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I’ve been blogging for several months now and I’m glad to have recieved the feedback I have. I’ve enjoyed the experince and for that reason I’ve decided to take blogging to another level. I’ll be self hosting my blog and that means you’ll see a lot more creativity in the design, functionality and layout of the new blog.
Check it out: www.SONofFIVErivers.com
Cheers
Retro & Vintage Design
So I woke up pretty early this morning (5:30am) and thought lets work on a project that I’ve been postponing for a while… So I collected some vintage and retro art design for this long overdue project and thought some people might find it inspiring. I enjoy the branding side of business and I think this look can help a business stand out by giving it a unique and distinct flavor.
As an individual whos all about requirements gathering I find it very difficult to sit with a designer and just explain what I need. I’ve about diagrams, charts, brief statements, pictures etc. So this collection should help me with that process and also provide me with a single place to store all these pictures. Hope its useful for whatever you need it for, enjoy!
Some of these pics came came from http://www.smashingmagazine.com, an online magazine dedicated to designers and developers.
- illustrations from old posters, movies, newspapers, CDs, vinyls, ads;
- old-style typography (e.g. Roman typefaces);
- script fonts and handwriting;
- old radio devices;
- old TV devices;
- old cars;
- old packaging;
- old photos;
- vibrant rainbow colors (high contrast, neon-style);
- torn, used paper with stains (often yellowish paper);
- dark, dirty colors (brown, dark red, dark blue) and textures (e.g. paper);
- scrapbooks;
- pop-art elements (see also Pop Art Is Alive: Classics and Modern Artworks);
- retro illustrations;
- old-style signs;
- vintage and retro are often combined with a hand-drawing style and grunge style.
~ The Statement ~ The Official Blog of The Old State
ISO50 – The Visual Work of Scott Hansen
The Ernest Hemingway Collection
The Dollar Dreadful Family Library
Renaissance-Designs
Business ER Hotline
Business BC Launches “Business ER Hotline”:
Economic Climate a Hot Topic for Small Business Sector
Vancouver – Small Business BC (SBBC) has launched the “Business ER (Emergency) Hotline” providing BC’s small businesses with the solutions and business strategies to deal with the current economic conditions.
The Business ER Hotline, 1-800-667-2272, will enable SBBC to quickly address and respond to crisis-related business issues.
In addition to a 1-800 number, clients can ask questions and access information via email, or they can go to the Business ER Hotline website, www.smallbusinessbc.ca/businessER, or visit the SBBC Vancouver office in person, 601 West Cordova Street.
SBBC Consulting CEO, George Hunter, explains the reason for launching the Business ER Hotline: “Our staff has noted a significant increase in questions relating to changes in the economy. For example, people want to know what kind of training programs are available for upgrading skills, or, which sectors are showing promise for new business opportunities, such as BC’s healthcare sector. There are many people newly out of work who are now exploring the idea of starting a business.”
SBBC also reports an increase in questions regarding financing options and business strategies for tougher economic times such as how to cut expenses and build revenue, as well as a significant number of inquiries regarding labour standards.
“The Business ER Hotline offers a direct way to get timely information out to business owners and their employees as well,” says Hunter, “The small business community is important to our economy and SBBC is pleased to be able to provide a link to current information and provide support as small business owners navigate a changing economic landscape.”
Hunter encourages small business owners to contact SBBC via the Business ER Hotline, or go to their website, www.smallbusinessbc.ca, to find out more about the comprehensive services SBBC offers, such as financing options and sources, government acts and regulations, one-on-one business counseling, market research and consultation, business planning services, business seminars, e-business information and an education and resource centre
Portable Work Station
These LEED (Leader in Energy & Environmental Design) and Built Green Building Certifications are the in thing when it comes to new development. This means that those who ware developing news sustainable and homes and commercial units are bring more work with them to the job site. That’s why I think this is great product and a great idea.
Is It Transportable? From Louis Vuitton to the Finley Plan Station, we are intrigued by transportable designs. They usually take up a lot less space, and are well suited to a more mobile lifestyle. They often display clever use of materials and hardware, and ingenious design ideas. And, like the Finley Plan Station, they don't always cost the earth. More: Less is More: Fold Away Wall Desks Room in a Box: You Can Take it With You Credit: Finley Products
Saving The Bee’s Project
Most of the world’s crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”.
“This newly created hive of bees was overwhelmed by a wasp attack … every single bee was killed … all the eggs and larvae were eaten … all the honey was stolen by the wasps … I found a large pile of dead bees on the mesh floor … no living bees in the hive at all … hundreds of bee-wings scattered … I could see legs, heads, thoraxes by the hundreds … I didn’t realize that wasps physically dismember bees, biting off wings, legs and heads … possibly they do this to carry away the bees’ abdomens, which they may use to feed their own larvae … I made six new wasp traps today and placed them around the hives … there were dozens of wasps inside the traps within 15 minutes … so the local wasp population evidently is really high this year …”
The predatory nature of wasps actually helps balance things in certain ecological systems. Their action against harmful caterpillars, for example, can be useful in the Sierra foothills in California.
But more than half of fruit and vegetable crops may be pollinated by honey bees. They are honored by many entomologists, in fact, as among the most beneficial of insect species – and that’s before they produce 200 million pounds of honey annually.
Wasps are not the only threat to bees. The so called Colony collapse disorder (CCD), is a relatively new phenomenon, which causes whole colonies of bees to disappear. CCD is believed to pose a serious threat to pollination in the future and stresses why we have to protect bees.
When wasps raid beehives, it never goes well for the bees. They’re no match for the larger, more powerful wasps. A single attack normally takes out an entire hive, as is described in the August 2008 account excerpted above, from California.
The significance of the design name “6.40mm,” then becomes quickly evident. The girth of the average bee is only 6.40 millimeters, a third of what a wasp’s may be. And by creating cell-shaped holes big enough for bees to enter a modern hive, but too small for wasps to follow them in, a group of designers from Seoul and Hong Kong believe they are able to make an effective intervention in this cycle of destruction.
“The new beehive we designed is totally similar to others at first glance,” the team writes in its documentation.” But in addition to the smaller hole, the new hive is made of six wooden boards. The top cover contains a steel piece to hold the body of the box together. The bottom has two legs for air flow. An instruction manual is engraved on the interior. And the “queen excluder” – which keeps the queen bee safely in the “brood chamber” – is positioned under the storage area for honey.
“Through a little change of thinking,” the team writes, “we can change big.”
no bee’s no pollen,
no pollen no plants,
no plants no animals,
no animals no food.
Sheltering the Urban Homeless
Here’s an Idea, an inflatable igloo-looking shelter, the ParaSITE is meant to attach to the exhaust points of urban buildings’ heating and cooling systems – in a sense, making a parasitic relationship to the air needed to inflate the shelter.
Though the creation of permanent housing must always be of first priority Parasite propose a possible temporary solution. The paraSITE units in their idle state exist as small, collapsible packages with handles for transport by hand or on one’s back. In employing this device, the user must locate the outtake ducts of a building’s HVAC system. The intake tube of the collapsed structure is then attached to the vent. The warm air leaving the building then inflates and heats the double membrane structure.
Chulha (Traditional Stove in India)
Research cited by the World Health Organization indicates that nearly half the world continues today to cook with solid fuels including dung, wood, agricultural residues and coal. Such “bio-mass” fuels are blamed for diseases that result in deaths numbered in more than one million per year.
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The Chulha is a stove designed to limit the dangerous health conditions caused by traditions of indoor cooking in many rural areas of the developing world.
BIO-MASS BREAKTHROUGH
The way the design teams behind the Chulha stove design like to put it, they’re “helping 400 million people give up smoking.”
What at INDEX: is called Design to Improve Life is termed, at Philips Design, “Philanthropy by Design.” And Philips’ teams in India and the Netherlands have worked together to create this smokeless response to a vast health problem.
Initially intended for rural and semi-urban parts of India, the design is intended to take the dangers of indoor cooking with bio-mass fuels out of an equation that health officials say affects the health of millions of people each year.
Bio-mass fuels include wood, dung and other substances which, when burned give off an array of particles dangerous to human respiratory systems. Adequately ventilated in an outdoor setting, there usually is no problem with such cooking. But by one estimate, as many as half the people of the world may still be cooking indoors with bio-mass fuels. And trapped inside, the smoke involved can become a lethal mix of indoor pollutants.
As the Philips design teams have noted, once they began to study the problem, the range of application was a huge issue. “The stove would have to accept different bio-mass fuels,” the teams wrote, “be widely available in different seasons and locations, adapt to people’s needs when cooking chapatti (bread), steaming rice, boiling water, and be able to accept different non-standard cooking vessels.”
The improved stove directs the smoke out of the house through a chimney. Philips went on to make its intellectual property on the design available free of charge – even working to develop molds that would allow NGOs (non-governmental organizations as identified by the UN) to make the stoves for people who need them the most.
One of the NGOs Philips has identified as a partner in the development of the Chulha is the Appropriate Rural Technology Institute of India.
Putting Needles in Cans Safely
Some people may not see the significance of this invention, but I’ve s seen this problem first hand with my work in the Downtown East Side the poorest and most drug riddled neighbourhood in Canada. This yellow cap was designed by Hân Pham to address the “Needle-stick” injuries with used syringes.
Disposable Biodgradable Mug for 3rd World
This may not make sense to you because of where you live and how you were raised, but imagine the hygiene and environmental factor for people in third world countries. Plus this would be good for camping and your home emergency/ earthquake kit.
“When I was a student,” Paul Sandip recalls, “I had to travel by trains. And because of our large population here in India, you normally don’t get reserved-ticket service. In fact, you normally have to travel sitting in the aisles. “So lots of travelers, like me, had observed this pressing need of people who use the public toilets in these trains. We Indians prefer to use water to wash ourselves, instead of using toilet paper. But there was no product that was catering to this need. So people would carry maybe empty water bottles or teacups, something like that.” Water, Sandip clarifies, is supplied on the trains, with taps in each public lavatory. But without containers, it’s useless to travelers.
“So I started thinking, why not have a product a person could buy inexpensively on a platform? Something nice and portable. It needed to be foldable because you’re traveling and you don’t have much space. It also had to be something you could throw away. You wouldn’t want to use it again because it would be very dirty. So you wanted something you would throw off the train.” “But then, you had to think, when you say you’re going to throw it off — a very huge concern arises because you have to ask if this product is going to harm the environment or not. A lot of people would want to use this, and it might create a lot of nuisance.” “That’s when I started exploring materials and came across a particular type of paper which had both the strength to withstand 1.2 liters of water, but which could also be glued with organic glue, and thirdly, that it would disintegrate after some point in time. I needed to connect these three different ideas of hygiene, portability and eco-friendliness. “The place I come from is an ancient part of India,” the Kolkata region of portable in West Bengal, known to some by its anglicized name, Calcutta. “And there, we have a type of paper for vendors to use in selling food. After you use it, you can just throw it away. And those packages are made from recycled newspapers.” Using this paper as his starting point, Sandip has test-marketed his Disposable Mug with the state railway’s cooperation on one of its longest lines. What the railway authority has asked is that private vendors make Sandip’s mugs available on the train platforms. Sandip’s effort now is to find sponsors who will pay for the paper and glue in exchange for advertisements printed on the mugs. To move to this next phase, Sandip has a business partner, a brother of his wife. “My brother-in-law has been thinking on how this can be manufactured,” Sandip says. “Because this product is needed all over the country — and that means logistics could be a huge problem. So the idea is to have it manufactured by the people who live in slums by the train lines. They live in unemployment and poverty, and this would give them something to sell. It creates the product all over the country. We just need the funding for purchasing the raw materials.” Sandip and his brother-in-law, then, are working on finding advertiser-underwriters of the product, to get the paper and glue into the hands of the slum dwellers who will make and sell it. “And you know,” Sandip says, “I normally deal with housewares and utensils as a designer. I have a small range of products, things housewives use at home. But for me, it’s not enough just to think about styling in design. You also want to put heart into it. That’s the real difference.” Additional credits: Bhushan Bawankule; Indian Railway Authority. Written by Porter Anderson |
Worst Packaging (NOT Sustainable)
Complete unstainable, and aginst common sense and logic!
SEE Brilliant Sustainable Packaging Here
HP Made both my lists (Best and Worst Packaing) A large box containing smaller ones... 17 of them. All of that for 32 pieces of A4 paper (wrapped two by two in pink foam). We're not suggesting this is standard practice at HP, but if this is real, they probably should have a closer look at some of their processes.
SEE Brilliant Sustainable Packaging Here
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TSon of Five Rivers
THIS SITE HAS MOVED:
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www.SONofFIVErivers.com
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