Scott Amron’s done it again, another witty little piece of product design. A blank key that you can have cut to match your own keys – simple. Acting as a nifty replacement to your currently cumbersome key-ring that you’ve been stuffing in your pocket for way too long.
Because good design is very simple.
(via Its Nice That)
The Style Rookie is a 13 year old blogger who writes about fashion - her own quirky unbelievably kooky sense of putting things together as well as about the world of fashion. She visits Fashion Week and gets gifted things by Christian Siriano.
This is how she describes herself :
Tiny 13 year old dork that sits inside all day wearing awkward jackets and pretty hats. Scatters black petals on Rei Kawakubo’s doorsteps and serenades her in rap. Rather cynical and cute as a drained rat. In a sewer. Farting. And spitting out guts.
Her name is Tavi, and if you care a kaboodle about fashion, she’s worth a look-see.
As someone who has used a bicycle to get around New York for about 30 years I’ve watched the city—mainly Manhattan, where I live—change for better and for worse. During this time I started to take a full-size folding bike with me when I traveled so I got to experience other cities as a cyclist as well. Seeing cities from on top of a bike is both pleasurable and instructive. On a bike one sees a lot more than from a freeway, and often it’s just as fast as car traffic in many towns.
A “livable city” means vastly different things for many people. In Hong Kong it might mean that your family is in a comfortable apartment while you play in the exciting mercantile world in a glass tower overlooking the harbor. In Dallas livability might mean that you live near an expressway that isn’t jammed up, at least not all the time, and your car runs most days. For some it might mean super fast Wi-Fi, the possibility of lucky and lucrative business opportunities and plenty of strip clubs. If that’s what rocks your boat then try Houston, though to me that city, oil money made physically manifest, is my worst nightmare.
David Byrne writes about what makes a city ‘livable’.
Hop over here for links to download, or read about how Matt (guest blogger @ Noisy Decent Graphics) came up with this brainwave.
Freddie Mercury, Tom Selleck, Hulk Hogan.
This is a personal poster project celebrating the varying perceptions of typography, in this case the symbolic correlation between brackets and moustaches.
Ryan Dixon
My money is beautiful.
Like having a flower, a tree, the sky,
‘Gioconda’,
These are beautiful things,
But my money is beautiful, too.
It lies in my pocket and I can touch it –
It’s little and much loved.
It’s so enchanting without being coy,
I can show it to you again and again,
And I can fix it to my buttonhole like a tulip.
My money,
My money …
This is a colourful performance,
This is a poor decoration,
This the shiny skin of non-existence.
I will wave it and enter into existence,
where there is a flower, a tree, the sky,
‘Gioconda’.
I shall enter.
I shall enter.
A ticket for me,
And a ticket for you – be my guest.
You know, life is beautiful,
If you attain it with beautiful money.
When I become an old man,
I think I shall give my beautiful money
To the museum of life
As a permanent exhibit.
People will come and enjoy
Looking at my beautiful money.
They will stand there for a long time, excited,
Then they will go home and think about it,
What’s good about it,
When you have a beautiful life,
A beautiful house,
A beautiful poem.
They will think about it,
What’s good about it,
When your money is as beautiful
As your pregnant wife.
by Shota Iatashvili
Translation: 2007, Donald Rayfield
From: Pencil in the Air
Publisher: Caucasian House, Tbilisi, 2004
Lets call a spade a spade. But lets also not assume that every Toyota car or Neelkamal chair is an exercise in the ordinary, the uninteresting and the downright mundane.
In a recent article in Time magazine, Nokia has been called upon for its lack of innovativeness.
“You know who are the winners when you have huge innovation,” says Pierre Ferragu, a London-based analyst at investment research firm Sanford C. Bernstein. “It’s anybody but Nokia is just unable to do it.”
:(
But the article digs deeper. Not every one has to compete in the race for innovativeness, it probes..
Much of Nokia’s emerging market dominance boils down to cost management — a crucial advantage when it comes to selling smart phones to price-sensitive consumers in India and elsewhere. Nokia will likely ship more devices worldwide this year than the next three biggest cell-phone makers — Korean rivals Samsung and LG, and London-based Sony Ericsson — combined. Manufacturing on that scale brings enormous purchasing power, making it possible to squeeze the cost of everything from memory chips to plastic casings.
Take that Sanford.
And now for that bit of customary trumpet blowing,
But Nokia’s real genius is simply in selling phones in more places than any of its competitors. From Indian mountain villages to towns on the dry plains of northern Nigeria, Nokia is everywhere. Supplying the end user with a smart phone in Western Europe and America is typically the job of cell-phone operators who will even subsidize the cost of a device in return for tying a buyer to a monthly plan. Not so in emerging markets, where users typically buy their phone independently. That means manufacturers need their own “very efficient distribution,” says Sanford C. Bernstein’s Ferragu. “And on distribution, nobody comes close to the strength of Nokia.”
Consider India. Years of building its business in the country — the first ever cell-phone call in India in 1995 was carried over a Nokia phone and Nokia-deployed network — has established the company as India’s biggest supplier by a huge margin. Nokia devices are sold in 162,000 retailers in India, more than three times the number for rivals Samsung or LG. Although Samsung is investing heavily to catch up, Nokia claims roughly 60% of the Indian market. So ubiquitous are the firm’s products that many locals refer to their mobile phone as a “Nokia” even when it isn’t. In China, Nokia supplies around 30,000 retailers, far more than its rivals. Across the Middle East and Africa, it has another 120,000 outlets and enjoys a 52% share. (Nokia’s slice of the North American market is approximately 10%; in Europe it’s more than 40%.)
Read the whole article here.
And for a lovely photoessay about the history of the mobile phone, skip here.
L to R: Harrison Ford (Han Solo), David Prowse (Darth Vader), Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), Kenny Baker (R2-D2), and Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker).
