Archive for the ‘Featured’ Category
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.
The recycled cassette wallet: environmentally friendly and cool in equal measures.
Handmade cardboard miniature synthesizers by danmcp. You can see the full set of models on Flickr.
Lovely models, but I can’t help but wonder how much he’d charge to make a mini SH-101.
Behold the humble audio cassette in all its plastic beauty. tapedeck.org has an extensive collection of tapes for your viewing pleasure.
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.
Check out this great photoset on Flickr featuring historical examples of Swiss design.
UPDATE:
More good stuff from our Swiss friends here.
The Jamaica Label Art website features over 1,000 examples of artwork and design from Caribbean vinyl releases.
Issue 3 of Wallspankers is out, the PDF sticker-zine showcasing the adhesive work of scores of international artists and designers.
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.
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?
The welcome screen upon login promised much. Soapbox certainly looks more appealing than YouTube:
(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.
(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.
