Category : design

Great Summer in San Francisco cards from Dowling | Duncan.

It’s like a Goya monster coming over the hills or something. French design studio Helmo has made these great collages for les Pronomade(s) en Haute-Garonne, an annual street arts festival in rural France.

The New York TImes has created a great infographic that looks at Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities. Who knew Mad Men was such a consistent demographic predictor.

Take a look at some of the most beautiful subway stations in the world.

A terrific new gallery of infographics and interactive design from the New York Times shows how interesting data visualizations and features increase the time readers spent on their site. And it makes their ads more valuable; interesting design is good business.

The most beautiful bookstore in the world is the Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht, Netherlands. A 700-year-old church refurbished by Dutch architects Merkx + Girod, the Selexyz Dominicanen has a three-story black steel book stack that reaches the stone vaults, and a cafe in the former choir where visitors can sit and admire the restored 14th century ceiling frescoes. Just take a look at this place.

Where y’at New Orleans? Four years after Katrina, architects, planners and builders have made messy, heterogeneous efforts at rebuilding the Crescent City. There’s a great article in the recent Atlantic Monthly profiles some of the approaches to rebuilding that are underway.

In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city’s neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan. It’s at once exhilarating and frightening to behold.

Happy Park(ing) Day. See a slideshow of the newly-global phenomena and read more.

A great example of better living through better design, the Hippo Roller.

Google has just rolled out a preview of Fast Flip, a new visual way to browse the news. Once you sign in with your Google login, you can flip between readable cached images of news articles without having to wait for them to load. The experience is close to flipping pages in a magazine and over time the site will learn the sites you like. The fast flipping between stories also plays well with iPhones. One significant aspect is the partnership with the three dozen or so news sites and blogs that are partners in the site– the publishers will get a share of the revenue from ads shown near their content. Maybe this is the Hulu for newspapers. Read more and see video of the product introduction.

Check how federal stimulus money is being spent in California in this great interactive map.

Alinea/Crucial Detail - Tokyo Taste Intro

Great, short, visual documentary on the extravagant molecule-manipulating cuisine at the Chicago restaurant Alinea. Read the interesting New Yorker profile on Grant Achatz, the chef genuis behind Alinea. And see more beautiful photography of Achatz’s creations from Lara Kaster.

Hear those sirens the other night? Check out this new crime map of San Francisco to get comprehensive crime data visualizations of the city. Using geographical data from the OpenStreetMap project and the City of San Francisco’s newly-launched clearinghouse for city government dat, a DataSF, the map lets you browse crime by type, time and geography. Along with a 510-friendly map too, you should check out more great data visualization project from Stamen Design.

There was a cool analysis of banknote designs in The Atlantic recently with a link to design consultant Richard Smith’s Dollar ReDe$ign Project, an entire blog and contest to redesign and rebrand U.S. Money. While Smith chose Kyle R Thompson’s design as the overall winner, highlights for me were designs from Mikael Tarkela, Nicholas Friend, Michael Tyznik, Nate Castiglione. Also, don’t miss Matt Dent’s winning design for the new British Sterling coins that were released this year. They’re probably the best looking coins on the planet.

The New York Times has a nice interactive graphic that displays information from The American Time Use Survey which asks thousands of Americans to recall how they spent their time in 2008. Not surprisingly, the unemployed get an hour more of sleep each day than the employed and they spend a lot more time keeping the house tidy than people with jobs too. Read the full article.

Here’s an incredibly large set of vintage matchbook covers.

Missouri high school student, Aimee Kick, made her prom dress out of coffee filters. She spent about a month on the entire project; folding and cutting as well as staining, dying, sewing, and hand blow-drying the coffee filters.

Tokyo designer Shunsuke Umiyama has created AC Adapter Midori, a mobile phone charger that looks like a vine.

You’d be surprised how beautiful Japanese manhole covers can be.

I’ve been checking out the exceptional web content of Good magazine more and more lately. And the thing that always pulls me in first is the terrific infographics, they’re usually creative, interesting and fun to look at. Now you can see the entire collection in a Flickr set that gets new updates each Tuesday. The L.A.-based magazine was founded two and a half years ago by Ben Goldhirsh, son of the late founder of Inc. magazine, Bernie Goldhirsh, and it donates its subscription fees entirely to charity.