For its latest commission from Wired UK, the Barcelona studio Lo Siento designed a typeface that required a syringe, bubble wrap, and some food coloring. They shaped the letters by individually injecting each tiny bubble with a mixture of water and food coloring using the syringe, and gave the text depth with a green and yellow contrast. According to designboom, Lo Siento wants to manipulate bubble wrap even more for the next lettering project: the plan is to introduce bacteria and other chemicals into the colored liquid so the text will slowly change colors, and in some cases, even start to disintegrate.
See more from Lo Siento online.
Back in March, the National revealed the cover art for its new LP, Trouble Will Find Me, a black and white image showing the top of a woman's head inside some kind of mirror system. That image is actually a scene from an installation staged at RISD in 2003 by the artist Bohyun Yoon. The installation, called Fragmentation, featured a man and woman lying nude with four mirror panels spread evenly from their ankles to head. By presenting "depersonalized" human bodies Yoon intended to draw a parallel between modern science and the consequences of plastic surgery on the human form.
The National's sixth album, Trouble Will Find Me, will be released by 4AD on May 20, and is currently streaming on iTunes. 
Skilled procrastinators learn to silence even the most complicated bedside alarms while barely waking up. While some alarm clock designers have reacted by making alarms increasingly more difficult to silence, Victor Johansson's Tangible Alarm wants you to wake up when you want to wake up. The alarm is actually an accessory to use with a cell phone's alarm. It's essentially a finished piece of wood with three sectors that contain sensors to detect a phone. Moving a phone to the center segment makes the alarm active, one side is snooze, and the other turns the alarm off for good. [via Design Milk]
In 2013, there's both a FLAG and a Black Flag touring and playing Black Flag songs—we won't get into who's putting on the better show. But it was FLAG, featuring former Black Flag members Keith Morris, Chuck Dukowski, Bill Stevenson, and Dez Cadena (as well as Descendents guitarist Stephen Egerton), that returned to the scene of the band's first ever gig on January 27, 1979, the Moose Lodge #1873 in Redondo Beach, CA for a semi-secret show. FLAG blazed through a 40-minute set at the secret gig, and just this week, lucky for us, professionally shot and edited footage of the show has hit the Internet. In the fight for the legacy of the iconic punk act, FLAG certainly won this battle, if not the war.
Fringe is everywhere right now. Seriously. With the hippie look in full bloom for 2013 spring and summer festivals, you can't walk into a clothing store or scroll down a fashion blog without seeing a fringe bucket bag, fringe cropped top, fringe skirt, ad nauseum. However, as in-your-face as fringe has been lately, we think the manipulation of fringe into jewelry details is probably the most innovative and welcome sidenote to the fringe story. Whether it's subtle metal links cascading down a cuff or a leather fringe necklace, fringe jewelry provides options for riding the season's wave without embracing the trend in its entirety. Here are five options to get you started.
Limitations often promote creative solutions. To create their Polígono furniture line, the Chilean designers at Losgogo gave themselves a three week deadline and severely limited their range of materials. The final pieces use only reinforced steel, usually found in the walls of concrete structures (sometimes known as rebar), and simple wood panels. According to Dezeen, Losgogo was able to create a total of 11 pieces of furniture, as well as six hanging mirrors. The designers painted the reinforced steel with a bright color palette, and included a few auxillary items, such as a wall-mounted bike rack and a simple hook to hang a coat.
With the new Daft Punk album, Random Access Memories, coming May 21 and streaming today, the electronic music duo couldn't have picked a better time to team up with their producer, the father of disco, Girogio Moroder, and fashion photographer Heidi Slimane for a sleek black and white photo shoot.
View the entire shoot on Dazed.
From dresses to shoes, bags and pants, white-on-white could be found in almost every major runway show for SS2013. Almost in rebellion to the over-the-top neon influx of SS12, this season's white-on-white trend is a clean, minimal, and subdued way to get back to basics. By keeping white as the dominate element in an outfit, other interesting, and more complex, details of clothing are able to be explored such as mixed textures, fabric manipulation and unique silhouette aspects. That, and it has the side effect of chicly drawing attention to the skin.
Whether done in small doses or all out, white-on-white brings a fresh perspective to dressing for the warmer months.
The cover of Chris Nosenzo's Packet biweekly zine has three constants: a date stamp, a title stamp, and a single staple in the top left corner. The rest of the contents are a largely collaborative effort: each issue features the work of roughly nine artists collectively producing about 20 pages of work. Past issues have included a mix of photos (see Bill Callahan in "Would Wife" below), artist interviews, comics, drawings, and even a few paintings. Each copy is printed with a Risograph, stapled by hand, and shipped to you in, well, a packet.
Packet Biweekly's latest, Issue #011, is available now for $4, and a wire-bound collection of the first six issues goes for $24.
“SoHo Forestry Guide” by Bridget Collins
Damien Correll Packet #010
Would Wife by Anthony Cudahy
For those of us with mild resurgence of Star Wars obsession, finding out that something as typically ephemeral as a movie set for Luke Skywalker's adventures on Tatooine still exists elicits a mix of nostalgia, wonder and excitement. Visual artist and filmmaker Rä di Martino set out to shoot old film sets in North Africa and eventually found her way by word-of-mouth to the mother of all desert film sets, a miraculously well-kept Skywalker Ranch as well as two other Tatooine sets from the original Star Wars film. Oddly enough, fans who saw her photos a few years back were concerned about the distressed state of Luke's "boyhood home" itself and eventually raised money to refurbish it and mark it for tourists fans.
di Martino writes us she was exploring the sets not as a documentarian, but rather as an artist exploring our dreamscapes. "These photo series are part of a research on abandoned movie sets in North Africa (which also ended up in a video), but is not reportage. I just liked the poetic potential of those ruins—being ruins of something that is our future in our imagination."
Photos by Ra di Martino. Follow her on Tumblr.
Restoration photo by Mark Dermul / savelars.com
