Project Ideas - Spot the Trends

Spend enough time looking at design and new-product Web sites, with their endless cavalcades of aesthetically appealing objects, and it’s easy to spot recurring themes. One of the most interesting is things that look like other things: a vase that looks like a paper bag, a tape dispenser that looks like a cassette, a drink coaster that looks like a chocolate bar, even bars of soap that look like tiny hands. Read more:
Imitation of Life
By ROB WALKER
Published: January 13, 2008
How soaps that look like little hands connect with the contradictory attractions of novelty and familiarity.

Project ideas: Toy Company

Thunderdog is a Creative Agency and Toy Company world-renowned for experimental design, creative exhibitioning and Fine Art based product.

Founded by Tristan Eaton in 2003, THUNDERDOG currently resides in D.U.M.B.O. Brooklyn and continues to strive for Pop Art excellence in everything they do.
Thunderdog believes that art is defined by it’s maker.
Tristan Eaton, Graffiti Artist, Illustrator & Toy Designer

XLR8R - music, culture, style, and technology in Seattle

XLR8R (pronounced "accelerator") is a magazine and website that covers music, culture, style, and technology. It was founded as a newsprint ‘zine in 1993 by publisher Andrew Smith in Seattle; the magazine currently has offices in San Francisco and New York. While XLR8R’s initial focus was on electronic music, it has over the years widened its scope to include indie rock, hip-hop, and reggae/ dancehall music as well as related trends in style, art, fashion, and technology.

Frieze Magazine

frieze magazine is Europe’s leading magazine of contemporary art and culture. frieze is published eight times a year and includes essays, reviews, columns and listings by the most forward-thinking writers.

Frieze Art Fair takes place every October in Regent’s Park, London. It features over 150 of the most exciting contemporary art galleries in the world. The fair also includes specially commissioned artists’ projects, a prestigious talks programme and an artist-led education schedule.

Frieze Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for the curated programme at Frieze Art Fair, comprising artist commissions, talks, films, music and education. The Foundation is funded by the European Commission and Arts Council England.

Get Started Collecting Comic Art

Comic book art can be a daunting thing to get into. It is expensive, hard to come buy, and you don't know who to trust in getting what you pay for. Take a look at some surefire ways to get comic art easily and on the cheap. These are some great tips to getting started in collecting comic book art. From Aaron Albert

The Medium

"About The Medium - With television and the Internet converging at last, who's going to watch all this here-goes-nothing online video? Everything from political propaganda videos to pseudo-candid celebrity rants seems to expect an audience. "The Medium" will find, review and make sense of all those senseless new images: web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes, mashups and more."

Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I've seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.

"The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor."