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The sisterly trio Haim just released its debut album Days Are Gone (Pitchfork finds it winning). In contrast to the album's overall hygenic-sound, the "Desert Days" video directed by Tabitha Denholm for the album track "Honey & I" has a bit of grit in it—and even electric guitar. The clip finds the ladies holed up at a cinder-block house found by the director on Air B&B and striking poses in pick-up trucks. 

Photo by: Josh Lewandowski

Josh Lewandowski has long doodled and sketched in 3D. Lewandowski, the founder of furniture firm Nordeast Industries with a MA in Architecture from Yale, was told "erasing was for wimps" by a teacher when he was young and therefore draws in pen and ink. Lewandowski recently started a drawing-a-day blog for his sketches with no meaning, because he believes that such creations are a useful exercise. His works draw on engineering and architecture as well as LEGO instructions and cereal boxes. 

Read more about the doodles, which are available for purchase at Dezeen.com.

Unsatisfied with the design of both traditional wallets (too bulky and expensive) and compact wallets (not good at carrying cash), the folks from Capsule wallets turned to Kickstarter. Once the clientele was found, they turned to Dwell on Design to show off their creation. The Capsule Minimalist has been something of a hit—the blue edition is currently sold out.  

Before you turn up your nose, consider that the handmade, full-grain leather wallet features the CashStrap—a simple way to store and get your bills out. The front slot holds one to two frequently used cards and the top sleeve another two to four cards. Narrow down the contents to what you really need and the Minimalist is your friend, your enforcer of a new no-more-than-you-need mantra, and suddenly that annoying pocket bulge has been downsized.

The Minimalist starts at $50 ($65 for uncoated Brazilian leather gray version) at capsulewallets.com.

 

 

X-Rite, the color tech company that now operates Pantone, shared a grim statistic: 1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some kind of color vision deficiency. If you're curious where your own color vision falls in that statistic, give its new online color tester a try. After arranging four strips of tiles in hue order, you'll receive an exact numerical score, the lower the better, and a percentile comparing your results to the rest of the field. The online test is an adaptation of X-Rite's FM 100 Hue test, a physical version of the test with actual hue tiles, often used as part of a recruiting process. 

This isn't our first time taking a look at interesting subway posters, or even English railway posters, but a new book of posters and printed matter from the history of London's Tube offers a slightly different perspective than we're used to. The book, A Logo For London, collects Tube imagery from the last 150 years and examines how the circular strike-through logo evolved. Compiled by David Lawrence, the book isn't limited to formally produced posters, but instead includes photographs, pamphlets, and anything else that informed the bar and circle logo. Check out a few images below. [images via DesignTaxi]







After studying together at the Royal College of Art in London, designers Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay formed the collaborative design studio Raw Edges. Sometime after the formation they also had a young daughter together, and the child ended up being the biggest inspiration for their SmartLight bedside lamp series. Designed as an unobtrusive reading light for those nights when one parent has to wake up to care for an infant, the lamps manipulate and direct the light from the built-in LED of most smartphones, while doubling as a charging station. [via Designmilk]







There's a wide range of content in Catalan artist Joan Cornellà's comics. His panels can easily include silly sight gags about having a face where a butt should be, or more upsetting, gory, violent imagery. No matter what, his characters are almost always smiling and definitely psychotic. For a good example of the twisted psychotic logic that dominates each comic's narrative, see "Zonzo" (first comic below). In it, a man's arm catches on a door and rips off. He's scared and spurts blood everywhere, until a co-worker slips in the blood and everyone laughs.

Keep an eye on Joan Cornellà's blog for new work. Prints are also available directly from the artist






Inspired by Samuel Beckett's "Endgame" 

Alex Eben Meyer is a Philadelphia-born, Brooklyn-based illustrator, with a portfolio that puts print work for the New York Times and Time magazine next to iOS imagery and remains remarkably cohesive. He's fond of anthropomorphizing everything from hair dryers to hot dogs. And while meat appears in much of his work, he skips the tired bacon humor and instead uses imagery of steaks and other cuts in a more inventive way, like showing meat consumption by state, and creating new lettering for a summertime arts feature.

Check out Meyer's new site.






In 1972, architect Kisho Kurokawa designed a residential building in Tokyo to house office workers during the week in small, interchangeable pod apartments. In addition to a uniform circular window, each pod came with a built-in bed, television, heater, and bathroom, and sometimes a stereo with a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The one-person pods aren't far from Mike Bloomberg's new plan for micro-apartments in New York, but they might have been built about 40 years ahead of their time. The concept of moving the pods for renovations and upgrades didn't catch on, and the building eventually fell into disrepair.

Photographer Noritaka Minami shot a photo series of the soon-to-be-demolished building in 2011, and managed to find a few units that seem to be relatively untouched since their construction. [images via IGNANT]









2012 was a banner year for the Brooklyn DIY space (and guitar pedal factory and recording studio) Death By Audio. To celebrate a year of operations, the venue is releasing a bound flexi-book of live recordings from 2012 with Brooklyn label Famous Class. The flexi-book includes one track each from a tiny fraction of sets recorded at the venue, including bands like Thee Oh Sees, Metz, Grooms, Eric Copeland, and Jeff the Brotherhood. Check out Tim Harrington's commercial below, and get a better look at the book with a few GIFs.

Order a copy of the flexi-book from Famous Class.