I've always regretted that I never truly learned how to draw. The closest I got was being able to render images from comic books with a fair amount of fidelity.
Still, I'd look at the great illustrators or to the Old Masters and knew it was a fruitless pursuit: I'd never be good enough.
Turns out the Old Masters had a lot of help, in the form of a tool known as the Camera Lucida, a device that makes it possible to, essentially, trace a live subject.
Now a pair of art professors are looking to resurrect this lost art tool. Naturally they turned to Kickstarter, and they've already blown through their planned allotment of NeoLucidas. So what do you do when demand outstrips planned supply and you don't want to get into the manufacturing business?
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I'm a slow typist. S-L-O-W. (That's took 20 seconds. Almost not kidding.) Which means I'm always on the lookout for some kind of advantage (current favorite: TextExpander).
The funny thing is that I feel like I'm more efficient with my thumbs than I am with my fingers, which is why my ears perked up when I was listening to KPCC's AirTalk this morning as they talked about KALQ.
KALQ is a new keyboard layout designed by researchers at the University of St Andrews in Scotland intended to replace the standard QWERTY layout on touchpad devices with something more thumb friendly. QWERTY, of course, is the layout most of us use these days, and it was designed to slow down typists who were jamming mechanical typewriters.
Talk about a legacy piece of design.
An Android app is coming. Lucky little droids. On the other hand it apparently takes about 8 hours to master. Does anyone have the patience? That's almost a season of Game of Thrones right there.
Follow Noah Nelson on Twitter (@noahjnelson)
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The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) is the non profit organization that runs research on the International Space Station. Shepard Fairey is the renowned designer and street artist famous for his OBEY and Obama HOPE posters. They were brought together by the design firm FICTION, who was commissioned by CASIS to make a mission patch for the Advancing Research Knowledge 1 (ARK)1 mission that launches later this year.
TL;DR: Astronauts have a posse.
Get a glimpse into Fairey’s process in this video by FICTION:
via Laughing Squid
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Turnstyle on Monday, Mar. 4th
99% Invisible is, as producer Roman Mars tells it, a “tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world”. Don’t let the “tiny” fool you: there’s nothing small about the ideas Mars explores.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the bygone Red Cars– the Los Angeles Pacific Electric Railway– and the way that rail line reshaped the destiny of LA. A story of conspiracies, strange marriages, and bad urban planning! Check out the episode page, it’s got a host of great images and more. No, really, check it out.
Side note: Roman can snark about the LA freeways all he wants, but at least we don’t have to deal with the Bay Area’s bridges. -NN
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You’ve played it, you’ve loved it, but did you know that– much like Tetris– the party game ‘Mafia’ (aka ‘Werewolf’) is a product of Soviet-era Russia?
From the This Game newsletter/website:
Tight circles of Mafia players started cropping up in dorm rooms and around campfires. It spread through word of mouth, making a slow burn across Eastern Europe. As it passed from person to person it mutated, acquiring new roles (e.g. “the seer”, “the healer”). In the late 90′s an American called Zarf renames it Werewolf and posts a ruleset on the web, and before long it goes viral on the tech conference circuit.
h/t to Sara Thacher
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IndieCade kicks off tonight with the Red Carpet Awards, and on Saturday the full festival experience will be available for the general public. What exactly does that mean? Why GAMES of course!
Yet a lot more goes into a festival experience than just throwing up a bunch of tables and tents, stacking them with games and developers, then letting people have at it. That’s where Scott Gillies, former Disney Imagineer and current user experience (UX) designer at Fourth Wall Studios, comes in. While Scott is busy working on secret projects for the Culver City based transmedia studio, he’s lending a hand to IndieCade to help polish up the festival experience for patrons.
“To me it’s a simple experience design thing,” Gillies said in our interview, “to make it accessible to the average person who doesn’t necessarily know what IndieCade is about. Or they get a badge and they don’t know what they can go to.”
The first step was simplifying the layout of the festival from previous years. Each of the festival’s venues, which are spread around downtown Culver City, will have a singular purpose this time out. Starting with what has been the heart of the festival: the Culver City Firehouse. (more…)
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Inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video, in which the singer flips cards with the lyrics as the song plays, artist Leandro Senna created his own version in a new video.
Senna drew each line of the song on individual cards (66 total) using only pencil, black tint pens and brushes. “I’ve been thinking for a lot of time on doing a personal project where I could get out of the computer for a little bit, and have pleasure doing something handmade,” Leandro writes on his website. “Getting back to the basics.”
Get a closer view of each page here.
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Remix Radio on Thursday, Sep. 20th
After making Kickstarter history just last month with the most funded journalism project ever, Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible has already kicked off its third season. This “tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world” explores some mighty big ideas.
Episode 61: A Series of Tubes
In this episode “architectural historian and pneumatic tube aficionada Molly Wright Steenson” takes the 99% Invisible team through the history of pneumatic tubes. It’s a technology that has one foot in the past, one foot in a future that almost was.
Catch videos and more at the 99% Invisible blog.
New episodes of 99% Invisible, air weekly on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am, and Tuesdays at 10:55pm. Also, 24/7 on Public Radio Remix.
Produced by Roman Mars, with support from LUNAR. It’s a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco and the Center for Architecture and Design. Twitter: @romanmars
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Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, producer of KCRW’s Sonic Trace, has an ambitious vision: to trace the stories of immigrants to Los Angeles from Mexico and Central America, illustrating how entire communities have reconstituted themselves in LA. Not only that, but she wants to do it in style.
Diaz-Cortes and her producing partner Eric Pearse-Chavez have successfully raised funds to construct a unique mobile recording booth: a shiny sphere they have dubbed La Burbuja (The Bubble), which they plan to take around LA to collect first hand accounts of the immigrant experience. The booth has been designed and constructed by the team at Mat-ter Design + Build Studio, but the campaign isn’t quite over yet.
While they’ve surpassed the initial $5000 goal, to complete their vision of a visually striking chrome sphere they’ll need to meet the stretch goal of $3000 more dollars in just a few days. Not to mention some of the other “above and beyond” objectives they’ve now targeted. Like dedicated transportation for the portable booth.
We caught up with Diaz-Cortes, who had just returned from a reporting trip to Oaxaca, via email to ask about the last minute stretch goal sprint. That and what– aside from a giant metal sphere– sets the Sonic Trace apart from other radio projects. (more…)
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99% Invisible is, as producer Roman Mars tells it, a “tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world”. Don’t let the “tiny” fool you: there’s nothing small about the ideas Mars explores.
Episode 60: Names vs. The Nothing
New Public Sites is an investigation into some of the invisible sites and overlooked features of our everyday public spaces. These are the liminal spaces within cities that are not traditionally framed as “public space” because, quite frankly, they are often ugly and unpleasant, the leftover scraps of urban design centered on the automobile. By giving these places succinct, fun and poetic names and leading people on playful walking tours, Graham Coreil-Allen says we can help start a discourse about our public spaces and how we want to envision them for the future. You can download a pdf of the New Public Sites book here.
See the photos that accompany this episode and more at the 99% Invisible blog.
New episodes of 99% Invisible, air weekly on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am, and Tuesdays at 10:55pm. Also, 24/7 on Public Radio Remix.
Produced by Roman Mars, with support from LUNAR. It’s a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco and the Center for Architecture and Design.
Twitter: @romanmars (more…)
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I don't normally use the weekly WATCH THIS slot to spotlight a trailer.
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As you all undoubtedly already know, Google Glass is finally here.
Now streaming: the archive of our Google Hangout On-Air with Jesse Vigil of Psychic Bunny, one of the designers of the new audio adventure game FREEQ (iOS/Android).
We’ve featured dancer Matt Luck’s work before.
I first encountered Sifteo Cubes back at IndieCade last October, and spent some time playing around with the little blocks which I first mistook for iPod Nanos.
