Cédric Ragot

Recently we seem to be posting the odd piece by designers and artists which pop up and strike us as inspiring there and then. This post is a change to that recent trend. Cédric Ragot guy is a designer who is coming up for his tenth year in professional design. His work spans development of mobile phones to basic furniture and beyond.

Pictured above is a crop of a set of vases, called “Fast”, which do actually look, well… fast I guess. His work is inspiring to us because he uses a range of techniques which push the limits of the materials he uses whilst retaining a real sense of proportion and form with good functionality (not necessarily in that order), the basis of all good design.

Click the picture above to go to his website to have a few minutes looking at the various project on which he has worked, and see what you think about his style and evolving ideas. Take time to check out the Reverso table range, which we think would look great in our studio… any one? donation? OK, we’re saving up.

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VW’s vision of future car design.

One of the things that everyone seems to be worried about these days is the future of transport and how we get around. With rocketing oil prices and a rapidly deteriorating environment, it is a fair concern.

The clever people at VW in Wolfsburg, Germany are currently stating their vision for the future of private transportation. Not only will you not be driving anymore, but you won’t need to remember where you parked your car, it will come to you.

Don’t just take our word for it, click the image above to go to the very slick VW website to let them tell you all about it. A well presented video and some great 3D graphics tell the story perfectly for everyone who wants to listen.

Everybody says… well done VW, this is the most believable vision of the future of cars yet.

Radiator cover

Anyone who has read my posts on other blogs knows that I don’t like to put the radiators on in the house during the summer months even when it is as cold as it is at the moment in Rotterdam. My fascination with radiators goes back a long way mainly due to the way they look being so damn boring and ugly. People like Joris Larman have designed some wonderful radiators which do the job efficiently and in a pretty manner. If you don’t want to go to the expense of putting in a new radiator, flooding your house and then paying a person who knows what they are doing to do it properly, these are perfect for you.

Designed by Bumrae Jo & Zemzem Kaya, these covers are a great way of hiding your ugly wall mounted heating device and adding a little bit of colour to your place. They are available in two colour ways, Red and White and Grey and White. Featured on the cover is a “nest” which will keep things warm (obviously being on a radiator) but, hey, maybe you can put your underwear in it on those cold winter days so it’s nice and toasty warm for you when you wake up.

Everybody says well done radiator covering people. Nice job.

A single cubic metre

Designer, Arik Levy, has produced a piece of storage furniture which is a modular system, when combined adds up to a single metre cubed. The piece is constructed from 7 individual pieces in either Aluminium, Blackened Oak and Clear Oak, the black one is shown above. Unfortunately this is an extremely limited piece and is only available in 5 of the Aluminium ones, and 12 clear oak or Black oak ones. The cube is a fashionable shape this year which is something you will see lots more of… mark our words.

Everybody likes this loads and would like one of these in the studio, thank you – please.

inspiration in a bottle – many of them, in different colours.

Artist, Aleksandra Stratimirovic, a Yugoslav, resident of Sweden has produced an installation entitled “Sunny day”. It is produced by filling 4464 small medical glass vials with different coloured liquids. When displayed with a fluorescent backlight, the coloured vails become bright and by taking a couple of steps backwards an image of a girl appears. The framework is 2 by 3 metres and the image depicts a girl stood by a lake with a rolling hill as a backdrop.

It’s another example of how the inherent properties of glass can be used to create art and by adding a simple coloured translucent liquid, something completely different can be created. Click on the image above to go to the artist’s website and see for yourself how the illusion works.

The work has been exhibited in Vzigalica gallery, at the Svetlobna Gverila festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2008.

foto: © Bojan Brecelj IPAK

Mona Lisa immortalised in crystals

OK, so recently there has been a real push on the Swarovski stuff. It used to be that they were pretty much tucked away in the corner of a department store near you. Regardless of your personal view of crystal and the sometimes horrific sculptures created in it (we won’t bore you with ours), the recent push on promotion by the company has seen swatch style stores popping up all around Europe.

The Swarovski Crystal Palace in Milan has started to turn the crystal into something more of an art medium than a… well crystal.

Recently the English artist Paul Cocksedge (stop giggling at the back) showed his piece which shows the Mona Lisa, but only when you look in the convex mirror provided. A trick of the light worthy of David Copperfield. The piece is 4 metres tall and utilises 1440 individual crystals

Anyway, we just thought this was great way of using a material and its inherent properties to create a visual effect with a twist.

Jam Jar Binks

Here in the Netherlands, they are recycle crazy and, without giving away my roots, it was a bit of a culture shock to take empty plastic bottles back to the supermarket.

Dutch designer, Jorre van Ast, has created a solution to allow you to recycle those old jars on your shelf. You might have used the contents long before, but this little set of screw on caps allows you to breathe a new life into the glassware itself. Simply by putting one of the pouring, shaking or one of the other tops on the jar you can give it a new use.

The Dutch Kitchenware company “Royal VKB” has picked up this selection of jar attachments for production and they are available now. I reckon the Everybody office kitchen needs some.

I guess the point of this post is to remind us that the best solutions to problems are almost always the most simple, the ones which stare us in the face and the ones which just make you say “Damn, I wish I had thought of that!”. In all forms of design, the brief is a problem which is solved by the designer and in this case, Jorre van Ast has taken an everyday object, which in many homes stays on the shelf or in a cupboard for years, and enabled you to utilise it again. This then reduces the pressure on the recycling system and allowing people to be damn resourceful in the process.

Everybody says well done, Jorre.

So… what does a virus look like?

Once in a while a piece of art comes along which strikes you as original, clever and downright good looking. In this instance, a fella has written some code/witchcraft to use malware (the nasty bits of software that do nasty bits of work on your computer) to create a beautiful and organic image to represent the nasty bit of software itself.

Dig deeper into his site and you will find that he also grows something which he calls “spam plants”. These use more code/witchcraft to take spam messages and grow them into more organic looking and in some cases beautiful images.

It kind of reminds us of those art images based on fractals which did the rounds in poster stores in the 1990’s. But there is something wonderful about these images, something which makes you want more. The uniqueness is interesting to me and the way in which they seem different each time you look at them is equally as enthralling.

Everybody says good work Alex, stunning images and an original idea. Nice.

Fantasy landscapes happen everywhere

Ever wonder where artists and designers get all their inspiration from? Sometimes when you’re watching a movie you wonder if people making these things are on a non-prescribed medicine. Sometimes you see logo or poster designs that evoke the same feeling.

Although some designers just design these kind of things out of their heads, a lot of us get our inspiration from the most usual (and unusual) places. Take this picture for example; looks like it came straight out of a movie doesn’t it? In this case, it was a place at the beach in Estonia, right after a storm followed by a cold winter night. What happens next is a sight that is just as unbelievable as it is beautiful and provides people with a huge amount of inspiration. Imagine loving chocolate, and walking into a bonbonshop in Belgium (home of one of the best bonbon makers). It’s a walhalla come to life, which is exactly what happens to designers when seeing inspirational places like this.

Scenes like this happen all around you though; you don’t necessarily have to go all the way to Estonia to see this. You’d be suprised how many fantasy-like places exist, sometimes even right around the corner.

Paper Sculptures

Here’s a thing. Appeldorn based artist, Ferry Staverman, has produced these wonderful paper sculptures from repeat shapes cut from various different kind of cardboard and paper.

The results are stunning and well worth a look. You can see more of them if you click the picture above, which will lead you to the website promoting the show where they were being displayed… We deal with paper everyday and sometimes you can forget just how easy it is to make something so great looking.