Falcon: old and new combined

With my rocky history with motorcycles I have to admit I’m not particularly bothered about them, but as with all other things there are always outstanding examples which make you stand up and pay attention.

Recently I stumbled upon one of those examples and had to point you in its direction. Falcon is a Los Angeles based motorcycle manufacturing company based on high standards of manufacture and quality in design. Ian Barry, co-founder and designer, has been obsessed with old British bikes like Triumph and Norton for years leading to his designing the Falcon when he met his business partner Amaryllis in LA.

Both spent two years sourcing vintage materials and machinery from around the world to create a workshop in Downtown LA where they could make their dream a reality.

So the first result is pretty much what you see above here, an imagining of what would happen would Triumph have produced a Board racer. It’s called “The Bullet” and is effectively a custom Triumph motorcycle, starting years ago as the derelict frame and engine of a 1950 pre-unit Triumph Thunderbird (which for all you movie buffs is the self same motorbike Marlon Brando can be seen riding in the classic movie “The Wild One”.

Everybody will be keeping a keen eye on this and we would advise you to as well, absorb the beauty of the bike, it really is something special. They plan many more bikes all based on vintage forms, so it’s going to really be a thing to watch over the next couple of years.

Good work vintage bike fellas!

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Mommy, what does a computer 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.

Just one thing strikes me about this though, and that is that this guy has to have been sent a virus and spam at some point to get this going, so lord help him now his project is public, as he will be doubtless bombarded with the stuff we spend our online lives trying to avoid. Take this one step further and imagine loosing the work to a virus itself… Hope he has a picture called, “My back up” On a serious note though, good work Alex, stunning images and an original idea. Nice.

Design is the fabric of the universe, it wraps us all, keeps us warm and makes you feel snuggly. It needs washing occasionally though, so be careful it doesn’t shrink.

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Painting in public

Since we have been ignoring the more painterly aspects of the arts recently, we thought we would introduce you to a friend we made recently who is painter, based in Austin, TX, in the United States of America. She is a like minded individual with a good ability to capture the moment and its movement. Painting quickly and with confident strokes her work captures the feeling in the local coffee shops she frequents in and around the city of Austin.

Everybody likes her style which is has a quite European feeling, impressionistic in nature and feels like it is painted with vigour. We recommend you have a look at her work over at her blog, which you can link to by clicking the picture above.

Thanks Lavanna, it’s good to see painting be brought back out of the studio again and into the public eye, keep up the good work.

The more non-technical use of chips

I’m sure everyone has either experienced or seen the RFID-chip (Raido Frequency IDentification) if you’re living in Holland. The public transport in Rotterdam has been using them for a couple of years now, as well as England and a couple of other countries. But did you know you can actually do some pretty creative (and for some, useful) things with those chips?

Some companies might use them to store information on them and follow you to see where you go (like on the metrolines), but what about using the chips to have something else follow you?

Try a chair for example. Designed by Jelte van Geest as a graduation project, it’s a chair for a library that works with the RFID-chip. Hold your librarypass in front of it when walking into the library-area, it will follow you around wherever you go (within it’s vicinity of course). So whenever you find a book and would like to read, you just have to turn around and sit down.

While this isn’t directly graphic design, although the chair looks pretty artsy, it does show that you can be creative with other things than a pencil or sculpture.

Recycled bottle lamp

Don’t get me started on recycling – it is a huge can of worms which is hard to keep to a short, single weblog post. But this is a way to recycle which I can get behind. Soon to graduate, Shelley Spicuzza, has designed a system which allows you to use your old drink bottles to good effect. The image above shows green bottles, such as Sprite or Mountain Dew but you could use red or other colour to create other effects by mixing them up.

Seems like a bit of a recurrent theme recently lights, I’ll be looking farther afield to find different stuff for you all next one. Promise.

Julia Galdo

Once in a while a photographer comes along with a portfolio which inspires us. This is one of those cases, Julia Galdo is an American photographer, born in Florida and working for a broad range of clients, her work is beautiful. Stunning portraits and lighting to melt you, used by fashion magazines and other fashionable clients. Have a look at her website to get a glimpse of a true artist. Very inspiring work which evokes thoughts of the American Artist/photographer Gregory Crewdson through the detail and story told in each image.

Everybody says well done Julia.

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.

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

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.

A mirror… but made with Wood. Yeah, WOOD!

On a recent look around the museum websites I found an interesting concept which struck me as, not only dead simple, but also beautiful too. I’ve seen it before – a few years ago in a magazine – and then forgot about it, but this time I thought I should share it with the world.

A piece by Daniel Rozin, it’s a mirror which uses wooden blocks and a carefully positioned light to produce the image that a small camera sees, in realtime. As a dark shape moves across the camera’s field of view, the wooden blocks are rotated to make a ‘mirror image’ of what stands before it. It struck me as being something which is a solution to a problem which doesn’t exist (as the mirror already does it’s job perfectly well). But on closer inspection it becomes a live piece of art, which will never be the same twice. Something which I would love to put on my wall, even if it is to see the blocks rotate around each time you put things in front of it.

Maybe I’m a geek, and maybe it isn’t the most amazing thing in the world, but, I personally think it is something that would keep me busy for hours, and not many pieces of art can do that.

Have a look at the artist’s website by clicking the picture above and look at the other things he has used to create mirrors and other interesting pieces of interactive art.