umbrellaofdesign

You've probably seen this by now: Pentagram at 40. Beautifully written by Naresh Ramchandani and Tom Edmonds. And nicely performed by some bits of paper.

Further camo action on the hill. Studio D’Artisan delivers a pair of five pocket camo shorts. Not much to say that cannot be gathered from the images, expect that they are made in Japan. Ripstop fabric makes them durable and light. Well up there at $215 a pair. Blue & Green has them. Do we see some flying pigs hidden in the pattern?

More detailed looks on the following page.

(...) Read the rest of Studio D’Artisan 5 Pocket Camo Shorts (1 words)

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| order of st. john |

| solar tree, by ross lovegrove, for artemide |

| spring forest, comprising 100 stilted fulton umbrellas, by draisci studio |

| farmiloe building |

| clerkenwell design week official sponsors; jaguar |

| the manufacturing process of johnson tiles |

| swedese |

| zeitraum |

| another country |

| liam treanor | imogen heath |

| matilda |

| farmiloe building |

| tekio, by anthony dickens |

| gen lane pop-up gin bar |

Twisted Pine is a brewery with some funk in their trunk … or tank, as it were. Along with a recently released Carrot IPA, they bring us this brown ale enriched with the likes of wasabi, ginger, and horseradish. The flavors all come through, no doubt, and most impressive, you can pick each one of them out at different points as the ale moves into your gullet. The spiciness also serves to undercut the 7.8-percent ABV, giving the beer a very light finish and the ability to quench summertime thirst.

This article originally appeared on Selectism.com.

Beer | Twisted Pine Big Easy Offbeat Brown

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© 2012 Selectism for Titel Media. Author: Josh Tyson | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us |

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This post is part of our daily series of posts showing the most inspiring images selected by some of the Abduzeedo's writers and users. If you want to participate and share your graphic design inspiration, You can submit your images and inspiration to RAWZ via http://raw.abduzeedo.com and don't forget to send your Abduzeedo username; or via Twitter sending to http://twitter.com/abduzeedo

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2D

Audry5

Cosme

chrisblissdesign

cuded

deiasartori

Dinesh Dave

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Karim Balaa

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BikeSnob is all over the Brooks blog with photos from his recent factory tour to their Birmingham facility. Fans for the ye ole factory tour will enjoy this look at machinery and people who have been working the line for decades. Ole machinery, loads of leather, and craftsman make up this look at one of the world’s most famous saddle makers.

More detailed looks on the following page.

(...) Read the rest of Brooks England Factory Tour – How they Make Saddles (1 words)

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In the 19th century, rural Pennsylvania became the powerhouse of the American economy. The state’s industrial infrastructure supplied the steel to build skyscrapers, the ships to fight wars, and even the glass for millions of windows. But, as America’s manufacturing economy passed away, so did the prominence of Appalachia’s industrial strongholds. If you drive across Pennsylvania today, you’ll see dozens of towering monuments to its past, rusting after decades of disuse.

In its heydey, Bethlehem Steel was the most prominent of Pennsylvania’s mills. It was the second largest producer of steel in the country, transforming the bucolic village of Bethlehem (smack dab between Pittsburgh and Brooklyn) into a vibrant industrial powerhouse. But Bethlehem Steel ultimately went bankrupt, and the town’s steel mills closed officially in 1995. In 2007, the abandoned brownfield property was sold to a corporation interested in turning it into a casino. As part of the redevelopment, part of the mill was slated for retrofitting to accommodate an arts campus of flexible galleries, shops, and community spaces.

After delays due to a (incredibly ironic) worldwide steel shortage, the 68,000-square-foot ArtsQuest campus opened to the public in 2011.

The complex is a "cultural incubator," sitting in the shadow of five 300-foot-high blast furnaces that once produced the world’s steel. Designed by Spillman Farmer Architects, the architecture speaks in a kind of updated industrial dialect. The complex’s 450-seat performance venue, a two-screen state-of-the-art cinema, and myriad flexible performance and community venues are organized by a structural steel skeleton painted in Bethlehem’s trademark International Orange shade. If the color looks familiar, that’s because it’s the same shade as the Golden Gate Bridge (built with Bethlehem Steel). The steel frame is infilled with locally produced precast panels, which lend the new buildings a rawness that echoes the old mill. Salvaged detritus from around the brownfield site is scattered throughout the spaces, note the architects: “Each major threshold is marked by a shroud, a vernacular doorway form found in many of the site’s industrial buildings.” It’s all intended to evoke a continuity between the towering past of Bethlehem and its future, say the architects, who cite Critical Regionalism (critic Ken Frampton’s argument that modern architects should prioritize local vernacular over conceptual rigor) as a guiding principle.

It’s tough to mention a project like this without talking about the originator of the genre: Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park, the Ruhr Valley industrial complex converted into an arts and entertainment campus in 1991. That project, master-planned in part by OMA, inspired several American mill towns to do the same--among them Braddock, Pennsylvania, which has since become a thriving cultural destination. ArtsQuest’s rousing success (it’s hosted over 300 live performances in the past year) indicates that the industrial-site-as-cultural-center typology is a repeatable model for dozens of other dilapidated brownfield sites across the Rust Belt. Spillman Farmer, for their part, just received the AIA’s highest honor for the project.

Find out more about ArtsQuest here.

How rich the life lived in a house that holds an art gallery and is itself a work of art. Them is some serious layers, yo. But of course you must keep your composure in an environment so crisp and refined as this. New York architect Steven Holl has hidden a subterranean, nay, subaqueous, gallery beneath a pool of water. Exciting, we know, but keep it in your pocket as you peruse the photos of this austere and impressive live-work space located in Seoul, South Korea.

And just in case you have any doubts about how serious this seriously awesome building is, just know that “The basic geometry … is inspired by a 1967 sketch for a music score by the composer Istvan Anhalt, ‘Symphony of Modules,’ which was discovered in a book by John Cage titled Notations.” (dezeen)

Photography by Iwan Baan and Inho Lee

More looks after the jump…

(...) Read the rest of Daeyang Gallery and House, Seoul – A Look Inside (1 words)

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We're working with Slava Menn and Brad Geswein, the founders of Gotham Bicycle Defense Industries, to create a new piece of urban biking gear. Unlike most products, this one is being developed from beginning to end by the people who will use it. Our network of urban cyclists are helping us decide everything from design to name. We're calling this experiment Product of the People.

Welcome to my favorite part of the product creation process: industrial design. Quora.com designer Rebekah Cox has said, “Companies try to support designers by giving them ‘a seat at the table.’ In practice, however, a designer is sitting at the table well after the important product decisions that influence the design have been made. This is where muddy designs are born.” To avoid a muddy design, we worked closely with our designer, Eric Whewell, for hours. It was a creative tennis match. We passed Eric initial ideas, and he volleyed back a design on paper. This iterative process went late into the night until Eric served up three powerful design concepts, which you’ll see below.

Vote on your favorite design below. Scroll down to read a few of our technical considerations.

The Defender

The Afterburner

The Predator

 

Which design should we use for our bike light?

As part of the industrial design process, Brad Geswein, my cofounder, made a technical brief for our designer. To write the tech brief, Brad has to think like a mechanical engineer, manufacturing engineer, ergonomics engineer, bike mechanic, and bike light thief. Here are some of the technical considerations he came up with:

• Seat posts have an angle between 69 and 78 degrees. The light mount must angle upward to compensate.
• The light mount should fit seat post diameters from 22 to 35mm.
• We want 180-degree illumination so cars can see the bike from the side.
• We want an aluminum body for light weight and theft-resistant strength.
• We want a custom screw-head to make it theft-resistant.
• We want an easy battery replacement mechanism without easy battery theft.
• The light should be narrow to avoid hitting the cyclists’ inner thighs.

We'll close the poll at 6 p.m. EST on Friday, May 25. In the next stage, we'll refine the design and start working on prototypes.

Lovely new Aesthetic Apparatus print: Miles Davis

There was a time, nearly 20 years ago, when Dickies were the only pants in our arsenal. All we needed was their full workwear rainbow—khaki, blue, grey, brown and black (for weddings)—and a narrow but functional wardrobe was complete. Thankfully our horizons have broadened significantly. Still, these chinos, a collab with Silas, find us nurturing a little nugget of nostalgia.

The seat of these things is a little logo-heavy for our tastes, but Silas was formed around the British skateboarding scene in the late ’90s, and skate gear has always leaned toward that sort of branding. Overriding our one complaint: that little leather-trimmed pocket on the leg and the fancy stripes on the waistband are both aces. Pick up a pair online.

More looks after the jump…

(...) Read the rest of Silas for Dickies – Chinos with Stripes (0 words)

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If the Lorax were to ever actually award a "Certified Truffula Tree of Approval" to a moving vehicle, it'd be a lot more likely to go to a garden-toting truck that brings farms to schools than to a Mazda SUV.

A literal "food truck," Truck Farm Chicago is a nonprofit organization that uses a 1994 Ford F-250 named Petunia to chauffeur a miniature farm. The project, which revved into gear on Earth Day, is a collaboration between sustainable development nonprofit Seven Generations Ahead and eco-friendly book-printer Green Sugar Press, a recent GOOD Maker finalist whose co-founders Shari Brown and Tim Magner were inspired by King Corn director Ian Cheney’s first truck farm in Brooklyn, NY.

While Truck Farm Chicago is one of about 20 truck farms sprawled across the nation, it's set apart by its focus on educating Chicago youth and families about healthy eating. Visits to the truck typically last an hour and consist of a short tour of the farm, plant identification, taste tests, and sensory exploration. Off-truck activities include planting a seed in a newspaper pot to nourish at home and painting their favorite lessons straight onto Petunia. 

"I was excited about this project as a fun, unique and creative way to bring gardening and nutrition education to children all over the city—especially those who may not otherwise get to see how food grows up close,” Brown says. "Making healthy choices can be challenging, especially when good fresh food and education about why it's important and how to cook it is not always accessible. Truck Farm is trying to do our part by using our exhibit to spark these discussions, give youth the tools to make healthy choices, and inspire them to use their own creativity to encourage healthy changes in their communities.""

There’s an enormous need for nutritional education in Chicago, where childhood obesity exceeds the national average: According to the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children, 35 percent of Illinois children between 10 and 17 are obese. In its first year, Truck Farm visited food deserts and underserved communities throughout the city, reaching 2,738 children at 47 schools. This year, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign, they hope to educate more than 3,000 children, strengthen programming opportunities from starting school gardens to follow-up visits, and spread awareness about the importance of good food. 

The community has been instrumental to the organization’s success, Brown says, donating compost, plants, and other supplies. The truck garden was designed and engineered by Chicago Specialty Gardens, which provides Petunia with a raised bed divided into a few sections to ensure the soil stays in place on the road and a drainage system with a permeable layer of landscape fabric. The crew plants seedlings that will sprout quickly, including lettuce, radish, kale, chard, broccoli, kohlrabi, beans, and a variety of herbs. As the weather warms up, cherry tomatoes, basil, rosemary, and eggplants will be added to the mix.

"One of my favorite quotes is, ‘If you don't take care of your body, where will you live?" Brown says. "Every child has the right to know how to care for themselves and to ultimately enjoy a higher quality of life."

Want to learn more about GOOD Maker? Drop us a line at maker[at]goodinc[dot]com, sign up for our email list, or check out the current challenges.

A directory of workspaces for creatives. If you have a spare desk or studio area that you’d like to rent or sublet to artists, designers, musicians, etc., you can list it on Open Studio Club. Interested parties email the listers through the site.

The name is perhaps a bit misleading, as the “club” is really just a directory; no account creation or login is required, which keeps things very lightweight and fluid, though club rules advise caution for everyone involved. There are listings from all over the world, though most seem to be in Europe. More here.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Netflix is an odd digital product. While the general idea of streaming full-screen movies is a simple enough premise, somehow, the service manages to look different on every single platform. On the iPad, Netflix is an extension of the web experience, a bloated browser UI that feels less tangible than it should. On the PS3, it’s a clickable library of icons. On the Xbox 360 (which is Netflix’s best manifestation to date), it’s always changing, having been redesigned at least three times in a few years.

Netflix’s current look on Xbox 360.

In all this, the Netflix desktop experience has been largely devoid of design innovation, which is particularly strange since its framework is the basis of their iOS app. But a new redesign has Netflix looking a lot better on desktops, building the innovation right into the player itself.

So say you’re watching a TV show but you want to check out another episode. A handy popup menu now allows you to quickly hop to any episode in the entire series, all without leaving a full-screen video. Click any episode number, and the UI extends to offer a thumbnail preview and quick synopsis. It’s great, really, really great. I hope that Netflix builds on this UI element so that, during movies, this same button leads me to other Ryan Gosling films.

Netflix’s new streaming interface for browsers.

Other controls are similarly wonderful. You can skip to the next episode with the touch of a button, add captions, change the language, or toggle HD without sorting through a mess of buttons. And in a turn to the beautiful, large typography labels the movie or TV episode you’re viewing whenever it’s paused for a while. (Remember when Zune started doing this big type trick? I’m glad to see that, even though Zune flopped, the big fonts for exploring media have stuck around.)

Big, clear text takes over a paused screen after a while. You can see summaries of other episodes, in screen.

Netflix’s general site UI remains slow and thick to explore, but once you’re actually playing media, the service shifts into something smarter and svelter. It’s exactly the same UI trend we’re seeing on the Xbox 360’s version of Netflix and HBO Go. Once you actually start watching media, the UI keeps you inside the movie screens themselves as much as possible, rather than perpetually kicking you back to the larger library to select the next episode of a show you’d like to watch.

(Xbox Netflix does this so much so, in fact, that it will begin auto-streaming your next episode right within the show’s general information screen as soon as you finish the last one, assuming that you’re looking to binge on Battlestar Galactica or Breaking Bad--which you should be.)

The Xbox 360's addictive take on TV-binge playback controls.

With video services packing more and more options into the players themselves, it will be interesting to see how our viewing habits change. I, for one, tend to get overwhelmed by all of the dusty choices in my own Netflix queue--so much so that I often just shut it down before I watch anything.

But when I make the plunge to stream some Archer, and Netflix teases me with the next episode without ever pulling me from the playback experience? I can only think two things: I really like Archer. And sure, I’ll watch another.

[Hat tip: GigaOM]

Brady bags have been around since the late 1800s, when the company was founded in Birmingham, England. Traditional production methods were applied to fine canvas, which was combined with English bridle leather and made to fasten with brass pieces for this exclusive line of bags for YMC.

Seeing some familiar but classic silhouettes here. We favor the zipper sack because it looks a little like a stolen money bag from the mid 1900s and we are tough as nails [not]. Fine array of colors, too, especially that searing khaki. Too strong a word, perhaps, but it seems to gleam on the computer screen. Speaking of, you can pick these up online for carrying things in the early 2000s.

More looks after the jump…

(...) Read the rest of Brady for YMC – Bags (1 words)

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Richard Blanco is a Chicago-based painter whose geometric paintings I’m completely taken with. Some of his abstract works are for sale as prints on Society6, while others remain as paintings on canvas and paper. A lot of his pieces make me feel like I’m staring in a kaleidoscope and I like it! Check out his Tumblr page for more work.

Some of his prints:

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© 2012 Design Milk | Posted by Caroline in Art | Permalink | No comments

So much to like at Double Bravo. An orange booth and elegant designs inspired by travel? Of course, I’m a fan. It was a pleasure to finally meet designer Barbara Buenz in person as well.

 

This post is in partnership with CLIF Bar

For city dwellers across America, the car has long-since been the transportation tool for every job. In the U.S., 40 percent of all trips happen within 2 miles—with 90 percent of those made by car. Energy food company CLIF Bar recognized the opportunity to rethink the way it looked at daily transportation. The CLIF Bar 2 Mile Challenge (2MC) was created five years ago, beginning as a fun competition between the company's staffers and their family and friends. Continuing strong, the program is now an avenue by which the Emeryville, California-based company is showing a continued commitment to the future of bikes-as-transportation, calling everyone to join to create more positive impact in communities across the country, one bike trip at a time.

Motivation is the key to leaving your car keys at home—opt instead to go by bicycle. CLIF Bar’s experience running the 2MC finds that biking to work or to the store, joining up with friends for an afternoon ride, or just to take in some fresh air is made easier with a little “skin in the game.” This year, each individual biking effort counts towards real impact. Throughout the rest of 2012, CLIF Bar will give away $100,000 to regional nonprofit organizations that support biking. Sign up for the 2 Mile Challenge (it's free) and every bike trip logged will count as $1 going to helping a monthly featured charity.

Register now and then get on your bike! It’s simple to log your bike trips and help pedal the goodness forward inside 2milechallenge.com or the new iPhone App integration.

May’s featured organization is BikeWalkKC. Learn more about them here, and see how many others have taken the challenge and swapped their car for a bike. Join the ride and help CLIF Bar support those organizations working hard towards a more bike-friendly America!

 

News updates all day from your Fast Company editors.

Airbnb just announced it's upping its host guarantee system from $50,000 to $1 million. The home-tel business, a cornerstone of the new Sharing Economy, has partnered with prestigious insurance firm Lloyd's of London to offer hosts increased protection against potential property damages caused by guests. Its a cushy upgrade from Airbnb's original $50,000 host guarantee, which the company installed in response to last year's PR fiasco, in which a San Francisco host reported her guests had vandalized her home. But don't get too excited: You can't just cash in on a few rogue Solo cups. Claimants are subject to an online documentation process and potential inspection.

To keep up with news as it happens, visit our main Fast Feed page.