Wrench Monkees
August 9th, 2010When it comes to minimal design, my passion for it extends way beyond graphic design. When it comes to design in general, whether it be a house, a shirt, or a spoon, I also prefer a minimal approach and aesthetic. So when I saw these custom motorcycles by Copenhagen based shop Wrench Monkees, I immediately fell in love.
Most of their bikes have a cafe racer style which I love, and the bikes are stripped down to their bare essentials: a motor, two wheels and a handle bar. The bikes have more a mechanical look to them as oppose to the mainstream bikes that are all cover in plastic.
When looking for inspiration, even motorcycles can influence my designs. I love it.
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Nooka Mercury
June 11th, 2010It’s good to be back. Hope everyone had a great week.
While I was away, lifestyle brand Nooka released this super minimal, ridiculously stylish sunglasses. The shades feature a polymer injected frame, blue lenses with silver mirror finish and are available in 6 fancy colors.
I’m a huge fan of Nooka, and with the Mercury they continue their simple approach in both aesthetic and construction. It’s a great addition to their already excellent lineup. Matt and crew are drinking the good stuff over there.
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Naoto Fukasawa
March 12th, 2010I’ve been obsessed with furniture design, specifically chair design, for some time now. My all-time favorite chair designer is none other than the brilliant Hans Wegner. If you’ve never heard of the name, you’ve probably seen one of his classic chairs.
Recently though, I’ve become obsessed with the chair designs of Naoto Fukasawa. Fukasawa is best known for his MUJI CD player, Plus Minus Zero Humidifier, and au/KDDI INFOBAR and Neon phones, all of which are part of MoMA’s permanent collection.
Since 2008, Fukasawa has designed a furniture series for Japanese company Maruni Collection for their Hiroshima line. The collection includes a dinning set and a living set, all constructed with beech and oak wood. The entire line is simply stunning, but what stands out for me are the small dining chairs pictured here. The simple, streamlined design, the mix of sharp and rounded edges and corners, along with the choice of wood make for a beautifully designed chair. Too bad it costs an arm and a leg or I’d fill up my apartment with them.
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Welcome to The New AisleOne
February 1st, 2010It’s finally here, after months of on and off work I’m proud to present the new AisleOne. Before I jump into some of the new features I want to give a MASSIVE THANK YOU to Emil Olsson for all the development work and for making this possible. Without him this new site wouldn’t exist. Words can not express how grateful I am for all his help. Not only is he ridiculously talented, he’s a super nice guy. So now onto the new features.
This site utilizes keyboard navigation to enhance the viewing experience. Use the up ↑ and down ↓ arrow keys to scroll through the site, which takes advantage of a nifty infinite scrolling feature. The site also has two viewing modes that can be accessed by pressing the (g) key for grid mode and the (l) key for list mode. And finally there’s a dashboard that can be opened and closed by pressing the (d) key. It contains other goodies like Twitter Hastags, inspirational links, featured articles and more.
For the design I wanted to keep it very simple, pushing site interface in the background and making the content the focus. I didn’t want to over do it with design elements that distracted you from the content. Based on the site stats over 85% of A1 viewers have screens larger than 1024 × 768 and 96% have a window width of 968px. Armed with that data, I decided to move beyond a 960px width to 1202px. Having an extra 242px to play with makes a big difference. The grid is made up of 10 columns, each 96px wide with 22px gutters between them. I usually build my grids based on the rule of thirds but this time I didn’t follow it. Mainly because I wanted to work with an image width of 450px since the previous design made use of that size.
You’ll also notice that AisleOne is now part of the Thinking for a Living Network, which will be launching a new site very soon. The Network is an alliance of like-minded individuals who are experimenting with publishing and education through a series of topic specific sites, conferences, workshops and publications. The Network includes Thinking for a Living, The Grid System, AisleOne, The Design Manifesto, Design Facts, More Substance, and Thought & Theory and is organized by Shane Bzdok, Antonio Carusone, Frank Chimero, Ian Coyle, J. Ellis and Duane King.
So that’s the new site. Please look around and let me know if you see any issues or if there’s anything you don’t like about the site or you want to see improved. This site is for you so I want to make it the best it can be.
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New Site Design Coming in 2010
December 31st, 2009Howdy folks. Hope everyone is having a great holiday season. As you’ve noticed, I haven’t posted much in the last week and won’t resume until next week. Just enjoying this time off with the family.
Anyway, I just briefly want to mention that I’ll be launching a revamped site in about a week or so. I’m pretty happy with it and I think you’ll like it a lot. Emil Olsson of TypeNeu is doing all the coding and he’s implemented some awesome functionality. I’ll let you all know right before I switch over to the new design because the site will have to be done for a little while.
Also, if you look in the header, on the right, you’ll notice a small ad. AisleOne is now part of the Fusion Ad Network. It’s a great network that caters to designers, developers, publishers and creative professionals. The ads are small and for the most part well-designed and unobtrusive. I’ve always struggled with displaying ads on the site, I’ve been approached by many companies in the past, but this is the first time that I feel comfortable doing it. The network is great and this is an easy way to pay for the site hosting and other site related costs. I’d love to know what you think about the new ads since your opinions matter most to me.
This version of the site won’t be up for long so I plopped the ads at the top, but in the new site design I’ve placed them in a much better space that isn’t so distracting.
Well, that’s it for now. I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year! I’ll be back on Monday. Peace.
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Dieter Rams
December 7th, 2009
Image courtesy of September Industry.
Seems like there’s a ton of stuff going on around Dieter Rams and his legendary work.
There’s the “Less and More — The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams” exhibit at the Design Museum in London.
To coincide with the event, a book with the same name will be released by Gestalten this month which features all of Rams’ products as well as selected sketches and models. They also have a video interview with Rams on their website.
The excellent design agency Bibliotheque has created two stunning posters dedicated to Rams’ legacy. The first, which is pictured here, is titled “Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles” and features his ten principles for good design. They were commissioned by Vitsœ to create the poster, which is currently available on their site.
The second lovely poster they designed is titled “Dieter Rams T1000″ and features an illustration of the Braun T1000 shortwave receiver. It will be screen printed and should be available this week.
And finally we have the retrospective book “BRAUN – Fifty Years of Design and Innovation” that celebrates 50 years of the Braun brand. The book is slated to be released in 2010 but you can pre-order it now through Amazon.
Wheew! That was a lot! Enjoy.
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The Future Distilled
July 21st, 2009When it comes to lifestyle brands, there are two companies that stand out from the rest. One is Apple, the other is a small but awesome company called Nooka. I’ve written about them before and their excellent line of timepieces. The company was born in 1997 by artist and designer, Matthew Waldman.
Recently Matthew and his team launched a few new products that expand the brand and will change the way you think about other objects. The new products are a Nooka fragrance, Asset Organizer and Strip.
I had the pleasure of sampling the fragrance when I took a tour of the Nooka office and it smells great. The Asset Organizer is a system of containers much like a wallet and the Strip is a belt featuring an innovative snap and release closure system designed and developed by Nooka. What stands out the most from these products is their simplistic design and function and the innovative thinking behind each them. Nooka is slowing becoming my favorite brand and I look forward to future products.
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A Redesign is a Comin’
September 4th, 2008UPDATE
I just flipped the switch and moved everything over so it should all be done. Let me know if you find anything that looks weird, especially those of you on a PC. Enjoy.
Yup… again. I’m starting to grow out of this current design. I need something more flexible with more real estate for the posts and for side widgets. Better typography and usability as well.
You’ll notice that I’ve also begun to prepare the most recent posts to work with the new design. I’m setting some visual standards. A slight change in how I write out the headlines. Previously I use to capitalize all the words in a title including “a”, “the”, “of”, “is”, “on” and so on. Now I’m using a form of Title Casing where the first and last words in the title are capitalized as well as any word four or more letters. I’m also setting an image height of 700px for consistency. You’ll see what I mean when I launch the new design.
It’s pretty much done, I’m just making some final tweaks and I’ll probably flip the switch tomorrow evening. I hope you guys dig it.
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Wine In A Can
July 18th, 2008I love the simple design of this wine can by swedish designers Jens Andersson and Jonas Forsman. I’m not sure how wine would taste from a can, but I’d definitely buy one for its aesthetic value.
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Bloggers Seeking Authors
May 17th, 2008Two quality design blogs are seeking new authors to contribute content to the site. You think you can cute it and are interested, head over to Change The Thought and The Strange Attractor.
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Company
May 2nd, 2008London based design studio Company has an excellent portfolio, but I’m particularly in love with the work identity work they did for Village Underground. They used the floor-plan of the building and embossed the shape into all the stationery. Looks great.