Archive for October, 2008|Monthly archive page
Colored Spectacles
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An interesting concept eyewear from Portuguese designer Luis Porem called ‘RGB Rainbow Glasses’:
The structure of the glasses have an internal channel where colorful ink can pass through, allowing
users to choose their own colors. made from plastic the glasses have a flexible arm and can be filled
with water based ink.
How good is your eyeball?
Hot on the topic of sketching – ‘eyeballing’ is one of the essential traits needed to product good sketches. It’s the ability to accurately place where a point or a line should be by imaginarily-visualizing them: finding a midpoint; the bisecting angle; drawing parallel lines, etc. Without good ‘eyeballs’ it is horribly difficult to get an accurate sketch out.
So, test yourself right here with a series of exercises to determine how good your visualization skills really are (the lower the better).
I got a 3.82 (quite a few bad judgments on my second round 
– don’t lose concentration!):
3D Sketching
This, I think is one of the holy grails of 3D-design, be it product, character or others. ILoveSketch is an absolutely awesome program that straddles the sweet spot between sketching and 3D-modeling – sketching in 3D plane and turning those sketches into curves on 3D space on-the-fly, giving the quickness and agility of sketches, while also delivering multi-view perspectived capabilities in 3D models.
Of course, nothing will replace a pair of good hands. No matter what software it is, if you can’t throw a line the way you want it, or even conjure aesthetically pleasing designs in your mind before sketching (proportion, form, weight, curves, etc.), software alone isn’t going to help. What it does though is to increase the sweet spot, and to reduce the turnaround time between a sketch-idea and a 3D-representation.
Now I’m just waiting for it to have a ‘paint’ function where you can render the views, and have it turn out 3D surfaces based on the shading (now I’m thinking too much). That’d be the holy grail.
Am I asking too much?
Typography T shirts
Here’s a collection of typography tee shirts for all you typo geeks!
Opus Design Award 2008
The Opus Design Award is an annual design competition open to conceptual designs of eyewear. Here’s this year’s winner fresh off the oven:
Switch, by Nick Jinkinson, is an eyewear that fully goes from ‘normal’ eyewear mode to ‘shades’ mode, and this won the Gold Prize. According to the designer:
Traditional photochromic eyewear suffers from the problem that the overall design of
the eyewear is usually biased towards one typology: normal glasses or sunglasses. When in tinted mode, normal glasses do not look like convincing sunglasses and therefore can appear compromised. This limits the appeal, which considering how practical it is, is a great shame. Switch addresses this by making a more complete transformation between states. Rather than just the lenses reacting to light, the arms and nose bridge do also, making a distinction between 100% normal glasses and 100% sunglasses.
Another entry that I thought was quite interesting was ClearVision by Emil-Dragos Brogdan (winning one of the Special Prizes). Observing that wiping the lenses off dust/moisture/grease was a regular action for the bespectacled, the bridge of this design incorporates cleaning mechanisms as well so you’d not need to bring along any other cloth (or even your sleeve).
Here’s the full list of winners.
Transformers: No No No!
I never noticed there were that many…
Celebrity Font Arts
Some interesting portraits of celebrities (Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, James Dean) constructed entirely from fonts and glyphs (well, except the facial features).
Carling iPhone Ad
Carling’s clever use of the medium’s inherent (additional) dimension to give a more engaging experience for its advertisement. If you tilt it too much, beer actually get ‘spilled’ out, and the realistic looking foam marks clinging on to the glass also gives it a touch of realism confined behind the glass.
Which also brings to my mind – just how good does your ad have to be when you know it’s no longer spoon-fed and streamed into people’s faces (ala TV/radio/newspapers/magazines)? If you think about ads that people have to proactively download onto their medium, it really has to be THAT great.
Paris Motor Show
The Paris Motor Show is a biennial affair showcasing production and concept cars from many major marques for automobile fans to salivate on. Here are just some highlights from the show:
Lamborghini Estoque
One of the highlights of the show was the Lamborghini Estoque – yes, Lamborghini is showing a car that you can actually enter/exit with reasonable ease! The four-door sports car is only the second in Lamborghini’s history. Personally I didn’t quite like the last third of the car from side view: it looked slightly awkward, like two cars were forcefully blended in the middle.
Some other interesting rides from the show:
Audi A1 Sportsback – Audi’s answer to a lower end, sporty and smaller car.
Mazda Kiyora - yes, yet another Nagare-styled Mazda concept.
Nissan Nuvu Concept - you’d either hate or like the cutesy electric car
Renault Ondelios Concept – Like a bird on the open roads
For more information about each of these cars, head here~
