Animated Flight Patterns

Check out Aaron Koblin's animations of flight pattern over the US. I like how you can tell the passing of time by the patterns.

Sketch Furniture by FRONT

The ladies from FRONT design in Sweden have developed a method to turn free hand sketches into real objects. They use Motion Capture to record their pen strokes in the air. The data is turned into 3D files and sent to a rapid prototyping machine. The result is not exactly pretty but I like the interesting mixture of processes.

Watch the process on this You Tube video.

Hope Garden

I realize that this site is kind of just a big advertisement for BSD Medical, but what brilliant advertising. This is such a lovely idea. Basically it is a big virtual garden where anyone can go and plant a flower for someone with a message attached. You can look through the garden at other people's messages and "add water too them" by choosing to add comments such as "You brightened my day" or "I with you the best". The original intention of the site was to positively influence people dealing with cancer but the garden has flowers that have been planted for many different reasons.

Visit the garden at www.flowersforhope.com

David Lanham

I'm a big fan of vector based artwork, and David Lanham's is some of the most enjoyable that I have seen in a long time. You can tell that he has a lot of fun creating these pieces. David is generous enough to allow you to download high-res images of is work as wallpaper, but give they guy some props and order an 8.5" x 11" print for $30.

World Changing

WorldChanging.com has released a book that is a collection of the site's contents from the past 3 years. World Changing refers to the book as a "groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future".
Buy World Changing on Amazon.

Amazon's Plog

I was just on Amazon and I noticed that they have added a trademarked new feature called a Plog. The term Plog stands for Personal Web Log. It is a blog that only shows content that Amazon feels is of interest to you. It also lets indicate whether or not you liked a posting and adjust future posts accordingly. Pretty smart...

Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

Thinkmap has created a Visual Thesaurus where the suggested words are grouped together by meaning. This visual spin on language is very effective. Try it out on their website www.visualthesaurus.com

Meowme Sleepypod

Spoil your kitty properly with the Meowme Sleepypod. This gorgeously designed mobile travel bed is both a cat travel bag a kitty bed. It comes complete with heating pad (Meowww!). I want one.

Whitney Music Box

Brett sent me this link to the memorizing Whitney Music Box. It is "a musical realization of the motion graphics of John Whitney as described in his book 'digital harmony' ". Warning: Do not watch if you are tired or otherwise impaired.

Cooper-Hewitt People's Design Awards

As part this year's National Design Awards, the Cooper-Hewitt was accepting nominations for the People's Design Award where members of the public could nominate and vote for their favorite designs. Nominees include the usual suspects like the iPod and the Mini Cooper but they also some great nominations for the wheel, the umbrella, duct tape, air bags and playing cards. That is my kind of design contest! Check out all the nomination on at the Cooper-Hewitt site.