A tour of a 100-square-foot house owned by Jay of the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.
Category: design
The offices of bldgs, a pair of Atlanta architects, was featured in a New York Times slideshow and article. It’s a pretty cool space, even though it looks like a bit of a disaster from the outside.
Every season, more paint falls off the walls and more rust develops. ItÄôs like an art installation in there—a slow-motion show.
I was just on their website the other day looking at their work on the Florian-Hart residence. [via magnetbox]
Selections from the 1962 Sears Christmas catalog.
I like these clothes hangers, simple leather balls tethered to the wall. They couldn’t be that hard to make on my own.
“It is important to use your hands, this is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator.” –Paul Rand
Photos of stuffed animals turned inside out. I think these inverted bears have more personality than the ones you see on the shelf. They should sell them like this. [via michael surtees]
I like this bit from an interview with Ellen Lupton, talking about common design pitfalls: “My students avoid printing out their work, to save time and money, but then they are disappointed that it doesnÄôt look good. I explain to them that everything looks good on the screen, because of the glowing light and the way we are constantly adjusting the scale of the image to suit ourselves. The same layout may die on the printed page.”
Chip Kidd interviews Milton Glaser: “My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you canÄôt overcome a fatherÄôs resistance youÄôre never going to be able to overcome the worldÄôs resistance.”
How to create an extreme overhang with toy bricks [$]. Via BLDGBLOG, where you’ll find some great images of the crazy stacking and some architectural speculation. I’d love to see some crazy buildings tilting over like that.
Oboiler has a little picket fence for your baseboards to hide wires and cords. A picket fence isn’t really in my aesthetic, but I like the concept. I might go for something that looked like a bridge or an aqueduct or something. [via unclutterer]
Helvetica, the film
Just got back from the local Helvetica screening (presented by AIGA-Atlanta, sponsored by the Art Institute of Atlanta). It was good, but not great. Pretty cool for a relative noob like myself to see Helvetica’s role in design over the past half-century. But I wish there was a little more nitty-gritty talk about how it came about, and less personal testimony and philosophizing about its ubiquity. One nice bonus was the post-film Q&A with director Gary Hustwit and type designer Matthew Carter. I didn’t take a whole lot of notes, so you’ll have to trust me on its overall worthwhility. But I do remember the three books that Carter most highly recommended: Letters of Credit by Walter Tracy, Modern Typography by Robin Kinross, and Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style.
Most of the online designeurotic t-shirt selling craze gives me nausea, but I like this one.
“Minimalism in interior design has become a caricature. Everywhere you find shops or hotels with an ambience that makes you feel like you are in a refrigerator.” Ha! [via jb]
A very cool article on how the National Parks Service is making more realistic maps. [via anil dash]
This Sarajevo Siege Map literally took my breath. Spectacular.
Buckminster Fuller invented the Dymaxion map, which folds and unfolds the Earth in all kinds of ways, so you can arrange the map without any hemispherical hegemony. Here’s a larger image of the Dymaxion map. It’s kind of mind-bending. This version with Antartica and its ocean at the center is particularly cool.
These photos of an oceanside cliffwalk in Chile make me swoon. What a lovely path, beautiful stonework. More photos here in the “recorrido” section.
Mark Larson 
