Category Archives: Design

ElliptiGO: Run Ride Glide

I saw this at MakerFaire last month and thought it was a fantastic idea. Just goes to show, if you want something and can’t find it, build it.

“The elliptiGO glide bike combines the best aspects of running and cycling to create a fun and effective means of exercising outdoors.”

Interview with the Maker:

3 Comments

Filed under Design

Infoporn

I like information and I’m a very visual person. One of my favorite sections of any Wired magazine is the couple pages dubbed “infoporn” which display some sort of statistical information in a creative and potentially impactful way.

Bar and Pie charts just don’t cut it anymore.

I recently stumbled across a site that will give me my pretty data fix whenever I need it. Enter infosthetics.com, a blog dedicated to data visualization and visual design, that scours the nets for interesting infographics.

See links to things represented like:

Gas price by county


An average american’s spending habits

Or videos visualizing Greenhouse Gas production

Or the romantic aspirations of thousands of online daters.

See things in different ways.

1 Comment

Filed under Design, Education, trends, Video

Maker Faire: Photos

I’m not sure when I’ll find the time to title, tag, and describe each of the photos from Maker Faire. I’ve got them up on my Flickr page now so those of you that don’t want to wait, or want to interpret for yourself what it is you’re looking at, please feel free to browse, comment, critique, etc… That way, when I do get around to describing them you’ll be able to see if you were right! (this is my way of encouraging you to look while rationalizing my laziness)

Anyway, in brief summary, Maker Faire was awesome and inspiring. There are so many people out there with excellent ideas that are doing something about them and with 65,000+ attendees, there are a lot of people interested in those ideas.

I love ideas, more on that later.

for now, the pictures.

_brp8081_sm.jpg_brp8118_sm.jpg_brp8254_sm.jpg

1 Comment

Filed under Design, Education, Fun, Photography, Random

“Cool”

Notice: The topics of my writings will start to focus less on travel and more on the passing fancy of my terribly-short-but-often-intense attention span. So if you’re here for the travel and not for the rest, I understand, no hard feelings.

Given that we are in an election year, there may be more than the average amount of political commentary as well. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing… I’m just sayin’.

With those stated disclaimers we can move on to some really cool stuff. I’m a design geek (as well as many another type of geek). I appreciate new and innovative ways of thinking about things, whether they be simple or terribly complex. Yesterday, over lunch, I was telling a friend how I really enjoyed that the man working at the Teriyaki shop down the street from our office had turned tying the handles of the to-go bag into a graceful art.

I really do love that. There are so many boring, mundane, repetitive things in our lives. Why not take the extra moments to think about how we could do those things better as well? It might even make them more interesting and fun. By the way, I’m totally as guilty as anyone else in this department.

Ok, back to the really cool stuff.

There are a couple sites I keep an eye on for fun design stuff and indy trends that have not filtered into the mainstream quite yet.

The first is “The Cool Hunter” – http://www.thecoolhunter.net

This site covers everything from cars, design, architecture, fashion, art, advertising, etc… The coverage is usually brief but informative and the photography is top notch. It’s enough to get you moving in a direction if you want to do further research or just to make you drool as you look at all the pretty…

mc1.jpg

The next is “WebUrbanist” – http://www.weburbanist.com

This seems to be more culture oriented than product design. I’ve just started reading this blog and so far everything has been very interesting. Articles on Shopdropping (or Droplifting if you prefer), the practice of people bringing things into a store without permission, much to the befuddlement of staff and security.

shopdropping-strange-can-art-project.jpg

Or how about Subvertising, the editing/modification/co-opting of existing advertising channels? Be warned, they seem to like to number things over there.

2 Comments

Filed under Design, Jargon, Random, trends