Every time I receive a hand-written letter in the mail, I feel like I am about to open a very special gift. Given their rarity, hand-written letters ARE a gift. Uniqueness is built-in and its effect is usually WAY more than the effort it took to make it, both personally and professionally. Here’s some inspiration that makes the making fun.
Read MoreOn a recent trip to Pittsburgh, I stopped at the Carnegie Museum of Art to wait for a friend who worked there. In my short rambling, I saw some wonderful works ‘in person’ that I’d previously only seen online, including On Kawara’s date paintings. Reading the little info cards alongside the works often gave me…
Read MoreCow hide rugs are so ubiquitous these days, that we’ve gotten pretty tired of seeing them in interiors. That is, UNTIL we saw one speckled with gold. It seems that painted, spattered, striped, embellished hides have become something of a trend. Apartment34 has a great DIY that gives the gist (and there are lots of…
Read MoreHow often have you found yourself late for a birthday party and casting around for a way to wrap your gift? We find ourselves in that position so often, we’ve begun to keep a photo archive of hasty, curiously chic gift wrapping solutions, sometimes made with only a few elements, like the startlingly-sensual beauty from artist David Carrino, below…
Read MoreKirsten Camara’s Analog Memory Desk has a holder embedded in its legs for scrolling huge rulls of butcher paper over the desk’s surface to make “a sort of tablecloth of memory”. It can record months, possibly years of ideas, drawings, doodles, mind maps, phone numbers, calculations etc. She has made detailed blueprints so you can build your own. Or you try these other methods of analog idea-capturing.
Read MoreRecently, we came across a portfolio of images created by legendary photographer Inge Morath in collaboration with the ever-illuminating Saul Steinberg. In the Mask Series. paper bags and pieces of cardboard totally change ordinarily dressed people into OTHER….
Read MoreWe discovered artisan/designer Olivier Dolle‘s lovely tree branch book shelf when reader Kevin Neff sent us an Instructable for a cardboard version inspired by it. We find the wooden one quite beautiful and appreciate its asymmetry, unusual in shelving. The cardboard version has it’s own charm.
Read MoreSorry, this gif just doesn’t want to stay published on our site. Just click here to make it pop out. Somebody spent a lot of creative thought, time, cardboard and energy making these seven seconds happen… Amazement! via Holton Rower via i.imgur.com
Read MoreWhen we first saw this cardboard laptop stand we thought: Who needs that? We can just rig a stack of books to raise our laptop. Then we saw it in action and thought of all the places it would be useful.
Read MoreWe know a lot of people who have created standing desks and love them (and we’ve posted over the years.) They generally feel energized because their bodies are, in effect, exercising just by standing as they work. They have, however, almost universally complained of one problem: leg fatigue. Standing for hours each day puts stress on…
Read MoreSometimes people adept at designing things get jammed and stuck by thorny design problems. When that is the case, making a prototype with moveable parts can help to test out various iterations. You can shift them around and play with them to see how they will actually work and feel. Somehow, I had forgotten this essential technique until a friend reminded me and got my stalled hideaway bed/storage/bookcase unit project MOVING.
Read MoreEvery since Holton Rower mentioned Equilibres, the inspired series of sculptures Peter Fischli and David Weiss made in the 80’s with ordinary household objects, we’ve been collecting images of them. They are a reminder of the fabulous possibilities inherent in all the things we take for granted.
Read MoreThis teeny video of Austrian Artist Klemens Torggler clever ‘Evolution Door,’ has been flying around the internet. It sets the common concept of a door — opening via hinges or running on a track —literally on end. The Evolution is a rotating geometric flip-panel door system that opens up with momentum and looks like origami. Torggler’s re-envisioning of the door is NOT just a design exercise, but a truly original solution…
Read MoreWe love this inspired DIY featured Remodalista in recently: rough-hewn banged-up floors embellished with dramatic stencils spotted in the showroom of Chairloom in Philadelphia. The how-to cuts down unnecessary steps and make the most of the floor’s as-is beauty.
Read MoreImages of christmas garlands made by school kids in Cuba (below) made us think of the materials at hand for making something pretty. That sent us imagining and hunting around, and we found a trove of possibilities, offered here just to spur your imagination.
Read MoreWe hadn’t thought much about packaging suggestions for homemade food gifts until our friend David Saltman was casting about for bags to pack his home-roasted coffee beans in. We had a dwindling stash of white metal tie coffee bags we’d bought years ago by begging the coffee guy at our local gourmet store to sell…
Read MoreOptical Illusion Sofas You Can Sit On: a useful optical illusion to make a room look larger, even with a real sofa? Beautiful LEGO, A Book Featuring LEGO Masterpieces Built by Designers Worldwide: inspiration for one of our favorite building fantasy materials. Steven Curry’s swell photo essay, Child’s Play is truly an ‘exultation of the possible’…
Read MoreRecently while browsing photographer Ellen Silverman’s website, we came across this picture of Sally’s old one-bedroom apartment, where Ellen photographed a lot, both to document the space and to do food and still-life photography. The room above was a minimal, mutable space Sally used as both office and photo studio, as its south light was…
Read MoreIn 1983, when he was 28, Steve Jobs buried a 13-foot-long time capsule packed with personal items after a tech conference in Aspen Colorado. Its discovery and unearthing a few days ago was filmed for the National Geographic Channel‘s reality show ‘Digger’. Although it seems most of its eclectic mix of items haven’t yet been catalogued, it…
Read MoreThis sculptural mesh chair ($2,000 at yliving.com) by designer Damien Velasquez has a deep, springy ergonomic seat. It looks to us like it was made from standard punched metal sheets used for grilles and other architectural applications. We checked one of our favorite catalogs for McMasters-Carr, and sure enough, that’s what it is. We wonder if Velasquez…
Read More