Roxana Zegan

I like the thinking behind the work of Canadian artist Roxana Zegan. She uses acrylic paints to transform Montreal's potholes into temporary works of art. The contrast of the colored paint on the dark asphalt is stunning.

I found Roxana's gorgeous work on an old Design Sponge post. I can't seem to find a more direct link to her work. If anyone has one, please let me know.

Happy Holidays

Project 99

Project 99 is a furniture project by Dutch designers Stefan Louwerse and Richard Broeksema. They are creating 99 pieces of original furniture based on refurbished chair frames. The project is made up of number of series, each focusing on a different reupholstering material including second-hand clothing, wallpaper, rubber and cowhide. The chairs cost (appropriately) 99 Euros each. (Found through Pan-Dan).

BBC's British History Timeline

The BBC's British History Timeline is a (insert best British accent here...) gorgeous (...end accent) way to brush up on your British history. It's a simple but sophisticated interactive timeline that lets you explore significant events in British history from 862BC to today.

The Sheep Market

Fun with Artificial Artificial Intelligence! The Sheep Market is a bizarre and intriguing collection of 10000 sheep drawings created by workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Each worker was instructed to "draw a sheep facing left" and paid $0.02 for their troubles. You can actually watch the sheep being drawn. My favorite fact about this project is that 662 sheep were rejected - my imagination drools at the idea of what these rejections were based on. (Found through the Sub-Studio Design Blog).

How iPhone is Changing Storytelling

Michael Surtees of DesignNotes started this interesting discussion about how the iPhone (and social networking) has changed the he tells stories. He says, "My blog posts from DesignNotes and my flickr photos can feed into Virb, twitter can be read in facebook, and with a simple rss I can send feeds anywhere else that I want to. It makes a crazy loop that makes my content very universal."

Cabbie Napkins

One of the most important responsibilities of hosting a party is making sure everybody gets home safely. That job is made much easier with these Cabbie Napkins. Just fill in your drunken guest's destination and appropriate cash stash location and file them towards a taxi. Best to order them now to make sure they arrive before New Years.

Andrew English Fingerprint Bands

Andrew English has created a lovely twist on the common wedding band engraving. His rings come with a hand-engraved imprint of your partner's fingerprint, making each ring truly unique. (Found through Pan-dan).

Interview with Chris Jordan

I had the pleasure of interviewing the fabulous Chris Jordan today for The Greener Grass. You can find the full interview here.

Year in Ideas

The New York Times Magazine just published its 7th annual Year in Ideas. The issue features the 'many curious, inspired, perplexing and sometimes outright illegal innovations of the past 12 months'. Articles include: The Cardboard Bridge; Smog Eating Cement; Criminal Recycling; and Wireless Energy. It is a fascinating collection of articles that aren't limited to good ideas, just interesting ideas in general.

The Story of Stuff

The Story of Stuff is a great 20 min animated speech by Annie Leonard examining a product's life cycle and the environmental and social side effects of each part of the process. It focuses on production and consumption trends that we have fallen into like bad habits and can't get away from. Whether you are involved in a product's development or you are just a consumer, this movie and website will definitely make you stop and think. (Found through Kaleidoscope's inspiring Greener Grass project).

Christmas Cheat Sheets

If you have been dropping hints to your loved ones about all the fabulous clothes you would like for Christmas, maybe you should follow it up with this sizing cheat sheet. Created by Made in England by Gentlemen, this is a pretty ingenious piece of holiday graphic art that allows you to write down all your clothing sizes as a cheat sheet for the people buying you gifts. Available in a boys and girls version. (Found through Swissmiss).

Kitty Wigs

Ha! I'm not sure this is a good idea, in fact I'm pretty sure it's not... but it totally made my day. It's wigs... for your cat. Ha! Cats are known for their big personalities. These wigs, by Kitty Wigs, just save your imagination some effort in trying to visualize that personality. Love it! (Found through NOTCOT.org).

Souvenirs

I enjoyed this File Magazine gallery of Souvenir photos by Michael Hughes. It features small souvenir products being held in front of the real thing. The varying sense of scale and color is nice. There is something really charming about capturing the souvenir in the memory, instead of the other way around.

Citizen Image

If you are a photographer (amateur or professional) you should check out Citizen Image. They specialize in marketing and selling the rights to photographs. Photographers can upload images they wish to sell and Citizen Image will help find a buyer. There is no fee to post photographs and photographers receive 50% of the gross proceeds from the sale of their photo. Buyers can search through the unique content online. If there are no appropriate images, buyers can set an Assignment for photographers, outlining the image(s) that they are looking for. This is a really well thought out system that benefits everyone involved.

Burst Labs

Burst Labs is the online production music library of The Burst Collective. The site takes a refreshing approach to organizing and searching through audio files. I particularly like the Discover feature that allows you to pick from suggested descriptive words to help define the type of music you are interested in. It gives you just the right amount of tools to 'discover' the music with, depending on your level of adventurism or need to define.

Philippe Starck TED Talk

Fantastique! I just listened to this TED Talk by Philippe Starck, and smiled from start to finish. He talks about his useless job of being a designer - very inspiring (seriously). Whether you think you are a Philippe Starck fan or not, this talk is well worth 18 minutes of your time.

BookScape

BookScape is an interesting concept for a online library archive. It was created by Michael Chang of Yahoo's Design Innovation Team. The project focuses on creating an interface that allows access to digital versions of 2600 illustrated children's books. Images of the scanned books are arranged alphabetically. Dynamic resampling is used to efficiently show all the images at once in one zoomable space. Zooming out allows quick navigation of the entire collection. Zooming in gives you more finite navigation control. This project reminds me a bit of some of the thinking behind Microsoft's amazing Photosynth that I wrote about earlier this year.