dark red color for the way it interplayed with this parcel-colored packaging.
But in Muji's earliest days, print advertisements were especially important in conveying the brand's look and feel. The two earliest ads in the exhibition—the ad mentioned above, "Lower Priced for a Reason" (1980), and "The Whole Salmon is Salmon" (1981), a paean to canned fish—did this by pairing simple, bold graphics with coherent block lettering. Not only was this style unique at the time in the frenetic world of Japanese graphic design, but it was integral in conveying Muji's ultimate brand message: that there is pleasure to be found in the sincerity of a simple lifestyle.
Another way Tanaka's ads for Muji were different from the competition? They tended to focus on just a single product, and its characteristics. For example, Tanaka's ad for Muji's bibs attempted to emphasize the fact that the cotton had been carefully selected for its texture against a baby's skin by pairing it with a gentle line drawing of a baby done in India Ink, along with an equally simple tag line: "Love doesn't beautify."
Though Tanaka died in 2002, his influence on the Muji brand is so comprehensive that it can still be felt. His graphic design language and branding choices are still embraced by the brand today. It's a synergy, argues Kuketsu, that is impossible to overstate. "Muji is Ikko Tanaka, and Ikko Tanaka is Muji," he says. Check out some of his greatest ads in the slide show above.
Although he's known for his incessant tweeting, an interesting fact about Donald Trump is that he doesn't really use computers outside of his iPhone. Although he aspires to lead the most technologically progressive nation on Earth, the Republican presidential hopeful has admitted he didn't own a computer until 2007. Heck, the only proof he has ever used a computer is this photo of him sitting in front of a Mac from July... and even then, Trump looks like he's going to try to prod the screen with one of his granule-sized fingers.
But that's not to say that Trump doesn't read what's written about him on the internet. He does. His assistants laboriously print out articles on him, like this one from Vanity Fair, which he then covers in crazily scrawled editorial notes, such as "BAD WRITER!", "BAD PICTURE (NO SURPRISE)" and "OH REALLY!"
For a recent satirical article, which purported itself to be Trump's own handwritten notes from the second debate, BuzzFeed decided to go the extra yard and task Mark Davis, a graphic designer at BuzzFeed and Font Bureau, to recreate The Donald's handwriting as a custom font, which it's calling Tiny Hand. Even better? It's now available for free download here.
On Wednesday morning, Saeed Jones, BuzzFeed News' executive editor, sent me the first draft of Hannaham's post. Naturally, I Googled "Trump notes debate" to research visual cues we might use in order to help provide a visual identity for the story. The search yielded several examples of Trump's . . . eccentric handwriting style. With only a cursory search—and more focused keywords—I was able to find other examples of his handwriting. Trump's notes, written to friends and enemies alike, were almost always written at an angle, scrawled on top of printouts of articles from the internet . . . I was struck both by the peculiar delivery of the notes, but also by the idiosyncratic way Trump writes the alphabet. At that moment it was clear to me—as it surely must be to you, dear reader—I had to make a font based on Donald Trump's handwriting.
King also told us by email: "We had the idea so quickly that the most challenging aspect was getting it done as fast as possible. Once we realized we could, we (perhaps rightly) never paused to ask if we should. In the end, we were very fortunate that Mr. Trump's prolific mailings found their way onto the internet, as it gave us an quite a bit of source material to work with."
So what does Tiny Hand, and by extension, Donald's Trump's handwriting look like? Like everything else about the GOP nominee, who in both head shape and hue closely resemble a citric Gusher's advertising mascot sprung to life, it defies easy categorization. Imagine a sociopathic, sexually ravenous Walt Disney with hands the size of a GI Joe action figure, frantically etching away with a Sharpie Magnum, and you'll have something of the feel of the font.
So what's Tiny Hand good for, as a font? Where to even start.
You could use it as part of an internet meme generator, pairing any one of the candidate's eccentric tweets with this photograph of Trump over-pronouncing a fricative. Passive-aggressive Post-Its left all around the house, accusing your roommates of not having the stamina to do dishes, or criticizing the way they vacuumed the living room: "Sad!" Heck, if you really wanted to be like The Donald, you could use Tiny Hand to design coupons to distribute to the young girls in your neighborhood, redeemable on the holder's 18th birthday for an overnight stay at any state route hotel room.
For a man who should be required by law to have the words "POOR IMPULSE CONTROL" tattooed across his forehead, Trump has caused a surprising number of people to believe he must be pursuing some sort of incredible ulterior master plan to the attainment of the U.S. presidency.
I will admit the notion has some appeal. To people who manage to go entire months without dreamily gushing about the machismo of foreign despots, marking up their day planners with the names of all the local Girl Scouts they're feeling "bullish" about as long tail sexual investments, or inadvertently crafting amazing viral memes for their political adversaries, the sheer superabundance of ineptitude on display from the Trump campaign seems explicable only if you assume he's crazy . . . like a fox!
So if Trump doesn't actually want the presidency, what does he want? The most popular theory is that Trump's plan is to use his failed presidential bid to launch his own cable news network—politically to the right of Fox News, but still more mainstream than Breitbart, the Drudge Report, or other level-headed publications that have endorsed a sputtering human cumquat for president.
It's a notion so horrifying that Matthew Ipcar, executive creative director of Blue State Digital, decided to mock up a dystopian peek of the news landscape as it soon could be: TRMP.NEWS.
"We were inspired by the thought that this talk of TrumpTV was becoming more than just talk and more like a self-fulfilling prophecy," Ipcar writes. So his team at Blue State Digital asked themselves a question: "What if we designed a simple website whose dystopic vision would compel progressives (and even sane conservatives) to think about the reality of a Trump media empire and to keep themselves updated after Election Day?"
Ipcar is no stranger to political branding. In 2012, he designed the logo for President Obama's second election bid, as well as the campaign's website. Previous to that, he designed the White House website, Change.gov, and a number of other government websites. So the first thing you'll notice about TRMP.NEWS is that while it's definitely bold and aggressive, it's infinitely better designed than any of The Donald's actual websites.
Instead of Trump's usual stochastic hodge-podge, TRMP.NEWS features a coherent layout, strong typography, and an effective color palette. "We imagined a restrained website whose design was closer to his luxury properties (Gotham! Simple! Clean!) than to the chaotic haphazardry of his campaign properties," explains Ipcar. "A creature where lurid, bilious creative would be reserved for the words themselves and not the outward appearance." He parenthetically adds: "Sadly, this is also how I imagine the alt-right's next serious candidate, and that scares me a whole lot more."
Content-wise, there's not much at TRMP.NEWS, besides some stabs at the vile sort of copy Ipcar and his team think a Trump news network might trade in. "A voice for real Americans that can never be silenced," the front page of TRMP.NEWS blares, before getting to its mission statetement:
A NETWORK FOR THOSE THAT AREN'T AFRAID TO DO WHAT IT TAKES FOR FREEDOM
Elections can be stolen, but liberty will never be. TRMP.NEWS is committed to telling the REAL story of the corrupt elites holding true Americans back. We're through with political correctness, we're putting the elites on notice, and we're taking our country back.
And what, do tell, is the network's tagline? Come on: You don't even need to ask. "Make news great again."
Sadly, TRMP.NEWS doesn't offer any mock news stories to go with its mock website. Instead, it simply functions as a way for people to be alerted if Donald Trump starts working to launch his own network, as well as ways to potentially stop it.
We asked Ipcar if, down the road, TRMP.NEWS might feature more Onion-like parodies of the sort of news stories Donald Trump might find to be good journalism, but he says he doesn't actually think those parodies would be very funny. "Writing the launch copy alone made us nauseous enough, and the things he's saying already sound like parodies, if parody wasn't funny," Ipcar says. "Imagine a far more hateful, bigoted, and misogynist version of Stephen Colbert—it just doesn't sound like fun anymore."
A new projection mapping technique out of Tokyo could make a big splash in the worlds of fashion, theater, and retail.
Projection mapping is a magic-feeling technology that gives creators the ability to paint with light on any surface. It allows for some pretty amazing and transformative effects, but it only works well on solid shapes. Fluttering is the enemy of projection mapping: try to do it on a sheet, a T-shirt, or a piece of paper and whatever illusion is trying to be created quickly falls apart.
This, more than anything, has prevented projection mapping from being embraced in the realms of theater, retail, and fashion. A team at the Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory at the University of Tokyo may have solved thee problem. They have created new technology that allow them to project any pattern they want on multiple items of moving fabric.
The technique, which they call dynamic projection, requires two major innovations. The first is a special high-speed projector, the Dynaflash, which is capable of projecting 8-bit patterns at up to 1,000 frames per second—the theoretical limit of human vision. Comparatively, many high-end consumer projectors top out at around 120 frames per second. In combination with a system that can map multiple moving targets just as fast, the system can dynamically adjust the pattern it is projecting onto a target as it deforms with life-like accuracy.
The use cases? In the theater, dynamic projection could allow actors to appear to change costumes without ever hitting the dressing room. A fashion week designer show could be done with just a single model, marching back and forth down the catwalk. Or a mannequin in a department store window could change its outfit in reaction to the weather multiple times per day, without ever sending in a sales associate with a new armful of clothes.
Inventor Buckminster Fuller was famous for espousing the virtues of geodesic domes, structures that incorporate the largest volume of internal space within the smallest amount of surface area. Unfortunately, geodesic domes don't make a lot of sense for housing here on Earth; they pose too much of a challenge to zoning requirements. But on Mars? If SpaceX's Elon Musk has his way, Martian colonists could live geodesic domes.
Last month, Musk revealed a bold plan to begin colonizing Mars as early as 2024. But that plan was woefully short on specifics. In a recent AMA Reddit thread, he offered a few more clues as to how people might live on Mars. Here was his response to a question about what sort of permanent Martian habitation he foresees:
Initially, glass panes with carbon fiber frames to build geodesic domes on the surface, plus a lot of miner/tunneling droids. With the latter, you can build out a huge amount of pressurized space for industrial operations and leave the glass domes for green living space.
This makes a fair amount of sense. Geodesic domes are incredibly efficient, at least when it comes to the amount of internal space you get for the cost of materials. From an engineering perspective, geodesic domes are too complex to be popular on Earth, but in space, where you need to account for every pound in your payload, their engineering complexity is a small price to pay for their incredibly efficient footprints.
But geodesic domes are only a small part of the question Musk needs to answer on how humans will live long-term on Mars. A big one is how Musk plans to protect people against space radiation. On Earth, we are shielded from the ambient radiation of space due to our planet's magnetosphere, which along with Earth's atmosphere operate like a huge protective bubble. But Mars has no global magnetic field to deflect space radiation, and its atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's. That means that Mars colonists are going to have much higher risks of developing cancer than if they stayed on Earth. It's such a serious problem that NASA has devoted an entire page to the problem on its official website.
Asked in the Reddit thread multiple times about how SpaceX proposed to shield astronauts from radiation, Musk never answered. Moreover, in other statements about his Mars plan, he's been extremely cavalier about the lives of colonists. In fact, when presenting his plan to the public, Musk said that aspiring Mars colonists should ask themselves a simple question: "Are you prepared to die? Then okay, you're a candidate for going."
With his love for space travel and geodesic domes, Musk may be the closest thing the 21st century has to Buckminster Fuller. But Fuller was more than a techno-utopian: he was a humanist, too. If Musk really wants humans to live on Mars in our lifetime, he needs to do more than build geodesic domes. He needs to figure out how to make them impenetrable to deadly radiation.
Restoration, gentrification, and planned communities can be just as scary as ghouls, goblins, and ghosts.
Architecture can play an important role in good horror—dating all the way back to Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. In cinema, the fiends tend to get all the attention, yet some of the best horror movies use environment and space as storytelling tools akin to monsters and villains. Some of these films are classics; others are relatively unknown. What unites them all, though, is that they aim to do more than just scare us—they aim to provoke thought about the built world in which we live.
J.G. Ballard made an entire career of turning the modern city into horror fodder. His novel Concrete Island imagines a modern-day Robinson Crusoe stuck in a no-man's zone between two highway overpasses; Crash, which was adapted into a 1996 film by David Cronenberg, imagines a new form of sexuality, rising in the wake of the mundane reality of bad traffic planning and vehicular manslaughter.
High-Rise, Ballard's 1975 novel that was turned into a 2015 film of the same name starring Tom Hiddleston, is probably the ultimate exploration of the themes that obsessed the author throughout his career. Part Towering Inferno, part Lord of the Flies, High-Rise focuses on a 1970s-era apartment tower, which soon becomes a dystopian universe unto itself, full of bloodthirsty, warring factions. The building's architecture becomes symbolic of society's own invisible class structure and caste system, with the more elevated higher-ups and repressed lower classes literally going at each other's throats.
The film is a little ham-handed compared to the novel, but even so, it's the best cinematic exploration to date of the way that architecture can divide and change us.
Everyone knows H.R. Giger's design of the titular xenomorph from Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece, Alien. It's widely hailed as the best monster design in history, and for good reason.
What people often don't comment on, though, is the synergy between the design of the xenomorph and that of the Nostromo, the deep space mining spaceship aboard where the bulk of the film takes place. Lined with sinuous pipes, dripping condensation, and shadowy recesses, the halls of the Nostromo feel like an extension of the alien's body itself.
This is no accident. It's very much by design. The screenwriter of Alien, Dan O'Bannon, meant for his monsters to be the ultimate predators, adapting themselves to their environments. So the xenomorph in Alien is literally an extension of the movie's architecture—and vice versa.
This 1992 horror film, based upon a Clive Barker story and directed by Bernard Rose, may be most famous for its bee-stuffed bogeyman with a hook for a hand. But also deserving of attention is Candyman's haunting grounds: the now-demolished Chicago public housing project, Cabrini-Green.
In the film, the legend of Candyman is intricately linked with the history and culture of what was once one of the nation's most notorious projects. Candyman's story starts in the Chicago shanties of the mid-19th century, where Cabrini-Green would one day be built. There, he falls in love with a white man's daughter, and is horrifically murdered. His story and legend become, by extension, an allegory of race relations in Chicago.
It's a movie that explores gentrification, plumbing the built world for symbols for inequity; the upscale condo building that the film's protagonist (played by Virginia Madsen) lives in is a remodeled Cabrini-Green tower. Eventually, the legend of Candyman, too, becomes gentrified: By the end of the film, Helen, the movie's protagonist, has become the next urban legend.
Forget the merely passable 2004 remake. George Romero's 1978 original—in which four post-apocalyptic survivors try to wait out the undead apocalypse in a Pennsylvania shopping mall—isn't just better, it's still the essential zombie film.
Much has been written about Romero's scathing commentary on the nature of American consumerism in Dawn of the Dead. The shambling zombies wandering through the corridors of the Monroeville Mall aren't just the ultimate consumers; they are implied to be scarcely more mindless than living shoppers. They famously congregate in the mall not because they want to eat the humans who are hiding there, but because they remember the consumerist patterns they followed when still alive.
While many movies ranging from Mallrats to Bad Santa have followed his lead, Romero's choice of a shopping mall as a set was incredibly progressive. In 1978, shopping malls were just becoming a major part of the American suburban landscape, thanks to legislative changes introduced in the 1960s that allowed multiple companies to group together on the urban fringe to avoid real estate taxes.
Today, shopping malls are on the decline, making it quite possible that future historians of 20th-century urban development will teach Dawn of the Dead in classrooms. The movie not only provides social commentary on the role of malls in our society, but is also one of the most detailed explorations of mall architecture ever caught on film.
Tobe Hooper's 1982 ghost movie Poltergeist is famous for updating the haunted house for a modern era, replacing New England's hoary gothic mansions with the cookie-cutter homes of Orange County suburbia. From an urbanist's perspective, though, what's fascinating about Poltergeist is how it portrays the early-'80s boom in planned communities.
In the film, Steven Freeling is an Orange County real estate developer, living within the first phase of Cuesta Vista, a new planned community. Despite the fact that it's a totally new structure, it's eventually revealed that Freeling's house is haunted because it's built on the site of an old Indian burial ground.
Especially early in the film, Poltergeist spends a lot of time examining the dynamic of planned communities. As the action becomes increasingly focused on the interior of the Freeling house, though, Poltergeist becomes a commentary on the nature of mass-produced suburban architecture: It becomes more horrifying, not less, that dead souls could infest a home that is, itself, so soulless.
There aren't that many horror movies that hinge upon architectural restoration, but even if there were, it's hard to imagine a scarier take on the subject than Nicholas Roeg's 1973 masterpiece, Don't Look Now.
In the film, Donald Sutherland plays John Baxter, an architect who takes his wife on a trip to Venice in the aftermath of their daughter Christine's accidental drowning. While he works to restore an ancient Catholic church, his wife becomes connected to a blind psychic, who tells her that her dead daughter is trying to warn her. Meanwhile, John keeps on catching glimpses of a mysterious child wearing a red raincoat identical to the one Christine died in, while a series of grisly murders sweep Venice.
It would be a disservice to you to spoil how all of these plot threads come together in what is, perhaps, the most shocking final 10 minutes in cinematic history. Regardless, Don't Look Now is as much of a masterful exploration of grief as it is an architectural examination of one of the most sumptuous cities on earth.
Most people think of John Carpenter's Halloween as a movie about Michael Myers, horror cinema's first (but far from last) un-killable serial killer. What really makes Halloween scary, though, isn't so much Michael Myers as it is the suburban neighborhoods through which he prowls.
Before Halloween, slasher movies predominantly took place in isolated rural environments. Psycho, for example, takes place in an out-of-the-way hotel, while The Texas Chainsaw Massacre occurs at an abandoned house in the middle of slaughterhouse country. The idea these movies posit is that the real-life monsters of this world can only get you when you're alone.
What makes Halloween so scary is that it totally subverts the assumption that there's safety in numbers. Halloween takes place entirely in the fictional midwestern town of Haddonfield, Illinois. The streets are well lit and idyllic, surrounded on each side by painted white houses with freshly mowed lawns and elm trees. The local kids walk to school; everyone knows everyone. Surely, anyone in trouble in such a neighborhood would be safe.
But when Michael Myers comes to town, the loneliness and isolation of suburban life quickly becomes apparent. Early in the film (in a series of scenes that later inspired It Follows), Myers stalks an oblivious Jamie Lee Curtis down the streets of Haddonfield. In these scenes, which allow Carpenter to trace the outlines of the invisible pockets of isolation that surround the suburban dwellers, Haddonfield becomes just as ominous as the film's bogeyman. Later in the film, when it's impossible for Laurie to get help even in her own neighborhood, you're not surprised: The town and the monster were in it together from the beginning.
We'll end with a gimme: Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation of The Shining. The Overlook Hotel is probably cinema's ultimate haunted house, and for good reason. As imagined by Kubrick, it's an impossible labyrinth of a building, every bit as hard to wrap your head around as the hedge maze through which Jack Torrance famously chases his family at the movie's conclusion.
Foreshadowing Mark E. Danielewski's House of Leaves—the award-winning 2000 novel about a house that is spatially impossible—Kubrick's Overlook is bigger on the inside than the outside. But Kubrick was more subtle about it, designing the Overlook in such a way that his characters, and by extension his viewers, can never actually orient themselves within its walls, without actually drawing attention to the fact.
The best explanation of how Kubrick bends architectural space to create horror and suspense is probably this short video essay by Rob Ager. Once you see it, you can never un-see it: The Overlook Hotel is the most Escher-esque exploration of impossible architecture cinema has yet seen.
A designer at Pentagram has redesigned the classic composition notebook to compete with the likes of Moleskine.
Dog-eared and covered in ballpoint doodles, the humble composition notebook has been a mainstay of teenager knapsacks for the better part of the last century. And not just students love them. Jean-Michael Basquiat and Roy Lichtenstein were aficionados of the comp notebook. So is Pentagram partner Michael Bierut. In fact, Bierut is such a fan, that a composition notebook is the second thing he hands new designers after they join Pentagram (the employee manual is the first).
Five years ago, Bierut handed Aron Fay such a notebook on his first day at the prestigious New York design firm. Fay (who, full disclosure, is the partner of a Co.Design staff writer) has become such a fan that, today, the 27-year-old designer is launching Comp, a sophisticated redesign of his favorite notebook. Comp gives the classic notebook the premium look and feel of more upscale notebook brands, like Moleskine and Baron Fig.
According to Fay, the reason he and other designers he knows love composition notebooks is because they are humble. "To me, the appeal of composition notebooks is they're not fussy," Fay says. "Haven't you ever bought a Moleskine or some fancy German notebook, gone to write something down, and felt like it was judging you? Composition notebooks don't do that. They're really utilitarian objects that make you feel like it's okay to write something down in them."
Even so, Fay says there are aspects of the composition notebook that drive him crazy. Paper quality is a big one: composition notebooks are designed to be cheap, and so the quality of the paper suffers for anyone writing on it with anything better than a cheap Bic, let alone the fountain pens Fay prefers. Composition notebooks are also bound cheaply, meaning they don't fold flat when opened. The composition lines inside the notebooks, while useful for grade school students, are irritating for a design professional. Finally, the typography various companies usually put on their composition notebook's covers tend to be inappropriate at best, a hodgepodge at worse. For Comp, Fay set out to address all of these failings.
The most distinguishing characteristic of a composition notebook is the cover, so Fay started there. Invented around 1830 by French papermaker F.M. Montgolfier as a cheaper (if less beautiful) way of marbling paper, pseudo-marbling is the paper printing technique that gives composition notebooks their distinctive, black-and-white cover patterns. Fay says that different composition notebooks use different patterns—some blobbier, some veinier, some lighter, and some darker—but for Comp, he tried to design a platonic ideal of a pattern that more purposefully matched his preferences. "I like the shapes in the pseudo-marbling to be very well-articulated, where the shapes are organic and self-contained," he explains. So that's what Comp has.
The biggest difference between Comp and some cheap Mead notebook, though, is the binding. Like higher-profile designer notebooks, the Comp lays open when flat, and uses a fine Italian cloth sewed across the spine to add extra durability to the binding, as well as a lush tactile feel. The covers of Comp are also stiffer than a normal composition notebook, making it feel "more like a hard cover." The paper has been given a luxe upgrade as well. While traditional composition notebooks use paper stock that's as inferior as 58gsm, Comp has lush white 120gsm paper, thick enough that you can write on one side with a fountain pen, and not see anything on the other side.
Available today for preorder on Kickstarter, Comp is easily the highest-quality composition notebook ever designed. Which prompts the question: Has Fay robbed the composition notebook of the very humility that makes it so approachable? Maybe a little, admits Fay, but cheap composition notebooks will still be for judgment-free doodling. It's just that Comp will also be around for when you want a little more out of your notebook.
Peer into the envelopes, and glittering constellations come to life.
A paper letter feels like it has more promise than an email, an iMessage, or a Snapchat: inside that envelope, a whole universe of possibility opens up, just waiting to be explored.
That's just one of the reasons why we love these Japanese Starry Sky envelopes: they make that universe of possibility that exists inside each paper letter literal.
Designed by Moe Tsukada, they are not much more than regular envelopes with a thick inner sheath of perforated black construction paper. This sheath is invisible from the outside, but when you peer into the envelope while holding it up to the light, you can see glittering constellations come to life.
It's a lovely, whimsical design, and a quiet alternative to over-designed specialty stationery and letterpress offerings. The magic of receiving a letter, after all, has nothing to do with what's on the outside of the envelope. It's what's inside that counts.
You can order a pack of Starry Sky envelopes for around $12 here.
Aruliden explains why the Jamboard takes pains to look analog, not like a screen.
What makes an office whiteboard different from a screen? The simplest answer is that one is analog, and one is digital. But Johan Liden of New York-based brand strategy and product design firm Aruliden thinks the real answer is less obvious. At their best, "whiteboards encourage people to walk right up to them and start drawing," he says. Displays, on the other hand, don't. Even when they're big touch screens, their industrial design language somehow encourages a hands-off approach.
What makes a whiteboard approachable—and therefore, the perfect tool for brainstorming and collaboration—was the problem Aruliden needed to get to the bottom of when Google approached the firm last year to design the Jamboard. Although hardly the first digital whiteboard, Google wanted the Jamboard to be the best: a seamless physical extension of the company's G Suite of productivity and office apps, allowing people in an office to collaborate with anyone in the world, as easily as picking up a dry-erase marker.
Aruliden's solution? Borrow some of the design gestures of analog whiteboards to make the Jamboard feel more like a piece of furniture than a piece of technology.
Spec-wise, the Jamboard is plenty powerful. The screen is a 55-inch 4K display with stereo speakers, built-in Wi-Fi, and a high-definition webcam. But what makes the Jamboard feel like something besides a piece of tech has less to do with the specs of the display, than what is in front of it: a red tray, just like the ones you'd find on any analog whiteboard, devoted to holding a marker-size stylus and a circular eraser.
The Jamboard's ledge isn't an afterthought, argues Liden. "That tray is the single most important thing letting people understand at a glance what the product is," he says. It's the main design gesture that makes the Jamboard feel like a whiteboard—the equivalent of an open hand extending a marker to someone in a brainstorming session. It's a friendly and familiar low-tech solution to a pain point that pinches the owners of many interactive screens: what to do with the styluses when they're not in use?
Even with the ledge detached and the display turned off, the Jamboard doesn't much resemble the soulless black screens you'll find in any modern office. That's due to the stand, an airy and organic design that was inspired more by the language of furniture than tech. "We really thought it was important to step away from the traditional materials and finishes favored by hardware companies, to make it more about the experience, and not just another black screen in the room," Liden explains.
Put it this way: Imagine if Apple designed a digital whiteboard. Compare that to the aluminum alloy and colorful trim of the Jamboard. The former would look like a giant iPad bolted to the wall, while the latter looks like it could have been designed by Sharpie. High-tech or not, it feels like an accessory to a digital marker. It feels like it was designed to write on.
Google's Jamboard will go on sale later this year for around $6,000. If it is successful, much of that will ultimately be due to the software, which does indeed look extremely impressive. Liden hopes that if Jamboards start replacing analog whiteboards, office-goers will be barely aware of the transition. "Whiteboard companies are far ahead of tech companies when it comes to designing approachable boards that feel at home in any office," he says. With Jamboard, Aruliden's designers they cribbed some of that magic.
The tuque, a 150-year-old symbol of French-Canadian nationalism, gets a high-end redesign.
Many countries have a national hat. In Turkey, it's the fez. In Russia, its the Ushanka fur cap. In America, it's the baseball cap, or, perhaps, the 10-gallon cowboy hat. And in Canada, it's the tuque (a word believed to be derived from the Spanish word toca): a close-fitting knit cap that has been a symbol of French-Canadian nationalism since at least the 1837 Patriotes Rebellion, when it became a maple leaf twist on France's own liberty cap.
Leave it to a Canadian design firm like Frontier, then, to embrace the tuque as a way of expressing their national heritage through design. The Toronto-based design firm just launched the World's Best Tuque, a perfected version of the knit winter cap that aims to be, in the words of founder Paddy Harrington, a "living manifestation of the design thinking process, by showing what happens when an interdisciplinary design studio asks fundamental questions about what an existing product can be."
Frontier didn't set out to fundamentally change the definition of the tuque. Rather, it started by looking at existing tuques, and doing a deep dive into the problems that tend to crop up in a product category no one ever really thinks of as "design." After examining dozens of tuques ranging in price between $20 and $200, Frontier identified a number of common problem areas, ranging from scratchiness of material to sweat absorption to a lack of elasticity—not to mention a lack of warmth.
The studio started by identifying a material that would give them the perfect balance between elasticity, warmth, and moisture wicking. For the outer layer, Frontier is using merino wool, but things get more interesting when it comes to the inner shell, which is partially made of musk ox wool, otherwise known as qiviuq. It's a distinctly Canadian material. The word itself in Inuinnqtun, the language of the Intuit peoples; consequently, it's a type of fiber usually only harvested in Canada's far North. It's also extremely luxurious: a rare fiber that doesn't shrink in water, is softer than cashmere, and is eight times stronger and warmer than sheep wool.
By combining qiviuq with merino wool and cashmere, Frontier was able to come up with a blend which, it says, is a perfect mixture of warmth, moisture wicking, and elasticity. Why elasticity? "In our testing, we discovered that a lot of tuques, which are meant to be one-size-fits-all, are too tight," says Harrington. Not only can it make some tuques uncomfortable, but it can make wearing a tuque with a pair of glasses painful, since the material pinches the arms into a wearer's ears. The material is also perfectly breathable, making sure the tuque doesn't become soggy with sweat like other knit hats.
All told, Harrington says he's confident that a World's Best Tuque can last 20 years with care, which should help justify its $195 retail price. None of this, though, really explains why Frontier felt like it had to perfect the tuque to begin with. To that question, Harrington says its a way of showing his firm's values outside of client work. "We wanted to take all our knowledge, and put it into this basic question about what a ubiquitous object like a tuque could be," he says.
And none of this has to do with the fact that the designers in his studio are Canadian, and tend to wear a lot of tuques? "Okay, you got me," says design director, Paul Kawai, "The whole studio is made up of tuque-wearers. Some stereotypes are very real."
