umbrellaofdesign

Don Draper drinks an Old Fashioned because he’s a man. Rocky Balboa drank his protein shakes--five raw eggs--for strength. Phil drank sweet vermouth because it was Rita’s favorite libation in Groundhog’s Day (and he was trying to get her into bed). And Alex and the gang from A Clockwork Orange drank their opiate-laced Moloko Plus’s to gear up for “ultraviolence.”

Some characters drink only what they can afford (not pictured: Homer Simpson’s cheap orders of the skunky Duff beer), and others are associated so closely with their drink of choice (also not pictured: Seabiscuit’s penchant for Budweiser, which personified both the horse and the beer as true Americans) that it’s difficult to separate the two. But when it’s an author or screenwriter playing puppet master, no drink gets ordered by accident.

The Cocktail Chart of Film & Literature, a new print from Pop Chart Labs, shows exactly where narrative storytelling and libations dovetail. “We started with what characters and drinks we could pull from the top of our heads. Then we researched, and got sort of lost in the close marriage of story and booze in the course of fictive history,” William Prince, Pop Chart’s managing editor, tells Co.Design. The team--whose past work charts the labyrinthine worlds of beer, wine, and martinis--had labored to create a literary-themed poster for some time. “As in all things, once we added alcohol," Prince says, "everything started to seem more attractive.”

Some notorious drink orders were easy to come by, like The Dude’s White Russion and Daisy’s Mint Juleps. Some stories actually need to be told without any alcohol at all, like the alien Edgar’s sugar water in Men in Black. But with only 49 signatures on the poster, some tales were, sadly, left on the bar room floor. “There were ultimately some tee-totalers that didn’t make the cut,” Prince says. “Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s, 'Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.’ was a hard omission to stomach.”

The Cocktail Chart of Film & Literature is available at Pop Chart Labs for $27.

Unfinished concrete is combined with exposed plywood in this Tokyo apartment renovated by Japanese architecture firm TANK (+ slideshow)

TANK wanted to create a more spacious and flexible layout in the compact Japanese apartment, which was previously divided by a narrow corridor into various cramped rooms.

"I considered that the room should have flexibility and the tenant can arrange it as she likes," explains the designer.

The team began by making the bathroom much larger and inserting sliding doors on both sides, enabling an extra route between the bedroom and the hallway.

The narrow entrance hall is designed as a "Doma" - a traditional Japanese entranceway - with a bare concrete floor that contrasts with the raised wooden flooring of the living area.

An exposed larch frame extends out beneath a raw concrete ceiling, while vertical batons combine with plywood sheets to form a screen dividing the bedroom from the living area.

The bedroom and adjacent closet are doorless, with walls and ceilings designed to look deliberately incomplete.

"There are no doors for the bedroom or walk-in closet," explains TANK. "The walls and ceiling have an unfinished look, I leave it to the tenant's taste as to how to utilise these rooms."

A clear glass lampshade houses a bare bulb that descends from the ceiling in the bedroom, casting long shadows from the wooden frame.

Other projects we've featured by TANK on Dezeen include an apartment with floors and ceilings covered in the same boards and a Tokyo apartment with removable patches of carpet to be used as flip flops.

See more Japanese houses on Dezeen, or see our Pinterest board filled with Japanese residences.

Floor plan - click for larger image Elevation one - click for larger image Elevation two - click for larger image Elevation three - click for larger image Elevation four - click for larger image

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After Architecture, a collaborative design house founded by two Cornell University seniors in the Bachelor of Architecture program, designed the Twofold bench, seating to accommodate two user groups, along with two types of behavior.

The all-in-one table slash bench design can host the average person of average height and seat them comfortably 18″ off the ground, perfect for resting your feet or playing a game of chess. The other type of user would be children, with space for the child to slide in and have the table be chest high for game playing or just to feel like a big kid.

The bench is milled from plywood profiles, basically inverting the way plywood is traditionally used, causing the linear layers to be exposed. The edges were then painted with a bright, neon color making the curved geometry of the piece pop.

Twofold was designed for a site outside the Boston Children’s Museum at Fort Point Channel and is currently on display as part of the Design Museum Boston’s Street Seats: Reimagining the Public Bench Exhibition.

I’m in love with this series of package designs that Make and Matter developed for Epic, a line of 100% grass fed animal protein bars.

The monster tornado that hit the Oklahoma City suburbs this week did more than just take lives. It also left countless people without homes. The most commonly-used shelter solutions are far from ideal. Tents are difficult to live in for long periods of time, and trailers are too bulky to be practical. There are other shelter solutions out there, though, and many of them are better-designed than what we have today.

One of the best long-term solutions we’ve seen comes from Visible Good, a startup that has created a lightweight, easy to assemble, folding, modular shelter that’s somewhere between a tent and a trailer. Visible Good co-founder John Rossi told us in a recent interview why he thinks the company Rapid Deployment Model (RDM) is useful in disaster situations: "The reality is, there really is a gap that this little structure fits into. It’s got the hard walls and insulation of a more conventional building, and it’s compact and packs into its own floor, so you don’t lose parts, things don’t go missing, it doesn’t fall apart, and you’ve got a very neat little package that’s easy to ship and easy to set up."

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When it was announced last fall that Newsweek, after nearly 80 years as a weekly news magazine, would ditch print and go all digital, it seemed to many like an ill omen--the first step toward an inevitable demise, sort of like when a network unceremoniously boots a faltering TV show to a Saturday night time slot. And indeed, the prospects for Newsweek's survival as a subscriber-supported, tablet-first magazine looked grim; consider the fate of News Corp’s much ballyhooed iPad-only mag The Daily, which was a complete and utter dud despite considerable resources and ringing endorsements from Apple itself.

Thankfully, that isn’t quite the path Newsweek is headed down today. Its new lease on life doesn’t just come in the form of a tablet app but a website, too, built with the help of Huge, the digital agency whose successes include the beloved HBO GO app and CNN’s flashy new website. What they’ve managed to cook up for Newsweek is both compelling and, in terms of web publications, simply a little bit different from much else out there. The new Newsweek is a handsome digital experience that taps into the social and multimedia opportunities offered by the web, sure, but it’s also the rare website that shuns the Internet’s breakneck news cycle and sticks to the magazine’s original raison d’etre as a curated collection of relevant stories. And it’s going to do it at the same pace as its pulp predecessor: once a week, every week.

A WHITE SPACE IN THE MARKET

To readers who’ve grown accustomed to a constant flow of new stories from their favorite pubs--even the ones with staid print origins, like the New Yorker and the Atlantic--Newsweek's model of putting out new content every Wednesday, but only every Wednesday, might seem deliriously out of touch. But from the start, Newsweek and Huge were set on doing something different. And the throwback publishing schedule is just a part of that plan.

For the last few years, Newsweek's presence on the web has more or less been an unglamorous existence as a sub-section of The Daily Beast, the popular news site that merged with Newsweek in 2010. "It hasn’t really been able to breathe on its own," says Eric Moore, managing director at Huge NY. The new site gives it some room to breathe, certainly. But for Baba Shetty, Newsweek's CEO, the redesign was also a chance to do an entirely new type of web publication--something more like a magazine, really, than a traditional news site.

"We felt there was still a place in the media landscape for taking a step back, reflecting, and framing the week."

That meant staying true to Newsweek's original mission: giving readers a curated selection of stories from the week. In a digital media landscape dominated by speed and volume, Shetty hoped to preserve the idea of the "issue," he says, "and the coherence that brings to the reading experience."

"I think there’s actually a beautiful restraint with what Newsweek is," he explains. "We felt there was still a place in the media landscape for taking a step back, reflecting, and framing the week…this idea that there’s been a set of editorial decisions about what the most important things are to focus on."

But Shetty thought there was another way Newsweek could stand out from the pack, in addition to editorial outlook. The real opportunity, he thought, was in user experience.

"Most of professional media on the web has been crafted from a couple of conventions that work for the business but aren’t particularly good for the end user," he says. Here he’s talking about the irritating, pageview-grabbing tactics like splitting long articles up into a dozen smaller chunks, hiding visual content behind endless, slow-moving slideshows, and throwing any and all news against your screen in the hope that some of it will stick.

What it all amounted to, Shetty says, was "a tremendous white space in the market for an iconic media property that devotes itself to user-first publishing."

USER-FIRST PUBLISHING

One way the new Newsweek, which launched last week in beta form, can be seen as a user-first product is simply in how nice it looks. The site is a highly visual affair, built for engagement and enjoyment, not pure news-dumping efficiency. Upon arrival, readers are greeted with a cover story, complete with Newsweek word mark, that stretches across the entire width of their screen. The rest of the week’s stories pour forth below, though they’re arranged by importance, not by chronology. As Meg Man, the Associate Creative Director at Huge who led the project, explains, "We definitely didn’t want to make another daily news website."

The site was designed to showcase Newsweek's long form content, a format that’s "not typically done well digitally," Man says. The story pages themselves are clean and visual-heavy, like the homepage, with full-width banners up top and dynamic "image windows" interspersed throughout. The text runs in a clean column on the left-center of the screen, rendered in a generous 21-point font. Ample images interject from the right side of the screen, breaking up the lengthy blocks of text but never distracting you from it. That, Man says, was particularly important.

"Readability was always first in our minds."

"We’re telling a story with this page, and that’s not just through the words," she explains. "But the supporting content, and the images that help draw your eye down the page and keep you engaged, shouldn’t actually be interrupting what you’re there to do in the first place. Which is reading the article. Readability was always first in our minds."

Other clever details can be found throughout. There are some that draw from Newsweek's print past, like a table of contents that can be summoned from any page on the site. Features that are commonplace on today’s news sites, like social-media sharing tools, are still deployed in thoughtful new ways. Instead of just dropping the stock-sharing widgets on every story page, for example, Huge created a gorgeous full-screen pop-up that gives users massive, click-friendly buttons for sharing articles. The way these buttons are presented--not as third-party doodads but as part and parcel of the Newsweek product itself--are just the type of considered details that lend the overall experience a cohesive, magazine-style vibe.

SCALABLE AND SUSTAINABLE

The result of all that care is a series of long-form pieces that are bold and beautiful--similar to the types of immersive, digital-first experiences we’ve been seeing more and more of lately, like the New York Times' celebrated digital opus Snow Fall, published last December. That article, an incredible account of a fatal avalanche at Tunnel Creek in Washington, was a stunning marriage of first-rate reporting and bespoke, multimedia-heavy presentation.

But Huge wasn’t just tasked with creating a one-off digital extravaganza. It had to come up with a design that would work week after week. And as remarkable as Snow Fall was, Man points out, it took 15 designers to complete. "We just don’t think that’s a sustainable model," she says.

Huge created a template that can work every week, regardless of content.

What they did instead was create a template that can work every week, regardless of what the lead story is about, how long it is, or what kind of multimedia material comes along with it. "We wanted to make sure this was something that could be maintained without too much editorial effort," Man says, a directive that became the "highest priority" as they fleshed out the design.

That, of course, meant that some ideas had to be left on the cutting room floor. "There were lots of features we came up with," Moore, the Managing Director, notes. "We tried to select the best that also were scalable to use on a weekly basis." But they hope the final product is one that will prove both flexible and simple--a template that doesn’t actually look like a template, from the reader’s perspective. Essentially, the aim was to deliver some of the visual dazzle and polish of Snow Fall without relying on a team of designers to custom-tailor the product every week.

BIG BEAUTIFUL ADS, USED SPARINGLY

But a scalable, user-first experience is only part of the equation. Web publishing is linked inextricably with advertising, and Shetty thinks the redesign has a chance to push the envelope there, too.

All the content will be freely available to start, though eventually the plan is to introduce a pay wall and a encourage subscription for frequent readers. In the meantime, though, Shetty thinks the site’s approach to on-screen ads could break new ground. Instead of a standard display ad model, Newsweek's pursuing a sponsorship system, where a limited number of brands will get prominent placement on the site.

Instead of a standard display ad model, a limited number of brands will get prominent placement on the site.

The ad units, which will debut next month, will be "big and beautiful and highly impactful," Shetty says, but "used sparingly." Individual stories will have no more than one unit; the home page will typically show two. More importantly, Shetty says they’ll be "in complete harmony with the rest of the design of the product." Essentially, the approach to ads is the same the redesign takes to the social sharing tools: they’re not foreign material to be awkwardly shoehorned in, but rather part of the product itself. "It’s not going to be the sea of rectangles you typically see," Shetty says. "It’s all part of once piece of thinking. If we had a conventional business model, we’d have to have a conventional site design."

Of course, ads are ads, and they’ll still ultimately be a distraction. But if Newsweek is going to survive, they’ll be a necessary one. On today’s fast-flowing, source-saturated web, it’s going to be hard to operate purely, or even partly, on a subscription-based model, even with big, pretty pictures, deft curation, and a user-friendly reading experience.

But whatever its own fate, Newsweek's redesign does give an enticing glimpse of what web publishing could look like going forward. It’s a bet that some readers won’t be satisfied by quick hits and listicles, and that a weekly dose of thoughtful editorial signal can find a foothold amidst a web full of noise. Is that naive? Maybe. But it’s certainly readable.

Check out the new Newsweek here.

When it was announced last fall that Newsweek, after nearly 80 years as a weekly news magazine, would ditch print and go all digital, it seemed to many like an ill omen--the first step toward an inevitable demise, sort of like when a network unceremoniously boots a faltering TV show to a Saturday night time slot. And indeed, the prospects for Newsweek's survival as a subscriber-supported, tablet-first magazine looked grim; consider the fate of News Corp’s much ballyhooed iPad-only mag The Daily, which was a complete and utter dud despite considerable resources and ringing endorsements from Apple itself.

Thankfully, that isn’t quite the path Newsweek is headed down today. Its new lease on life doesn’t just come in the form of a tablet app but a website, too, built with the help of Huge, the digital agency whose successes include the beloved HBO GO app and CNN’s flashy new website. What they’ve managed to cook up for Newsweek is both compelling and, in terms of web publications, simply a little bit different from much else out there. The new Newsweek is a handsome digital experience that taps into the social and multimedia opportunities offered by the web, sure, but it’s also the rare website that shuns the Internet’s breakneck news cycle and sticks to the magazine’s original raison d’etre as a curated collection of relevant stories. And it’s going to do it at the same pace as its pulp predecessor: once a week, every week.

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Apple recently counted down to iTunes reaching 50,000,000,000 billion app downloads. Now, that's a lot of zeroes. Montessorium was lucky enough to be featured as part of the countdown, on the homepage of Apple. Take a look!

Every five days, a billion tiny stories are generated by people around the world. Those messages aren’t just being lost in the ether, like the imaginary output of monkeys randomly attempting to produce the works of Shakespeare. Instead, the tweets are being archived by the Library of Congress as part of the organization’s mission to tell the story of America. The archive now includes 170 billion posts and counting.

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Copenhagen designer Cecilie Manz has created a collection of aluminium lampshades with softly angled edges for Danish brand Lightyears.

The round Mingus shades by Cecilie Manz for Lightyears have profiles with four facets, giving them an angular appearance.

Each is composed of a matt-lacquered aluminium shade and a white or grey textile cord.

An acrylic fixture sits snuggly within the top of the lampshade, allowing a soft light to seep gently upwards onto the cord.

The lamps are available in two sizes and six colours including white, nearly black, very grey, pale moss, light celadon and dusty limestone.

Mingus can also be bought at Folklore, a north London shop that we've previously featured on Dezeen. Read the story here.

The lamps are named after American jazz musician and composer Charles Mingus.

Other pendant lamps we've recently featured on Dezeen include two monochrome lamps by Zaha Hadid, and a collection of small and colourful lamps made from recycled aluminium.

See all our stories about lamp design »

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Readymade funding

If you're up to date with the stream of negative business voices out there, they'll tell you that securing funding is the hardest part of starting a business these days. But, if you have a regular salary landing in your bank account every month, you've got the funding for the early stages of your business sorted.

Don't forget: One day, you will leave your steady salary behind. Saving as much as possible while you know what's coming in will give you a safety net when leaving the nest of full time employment.

Up to date skills

Alan Sugar swears that every entrepreneur should work in whatever industry they're starting a business in. But the truth is, whether you're in the right sector or not, the skills you use every day at work will help you get your business going. Whether it's IT capabilities, organisation or networking, working life offers you opportunities every day to improve the skills you'll need as an entrepreneur.

Don't forget: While your day job is a great training place for skills, there will be aspects of starting a business that you'll never practice there. Your innovation, marketing and commitment will be tested every day in a way full time work won't have prepared you for. Use courses or Smarta 100 Academy events to help build up your confidence in the areas you haven't used recently.

Contacts

Don't be secretive about your business. Tell everyone at work you're ideas and listen to their advice. And say yes to every favour you can to build up a team of people who will return the favours and sing your praises once your business starts.

Don't forget: It's important to understand where you work and what's acceptable there. Starting a business is an exciting time and you're going to want everyone to know what you're doing, but letting your boss know you're desperate to get out will only muddy the water. Once you've started a business, every relationship is crucial, don't forget that in your relationships at work.

The final push

If and when you do decide it's time to leave your day job behind, it will be the perfect motivation to put everything you've got into getting your business growing. Chances are, you'll have left because you need to invest your time in your business rather than that safe salary, and that thought should drive you to make the most of every minute you have to spend on your business.

Of course, there are other ways to boost your business by leaving your job, like Mr Cake, who generated incredible viral PR with his resignation in the icing of one of his homemade cakes.

Don't forget: Everything will change when you leave your day job. You won't have anyone setting your deadlines, your targets and your long term goals. You'll be setting those yourself and you'll need to get used to that quickly. Quitting your job isn't about giving yourself a holiday, it's about giving yourself the time to focus on making your business a success.

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Fast Company

Ai Weiwei is an unusual guy--so unusual that the Chinese authorities felt the need to lock him up in 2011 for 81 days as part of a crackdown on activists.

His new music video is a re-creation of his prison environment right down to the wallpaper. It's a promotion for "Dumbass," the first single from his first music album.

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Get excited, Star Trek fans and self-tracking enthusiasts: your real-life tricorder is now available for pre-order.

Scanadu, a startup based at the NASA Ames Research Center, has been working on a non-invasive tricorder for over two years. By the end of 2012, the company had a prototype ready--a handheld Yves Behar-designed device that tracks pulse transit time (to measure blood pressure), temperature, ECG, oximetry, heart rate, and breathing rate. A 10 second scan of a person’s temple yields data that has a 99% accuracy rate. That information is automatically sent via Bluetooth to the user’s smartphone.

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Anagrama recently completed this playful, feminine identity, collateral and packaging for Cocolobo, a high-end women’s fashion boutique.

Cocolobo is a high-end shopping boutique that caters exclusively to strong women with a confident and in vogue fashion sense. For the naming, we played with the shop’s main patrons’ characteristic duality, in a catchy and fun play with words: “Coco” (coconut in Spanish) and “lobo” (Spanish for wolf). The Cocolobo woman is not only feminine and sweet, but also independent, aggressive, sensuous and daring. The color palette also invests in this polarity, with black and white portraying the elegant, sober aspect of the brand and the red representing all that is feminine and chic.

Sure, Pac-Man, which turns 33 on May 22, looks awfully basic when you compare it to, say, Call of Duty: Ghosts.

But the arcade game created by Japanese designer Toru Iwatani was something to see when it was released back in 1980, especially when compared to black-and-white predecessors like Pong and Asteroids.

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of poet Sylvia Plath’s classic novel The Bell Jar. If you missed reading it as an angsty teen, the bildungsroman lightly fictionalizes Plath’s summer as a guest editor at the women’s magazine Mademoiselle in 1953, after which she had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. There have been several biographies of Plath--the 50th anniversary of her death, from sticking her head in an oven, is also this year--but Elizabeth Winder’s new book, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953, is the first to focus completely on that heady first breakdown period in Plath’s life.

Though she was only 30 when she died, Plath left a very large body of work: two award winning books of poetry (The Colossus and Ariel), The Bell Jar, reams of journal entries, and many other poems, stories and half-finished novels. Because of those meticulously kept journals and the many letters she wrote to her mother and others, we have a very good idea of how Plath worked. According to Diane Middlebrook, who wrote the Plath biography Her Husband, about Plath’s relationship with the British poet Ted Hughes, Sylvia had a lot of physical energy, which she channeled into intellectual productivity. “All in all, Plath was a decidedly unrelaxing person to be around,” Middlebrook says.

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Some words from languages around the world frustratingly have no equivalent in English. Other words for complicated and difficult-to-convey ideas simply haven’t been invented yet. A new website, however, is dragging a bunch of these previously inexpressible words into existence.

The Emotionary is an online depository for words that express feelings such as "ambiviculty"--the anxiety associated with making a decision due to constant self-doubt and ability to see equal merit in each outcome. Created by actress Eden Sher, the site mines some thorny emotional territory, and gives it a name, mostly by jamming two existent words together in interesting ways.

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