Archive for the ‘Featured’ Category

Twisted Fifties

23rd July

2007

The Twisted Fifties online store has launched, offering deviant art prints for the masses.

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The beauty of Digbeth

20th June

2007

The city centre of Birmingham has undergone a relentless process of regeneration and gentrification in recent years. Its much-maligned concrete heart has been ripped out, replaced with shiny new buildings and pedestrian-friendly areas. However, if you’re brave enough to venture down Digbeth High Street you’ll soon discover what this once great industrial city is really about.

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The Cassette Wallet

29th May

2007

The recycled cassette wallet: environmentally friendly and cool in equal measures.
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Synth in your pocket

17th April

2007

Handmade cardboard miniature synthesizers by danmcp. You can see the full set of models on Flickr.

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Lovely models, but I can’t help but wonder how much he’d charge to make a mini SH-101.

Love for the C90

13th April

2007

Behold the humble audio cassette in all its plastic beauty. tapedeck.org has an extensive collection of tapes for your viewing pleasure.

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Those of you born after 1990 should refer to the compact audio cassette page on Wikipedia to find out what the hell these things are.

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Graphic design from Switzerland

16th March

2007

Check out this great photoset on Flickr featuring historical examples of Swiss design.

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UPDATE:

More good stuff from our Swiss friends here.

Jamaican record label artwork

21st February

2007

The Jamaica Label Art website features over 1,000 examples of artwork and design from Caribbean vinyl releases.

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Wallspankers sticker-zine

15th January

2007

Issue 3 of Wallspankers is out, the PDF sticker-zine showcasing the adhesive work of scores of international artists and designers.

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The Best Illustrated Books of 2006

18th November

2006

Every year since 1952, the The New York Times’ Book Review has asked a panel of judges to make a selection from among the several thousand children’s book published that year. This years’ list contains a broad selection of styles from leading illustrators such as Bob Staake and Charlotte Voake.

Illustration by Bob Staake

Microsoft Soapbox Beta – a brief review

16th October

2006

An invite to the private beta of Microsoft’s user-generated video site Soapbox arrived in my inbox today. A direct rival to Google’s YouTube, is Soapbox yet another example of too little too late from Redmond?

Soapbox screenshot

The welcome screen upon login promised much. Soapbox certainly looks more appealing than YouTube:

Soapbox screenshot

(Click the screenshot above to see a larger version).

Proceeding to the main application interface, I wasn’t disappointed. Navigation throughout is a very fluid, Flash-based experience, which works excellently for video-based content.

Searching for content proved very easy: both category selection and free text search were very responsive, and delivered appropriate results. As one would expect from any aspiring Web 2.0 application, all search results are delivered without refreshing the page.

The video player seems more refined that YouTube’s: the core controls are simple and clear, and the tools for rating, tagging and sharing content are equally straight forward. However, it does suffer one fairly irritating flaw; the fullscreen link fails miserably in Firefox on OSX, but as this is in beta, it’s likely this will be fixed prior to launch.

Soapbox screenshot

(Click the screenshot above to see a larger version).

Soapbox looks like it could be a real contender. Microsoft are sure to throw their considerable weight behind it, but they’ll have a real fight on their hands given YouTube’s total dominance in the field of user-generate video.