Nature by Numbers

A movie by Cristóbal Vila inspired on numbers, geometry and nature. Thank you, Hundreth!

Taylor's drawer II - Cheese or font?

Just found out an ideal time waster for rainy Sunday afternoon: Cheese or font? This game tests your knowledge of fine cheeses and fonts. You are given a name, and you have to decide whether it is a font or a cheese. It is not so easy as it might seem...

Oddly enough, the same website offers a link to Monotask, a simple attention management program. Still in preparation, this program will allow you to lock down internet, and create create productive blocks of time to work on the stuff that is valuable to you.

Of olive oil drips, a naive kid and an almost perfect object

The world of olive oil bottles is divided in two - the ones that drip and have their outside walls covered with a sticky and oily film, and the beautiful and almost perfect Marquina bottles.

Spanish architect Rafael Marquina knows only too well how badly designed the olive oil bottles can be. When he was a kid, his mother used to ask him to pass her the olive oil (¡pásame el aceite, niño!). Rafael would invariably pick the bottle by its handle, oblivious that it was resting on a dish that protected the table from oily stains. The dish would invariably stick to the bottle, and it would invariably fly until it ended up crashed on the floor much much to the despair of his infuriated mother. Just imagine: she would give me one slap for every dish, and every day she would ask me to pass the olive oil - said recently Rafael Marquina in an interview.

Probably still suffering from an aching cheek, in 1961 Rafael Marquina created a bottle that would forever end with the drip and tray problems. These glass bottles feature a flared neck that prevent prevent dr

ips from running down the outside. The neck acts as funnel that forces the drips inside the bottle, and the ground glass of the opening and stopper keeps them firmly together. The large bottom provides enough stability, avoiding the bottle to tip over. The stopper is easily extractible and has a small ope

ning that allows you to control the quantity of liquid you want to use.

The Marquina bottles suspiciously look like an Erlenmeyer, a glass flask that is widely used in every lab. They share the same large flat base, the conical body, and the cylindrical neck, and they both were designed to solve the similar challenges. But, the inspiration seems to have come from the work the of the Finish designer Tapio Wirkkala for Arabia.

Rafael Marquina claims that these bottles are far from perfect. The grind glass of the opening and stopper have to be hand made, making it unsuitable for industrial production. And this according to the arch

itect, is not in agreement with two of the most important premisses of design: low pr

ice and economy of procedures. Regardless, this

iconic object have become a symbol of Spanish design and possibly its most copied object

Image taken from the book 'Cocos, copias y coincidencias' (Editorial Electa)

Takashi Murakami - Superflat First Love

First, Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton united efforts to revamp the old Monogram Canvas pattern. Six years after, they resume their collaboration to create Superflat First Love. This animation was released earlier this year as a download available for Japanese mobile phones only (you could take a look at the trailer, though). The full blown video is now on YouTube:

IKEA - Bringing design to the masses

The aesthetic form is there for all. And not just for the museum

IKEA Catalog, 1979  

In a couple of weeks I might be off to IKEA in Munich. Not to IKEA, the store, but to IKEA, the exibihion at the Pinakothek des Moderne 

Democratic design - IKEA  is the first ever show about the Swedish company that has shaped the concept of bringing design to the masses like no other. As understood by IKEA officers and designers, democratic design means that having a limited budget should not prevent people from creating a beautiful home, with practical and sensible elements. This groundbreaking concept make them one of the most impressive success stories of the 20th century, and the world's biggest producer of furniture and decorative objects. It is was estimated that one in 10 Europeans are conceived in an IKEA bed.

 

A perfectly good example of bringing the design to the masses and democracy of design is the PS Jonsberg series of vases, created by Hella Jongerius.    

Hella Jongerius is a Dutch designer whose innovative creations are sold by high end design companies, shuch as Droog, Vitra or Donna Karan  She heads her own company, JongeriusLab, which designs and produces unique ceramics, textiles, tableware and furniture.

 

Jongerius is known for her attention to detail, and also the individuality she puts on each piece. Almost all of her objects involve handwork during the production process. “Normally my work is made in small editions, which gets expensive”, she admits  (the limited edition of the repeat big pot can cost something like EUR7000; a unlimited production, like the NON temporary vase can be EUR400).

For the Jonsberg vases, Jongerius wanted to integrate her love of handwork with the high volume production requirement IKEA imposes. “I was searching for a way to create something mass-produced while preserving attention to the richness of details,” she says. “I wanted to make a product that is uniform in shape, but that reveals that it must have been made in a traditional workshop because there is no industrial production technique for this particular ceramic process. This was possible because Ikea has manufacturing companies in China, which produce very high-quality handwork, but can also deal with large volumes”.

 “The 4 vases all have an identical shape, a familiar archetypal vase form, which for me is a blank sheet of paper on which I can design. Every vase has a pattern that represents a particular part of the world, and each pattern is also assigned its own ceramic technique. It reveals the great diversity of the ceramics world. Moreover, it shows four different characters and traditions that produce completely different vases, despite the fact that the basic form is one and the same”.

 

I am the proud owner of several of those vases, that were something like CHF50 each (about EUR40):

I love them!

Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami - when high street shopping meets manga

Louis Vuitton is one of the oldest fashion houses in the world, having been founded 1854. You can find what seems like LV purses everywhere you go these days, but chances are, only a small percentage of them are authentic. Ironically, one of their most popular patterns, the signature Monogram Canvas, was created to prevent counterfeiting. The Monogram Canvas was introduced in the market in 1896, and the design was based on the late Victorian era trend of using Japanese and Oriental motifs.

 

More than one century after, it is still trendy to use Japanese motifs in design. In 2003, the Maison hired Takashi Murakami, a Japanese artist known for his colorful creations and manga influenced work, to re-invent the serious looking Monogram Canvas. Murakami created then the Cherry Blossom pattern, in which smiling cartoon faces in the middle of pink and yellow flowers are strategically placed atop the Monogram Canvas. The limited edition products made with the Cherry Blossom pattern were an hit, and are, still to this date, very popular.

One of the things that Murakami does best manga animation. As a part of the marketing campaign, he created a short film around the LV and the new Cherry Blossom pattern. A girl named Aya is swollen by a panda and guided into a manga world decorated with LV’s patterns and multicolor monograms:

 

Six years after the original release, Louis Vuitton is now getting ready to launch a new project with Takashi Murakami. The new collection is called Multicolor Spring Pallete and its release earlier this month in Tokyo was built around another short film created by Murakami. The sequel is called Superflat First Love and is only available as a mobile download in Japan. But, we can take a look at the trailer: