RIDGID Lit Power Cords

This 7 1/4" wormdrive saw is just one of the many corded power tools by RIDGID to incorporate this nice design feature. The power cord lights up when plugged in and displays an icon of the tool. This shows that the tool has power to it and allows you to easily see which cord to unplug when you are finished.

Antivirus

Antivirus is one of the many products nominated for this year's Index Award (see previous post for more information). Antivirus is aimed at the millions of people who are infected with HIV and Hepatitis B and C each year because of the reuse of needles. According to the product's designer, Han Pham, "At least 50% of injections in developing countries are estimated to be unsafe. Used syringes are being picked up from trash by poor adults and children with re-sell intentions and circulate back into the health care system".

Antivirus is a cap that is placed on the top of beverage cans and is used to separate the needle from the rest of the syringe preventing reuse or accidental sticking. I like this solution because it is very simple and takes advantage of readily available beverage cans to make the product as small as possible for transport. To see full entry details click here.

Brooks Salzwedel Belt Buckles

These belt buckles by Brooks Salzwedel are not your traditional metal buckles. They are really gorgeous pieces of artwork made from layered graphite and resin. The layers create depth of field making the images very dynamic. If only I could afford the $175 price tag.

Make your own Wee Planets

I've always really liked the little planet images that people have made out of panoramic photos. They are very Little Prince. I've seen this done by a few photographers now. For a couple of examples check out Alexandre Duret-Lutz's flickr collection of Wee Planets.

I found a tutorial on Photojojo about how to make your own little planets. You basically take a panoramic photo and stretch it into a square. Then you apply a polar filter. It sounds simple but I think it takes the right photo and some handy Photoshop clean-up work to make it look awesome. I'm totally going to try it.

Barcade

My geek status has been confirmed... again. I was just reading in Wired magazine that one of my favorite Brooklyn bars, Barcade, has been named one of "The Best Geek Bars in the US".

If you have never been to Barcade, it is basically, as the name suggests, a bar and an arcade combined. The walls are lined with all your favorite 80's arcade games like Tetris, Frogger, Ms Pac-man, Tapper, Donkey Kong and many more. Each game has a little ledge beside it to put your drink and quarters down on. Awesome geeky fun!

Trunki

This is the ultimate in fun luggage. Trunki is carry-on sized luggage created especially for kids. It is super cute with brightly colored hard plastic walls, large wheels, horns and a furry texture. The luggage is designed for kids to ride on it. It has a saddle area with handles and a shoulder strap that turns into a tow rope. It is perfect for young children to push themselves around on, or be pulled by parents. What more could a globetrotting tot ask for? You can purchase Trunkis in the US for $39.99 at www.trendykid.com.

Influences

Phil Hansen's fascinating version of a self portrait has been making the rounds, and rightly so. It is pretty impressive to watch. He uses his bare torso to paint 30 different paintings, one on top of the other. Each painting represents someone who influenced his life, such as Georges Seurat, Stephen Hawking, and Adolf Hitler. The paintings took a total of 30 hours to complete. You can see more of Phil's work at www.philinthecircle.com.

Domino Magazine Flags

I was pleasantly surprised to find these page flags in the front of Domino magazine. The flags peal out to be used as page markers. They cover the categories of Decorate, Entertain, Garden, Renovate, and Gift. It is a pretty effective way of adding value to a magazine. The flags entice readers to increase their interaction with the magazine. It encourages people to not just flip through the pages but to actually take note of some ideas and come back to them. This must be very appealing to potential advertisers and featured designers.

Post Secret

Post Secret is a website that displays people's secrets on 4"x6" cards. Anyone can submit a secret as long as it is something that you have never told anyone and it fits on one side of a postcard (or at least mailable material). New secrets are posted to the site every Sunday and then replaced the following week.

There is something really fascinating about reading other people's secrets. They all seem so genuine. I really like the idea of telling a secret anonymously. It's like writing a message in a bottle and sending it out to sea... only we all get to read it. Previous secrets have been turned into books. Check them out on Amazon.

Don't Click

The Don't Click website is an experimental look into a world with no mouse clicking. It explores our clicking habit by creating an interface where no clicking in necessary. The site includes some games and activities to explain, explore and practice the different click-less selection techniques. They collect and display statistics on how many accidental clicks were made on the site and whether or not visitors miss the mouse click. (Found through Josh Spear)

Index Award

I came across this site for the Index Award the other day. It is a design award given every two years to products or ideas that improve human life. The aim of the competition is to increase public awareness about how design can help improve life on a global scale. Five €100,000 prizes are given away in the categories of Body, Home, Work, Play and Community. There are hundreds of nominations on the site. I will write some postings on a few of the more interesting entries over the next few weeks.

Sweetskinz

Sweetskinz bicycle tires are featured in this month's Popular Science - What's New section. Full color graphics and patterns are added to a thin skin of rubber which is then pressure melded to the tire itself. The most interesting part is that the ink used to produce the artwork is reflective, making the tires visibile at night, giving these over the top graphics a very safety conscious functionality.

Dole Fruit Containers

I was in the grocery store the other day and I saw these new Dole fruit containers. They are such a freshing approach to the old tin can. First of all, they look great. The clear plastic shows off the natural beauty of the fruit and reinforces Dole's confidence in their fruit's quality. Secondly, they are much more user friendly than cans because you can use what you need, put the lid back on and stick the whole thing in your fridge. Thirdly the plastic containers are recyclable, like cans, but also reusable.

This is good marketing on Dole's part. It caught my attention, make me buy more than I needed and gave me a great user experience that will make me a return customer. Good job guys.

Monoface

The creative folks at Mono branding and advertising agency have put an admirable new twist on team photos. They have created a section of their website called Monoface which combines features from different employee's faces together to produce some pretty entertaining portraits. You can can shuffle the images to see random face combinations or click specific features (eyes, nose, mouth, head) to make your own creatures, I mean faces. There are a total of 759 375 possible combinations and you can't help but make a few. These guys are clearly brilliant advertisers.

Photos of the Human Heart

National Geographic's cover story this month is Healing the Heart. It focuses on heart disease, which is still one of the number one killers of men and women worldwide. The National Geographic website has some nice multimedia takes on this story including images of the human heart taken by photographer Robert Clark.

Carla Collins Collections

Wow, I'm really impressed with this website. It takes a few been-done-before elements and turns them into something really unique and interesting. It is basically the Carla Collins Collections put into books that you can turn the pages of. The images are all variations of each other so that they effectively form a flip book. The real beauty of it is that you can play though the pages quickly to see the full flip book effect both forward and backwards and then you can rotate the whole book around and do the same thing upside down. This lets you see what was on the other side of the page in an entirely different way then you saw it the first time. Have I mentioned on this blog before about how much I like Flash websites (imagine my best innocent smile here).

Dharma Initiative Food

Last Wednesday I was over at my friend Laura's with the usual LOST crowd celebrating the return of the series. As we were watching there was a shot of someone eating the Dharma Initiative Cereal. We started talking about how awesome it would if you could actually buy Dharma Cereal (the general consensus was that it would taste really good!). Well, apparently we weren't the only ones thinking this. The proactive guys over at Insanely Great News have taken the initiative to create PDF Dharma labels that you can just print out and relabel all the stuff in your cupboard.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University created this video to explain Web 2.0. It follows the evolution of the web from HTML to its current state. Very interesting.

10 x 10

10 x 10 is a website that aims to create a unique view of our time by collecting 100 highly used words and their corresponding images every hour, day, month and year. The content is gathered from a few news sources and sorted automatically with no human intervention.

This is a pretty interesting idea. It creates an illustrative historical record that is more about observation than interpretation. This site won a Flash Forward award a couple of years ago for its technical merit. (Thanks Heckman).

Head First HTML and CSS

I learned pretty much everything I need to know about the basics of HTML and CSS from this book over the weekend. That's right, I made it through 650 pages of text and exercises over one weekend because that is how awesome this book is. This book calls itself a "Brain-Friendly Guide to HTML and CSS" and that is a pretty good description. It is written like an elementary school text book with clear explanations, examples and exercises that make it easy to take in and retain the information.

This was the best learning experience I've had from a book in a long time. I highly recommend this book and apparently I'm not the only one. Out of 107 customer reviews on Amazon it received an average rating of 5 out of 5 stars. Worth every penny of the $27.00 I spent on it.

Rulered Sheets

Just in time for Valentine's day, rulered sheets. These sheets are meant to help solve the issues of who is hogging all the covers. They are printed with rulered markings starting from 0 in the middle working out to 80 on either side. The numbers are readable from inside the bed. Just in case you can't count, they are also color coded. Hahaha! For more information go to Experimental Design.

TV Online

One of my favorite new internet trends is TV networks providing full episodes of their popular programs online for free. ABC and CBS have done a particularly good job of this. Yeah, it's not perfect. It stalls sometimes and the picture is relatively low res, but how can you complain when you have the ability to catch up on your favorite TV shows anywhere you have internet access. I wish they had had this when I lived in England so I wouldn't have had to wait the 6 month lag that it takes American shows to be broadcast there, that is, if they are shown there at all. I hope more networks jump on this bandwagon, especially international ones. It would be great to be able to watch some shows that we don't have access to here. I love the internet.

Sunset Time Graphs

Jim Bumgardner (a.k.a. jbum) has put together some pretty intriguing time graphs using photos from Flicker. Over one year he collected 15000 photos posted to Flickr with the tag Sunset. He then used the image's EXIF data to tell when the photo was taken and graph the photos accordingly. The horizontal axis represents the days of the year and the vertical access shows the time of day. The photos are dimmed to reflect the number of images posted at that time. The overall effect is a graph that shows the sun's cycle over the seasons. He also calls attention to the echo of sunset photographs taken between 5-7am caused by all the people who have their cameras am and pm settings backwards.

Check out this and more fascinating graphs by Jim on his flickr account.

Hook Box

This hook box concept, designed by Luca Nichetto, was featured on Gizmodo today. This is such a good idea and it looks good too. My cell phone, keys, and sunglasses are always thrown on various surfaces in the general vicinity of the door. Unfortunately it is only a concept and not purchasable product. I can't imagine it staying that way for long.

Flying Fish Bowl

I always thought life life as fish would be good but I never imagined it to be this good. The flying fish bowl by Shay Alkalay is a large wall mounted fish bowl with rotating 3D scenery. See more images at www.shayalkalay.com.

Sketches of Frank Gehry

I watched the Sketches of Frank Gehry today on DVD. I was somehow expecting him to be more of a rock star architect but he comes across as very down to earth and often even under confident. He spends a lot of the movie talking about how he stresses over his designs and has to become suitable frustrated with something before he can get it right. You get a good sense of his creative process and approaches by the end. There are also some great quotes from Gehry like 'That is so stupid looking, it's great'. After I was done watching, I immediately ordered a copy on Amazon. You can watch the movie trailer here.

Heiwa Alpha

I have no idea what this site is about but it's absolutely gorgeous. It takes a long time to load but it's worth the wait.

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

This hat will help those around you who still struggle with the true meaning of life. Available at Jinx.com. (This is my 42nd post. I couldn't resist)

Chuck Anderson

Artist/Designer Chuck Anderson has a new print out entitled Places You Can't Imagine 1. It is a lot simpler than some of his previous work, which can be seen on his website NoPattern.com. It's hard not to admire Chuck's shameless self promotion. It seems to be working for him as he has a pretty stacked client list and he is only 22 years old.

Pepper Face

Designer pepper spray, now there is an interesting idea. Pepperface.com offers a range styles from plain aluminum bodies ($35) to crystal adorned bodies ($105-$295). You can even get a custom canister made with your own design or message. There is also a celebrity auction range with designs from Kelly Ripa and the cast of My Name is Earl.

This site also deserves props for the information it provides about raising awareness and helping to prevent violence against women

Digg Labs

If you are not familiar with Digg.com it is a website where users submit links to stories, videos or podcasts that they find interesting and then other users "digg" the submitted stories. The stories are ranked according to how many diggs they get. It's an interesting site, and if you haven't been there you really should check it out.

My favorite part of Digg is the Digg Labs where you can view the stories as Swarms or Stacks. They are both visual representations of stories being submitted and dugg in real time. In Swarm, stories are represented as circles. You can see Digg users swarming around the stories and watch them grow as their popularity increases. In the Stacks view stories are shown as columns and diggs fall from above. The columns change color to represent the number of diggs they have received.

Brandi Milne

Check out the gorgeous artwork of Brandi Milne. Her work is very art nouveau but with a modern twist. There is lots more on her website www.brandimilne.com.