Copy Goes Here

I tumbled upon Coudal Partners’ website through an NPR article about online museums. As a Chicago based design, advertising and multi-media studio, Coudal Partners’ website is quite informative and fun to read. It is nothing like a self-promoting design firm website, strange. This short comic film, “Copy Goes Here” is making fun of designers being illiterate. The title refers to the “place holder” in graphic design when the designer leaves spaces for the text boxes to go without knowing (or caring) what the text will be.

Also check out MoOM (Museum of Online Museums) also by Coudal Partners.

Who killed the Electric Car?

Tesla, possibly the hottest roaster, which happens to be an electric car, says on their website, “Burn rubber, not gasoline. 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, 135 mpg equivalent…” The coolest thing: it plugs directly into any 110V (or 220V) outlet, recharged for 3.5 hr for another 250 miles, so it is just like your laptop.

Speaking of electric car, there is an interesting documentary now playing in theaters.

Colorful LV

Takeshi Murakami is Andy Warhol of Japanese Pop Art. His series of pattern/print for Louis Vuitton with Marc Jacob in 2003 merged low and high art, commodity and value in a way that Warhol would never have imagined. Those patterns, as some of you may have seen, were applied to LV’s handbag and luggage collection in replacement of the boring gold and brown monogram (which I still can’t understand why it is such the big deal). Murakami’s approach is the best of both worlds: being playful and humorous while critical of popular culture, even better, making huge profit on creating seemingly kitsch art. Remind you of any architect? Not many.

Whale's Tail in England

Domus showed this beautiful sculpture/bench on its weekly newsletter. Designed by Ian McChesney, it was a competition winner of the Public Art program in NW England, city of Blackpool (north of Liverpool). Its arc shape in plan forms a curving bench for 8 people while extending 8 meters vertically to become a “wind shelter”. This wind shelter rotates 360 degree to protect the occupants from the wind. Some of McChesney’s sculptural design uses amazingly simple method. He draws the organic shape on a piece of paper in 2D then cut it out to fold or bend them to create a 3D form, not unlike Gehry in some regards. This kind of old school model/form making is still a lot faster and more effective than using computer, especially non-90 degree geometry.

OMA's Change Design

3 OMA projects were presented at the TED conference (Google Video 20 mins) a few months ago to demonstrate 3 key ideas of OMA’s design approach. The first is Hyper-rational process, which takes rationality to an absurd level, that it transcends all the baggage that normally comes with a rational conclusion. The second is the design without authorship and signature. Design through team collaboration and editing. The third is compartmentalized flexibility, which challenges the high Modernist notion of universal flexibility (think Mies).

These ideas, interestingly, are very similar to Change Design. In terms of presentation, we have quite a bit to learn in terms of using interactive QuickTime VR, diagrammatic animation and video montage. It is time think beyond photo-realistic renderings…