If you know Lego, you know the pains of the Lego sorting and storage.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never pondered the storage solution landscape for Lego really until now. Clearly there’s storage-agnostic solutions most folks will reach for. Container Store, IKEA, generic plastic bins. Those are fine choices.
The holy grail solution for storing Lego must meet a few bits of criteria. Scalable and easy-to-clean are probably the two biggest factors. But the utility of sorting is rarely considered.
Enter the Brickle. A storage solution and play table. The simple design consists of a system of drawers. Each drawer consists of gradually smaller holes, allowing for each drawer Lego to drop from drawer to drawer for passive organization by size. From their website description:
Capable of comfortably holding up to 15 kilograms of LEGO® pieces, and with five lanes there’s plenty of options when it comes to sorting your collection. As for the infamous special pieces drawer this has a total of 41 compartment slots of differing sizes meaning your child will have somewhere for every important part of their collection.
joshholtsclaw.com – An incredible blog post from Josh Holtsclaw, an Art Director at Pixar. I love coming across these. This post in particular documents a lot of the process, design thinking and iteration that goes into the art direction for the film Incredibles 2
Back in 2017, Resident Advisor visited Paul Nicholson. He shares his creative design process for Aphex Twin’s (Richard D. James) Selected Ambient Works Volume II (sometimes abbreviated as SAW II) album artwork. Novel and fun to hear him talk about some of the design choices he made. You can tell he’s giddy to expand on some of the deliberate artwork choices (like the chart symbols corresponding to different tracks on SAW II).
“His paintings were successful in a way that is rare and precious — they enabled us to see the places we overlook every day and to recognize that, in spite of its ominous industrial overtones, the city is shot through with a luminous, electric vitality and a psychological potency verging on the mythic.”
Study for Corporate Rise, 1986City Of Glass, 1991The Last Painter on Earth, 19834WD, 1983
Japan’s delinquent girl gangs. The Sukeban were massively influential in popular culture. Influences were wide across manga, anime and even films. For example, the film SukebanDeka (1987) inspired several characters in Kill Bill such as O-Ren Ishii and Gogo Yubari.
The (currently) invite-only social network has a new logo! It has other new features as well, such as lists and custom feeds. Ok, the custom feeds have been around for awhile. But, it’s new-ish.
The new logo is basically the 🦋 (butterfly emoji). It’s simple and less non-representational than the nebulous sky/clouds photo or blue cube it was previously. This one seems fitting and easier to grasp (and meme).
Update: the creator of the identity and logo direction is @fonsmans:
Happy to have helped the Bluesky team with the new logo! 🦋
I was re-organizing some of my bookmarks and discovered some old gems. Among them was an amazing design resource I have long forgotten about: Logobook – Discover the world’s finest logos, symbols and trademarks. Note: unfortunately this website does not have a SSL Certificate so it’s only accessible over http
When people wear Apple Vision Pro, they enter an infinite 3D space where they can engage with your app or game while staying connected to their surroundings.
The Vision Pro is a uniquely different kind of general computing device that operates in 3D space. Often referred to as spatial computing. Apple lists 7 fundamental interface guidelines to be aware of:
Space: The Vision Pro offers a limitless canvas for virtual content and immersive experiences.
Immersion: Users seamlessly transition between different levels of immersion in either Shared Space or Full Space modes.
Passthrough: Live video from external cameras allows users to interact with virtual content while seeing their surroundings. Using the Digital Crown users can dial in and out of passthrough
Spatial Audio: Sonic characteristics of the surroundings are modeled for natural audio experiences.
Focus and gestures: Users interact with Vision Pro using their eyes and hands. Using their eyes to bring focus and tapping is called an indirect gesture. Interacting with virtual objects with touch is called a direct gesture.
Ergonomics: Content is automatically adjusted or scaled relative to the wearer’s head for visual comfort.
Accessibility: Vision Pro supports various accessibility technologies for customized interactions such as VoiceOver, GuidedAccess and more.
Google’s core business is still search. By neglecting UI and design for these products, Google corals user behavior into a “search-first” mentality. The more disorganized you become, the more reliant you become on search, and Google benefits.
I’ve often heard people say they no longer use bookmarks any more and just rely on search. I wonder if that truly is the most practical solution for them or if it is the result of a self-serving dark pattern from Google.
Brands tend to reduce their footprint and minimize messaging after substantial growth. That’s not a maxim, or anything. Just an observation. Google, AirBnb, Slack and IBM — are a few that come to mind. But there are hundreds of examples out there. Tech companies have it easy, because their product is imbued with their digital identity.
Food brands on the other hand require great packaging to propel their brand identity. A harmony has to exist between the packaging, the restaurant, and the brand. Check out Burger King’s big rebrand. It’s flat, simple and oozes nostalgia of the 80’s. Now McDonald’s has a new packaging initiative? Clearly they’re competing, right? Of course, they are competing in the literal sense, for our dollars, our mouths and our attention — but why the sudden renewed interest?
We’re exiting the the pandemic, for one. Albeit slowly, and on the heels of the highest mortality rates in the world no less, here at home in the USA. But secondly, the world is changing, and the fast food industry is taking notice and investing like crazy in new food technology. Plant protein is in huge demand.
Plant-based protein versions of the Big Mac and BLT are on the horizon. They’re closer to market than you think, and the fast food industry is about to explode in new varieties of alternative meat offerings. This is a huge deal. But while it’s compelling to vegetarians, and vegans — a large swath of American omnivores are not so easily convinced. To change their minds, you have to change their hearts. Burger King and McDonald’s are shedding the brand equity of the past 20+ years: fast, quick, and greasy — and trading it in for something new, something hopeful, perhaps impossible: fast and good.
That’s a fucking hell of a tall order, I know.
Rand Paul, did it with IBM in 1968. Despite being an immensely complex data organization, hand-built the machines that led us into the information age, and makes continuous breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, the company continues to grow and evolve his simple brand system.
The fast food industry knows there’s an explosive growth potential just waiting to burst with the advent of plant proteins, and they’re laying the groundwork for the next 20-30 years of growth.
Simply put, minimalism is the language that brands foam at the mouth for. It’s the ultimate designation for a successful product in any industry. I mean, just looks at Apple. The pinnacle of minimalism. The pinnacle of success. The champion of Americana. Capitalizing on that language, the fast food industry are willing plant-proteins into the mainstream. Will it work though?
No matter the region or language, we wanted the packaging design to communicate joyful moments while being immediate and universal.
Hamish Campbell, vp, ecd, Pearlfisher
Universal adoption of a packaging system will be key to success across all of their menu items. But, the packaging is only a small part revealed of a broader effort coming to the global face of the McDonald’s company. I predict we’ll see more and more of this minimal system Pearlfisher constructed very soon. I think we will definitely see plant-proteins and new offerings from McDonald’s coming to the forefront, with classic products like the Big Mac and Filet-o-Fish take a backseat to quickly evolving American fast food tastes.
It’s fun. It’s cathartic. It’s great for team-building, self-esteem, your mental health and frequently, a decent workout. I’m talking of course about skateboarding. It has even passively impacted other areas of life previously unbeknownst to the common urban dweller. There’s so many beautiful urban spaces in cities like like Tokyo, New York City, Dallas, Berlin, Los Angeles and I could go on and on for days. Simply put, the best cities to skate in, are also the best cities to live in — CityLab reports:
After-school skate programs in Colorado and Dayton, Ohio, are proving to be therapeutic for young people with challenges such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Skateboarding’s informal, non-competitive nature normalizes failure—skaters practice a trick hundreds of times, building resilience and perseverance. In Dayton, which has seen the worst effects of the U.S. opioid crisis, these programs can disrupt the toxic peer groups that can lead to substance misuse, and establish good role models instead.
Cities that aren’t the most walkable (look at you L.A.) gets a bad rapport, but the citizens certainly know how to assemble and appeal. There’s a lot to learn from Los Angeles. The same ethos that keeps Los Angeles locked into an ever-evolving urban jungle, is also the engine that keeps urban development in check. Upsetting that balance can mean the difference between a highway dividing a neighborhood, or a brand new bus station. Skateboarding can teach us a lot about DIY and teamwork. The skateboarding communities positive and often progressive ethos could be adopted in communities as a model for fighting for inclusivity and preservation of neighborhoods:
Academics Sharon Dickinson and Chris Giamarino have critically reviewed the tactics skateboarders use to protect the spaces they practice in from being shut down or redeveloped, to understand why some campaigns have been successful while others have failed. DIY or guerrilla regeneration can be applied, alongside more conventional approaches. In Los Angeles, for example, skaters succeeded by appealing to municipal priorities relating to creativity and entrepreneurialism, and presenting their use of the space as convivial and inclusive.
Next time you see a (laughably impossible to enforce) no skateboarding sign in a public square, know you’re in a good place.
