The Vårdapoteket chain of pharmacies are found in about 24 different hospitals throughout Sweden. In an effort to make their locations feel less cold and clinical than the hospitals that house them, Vårdapoteket enlisted the help of the Stockholm Design Lab to create a warm new identity for all their locations.
The result is a colorful theme with a bright diagram of the human body's internal organs at the center of the design.
The branding is tailor-made to a very specific, and potentially sensitive, setting. The imagery and color palette are positive, but not obnoxiously joyful, and the medical-diagram-meets-illustration aesthetic functions at various scales; it looks great at eight inches on printed literature and at eight feet on the pharmacies' walls.
The xx and Grizzly Bear toured the U.S. and Canada together and Manchester's Dr. Me designed a very handsome poster available only at the shows. Some superfans couldn't make the gigs, however, and petitioned for their own posters. So the designer has wisely made the posters available to the rest of us.
Stalk desktop speakers are actually designed to stand next to a crowded desk, rather than take up valuable desktop real estate. The two models (taller or shorter) are built with colored steel legs and a 3D-printed dome, both meant to be chosen by the owner to personalize the set. The designer, New Zealand-based Ella Bates-Hermans, developed the cone patterns by experimenting with 3D printing textures, and drew inspiration for the speaker's form by studying the shape of speaker drivers. [via NOTCOT]
At one point in time, we took them for granted. Payphones were a must—if you were running late, lost, or traveling and needed to make reservations—or perhaps didn't have a home phone. The eventual affordability and popularity of mobile phones wiped them out, destroying the market for their use and making payphones, it seems, not worth the time or money to maintain. Some still exist, sometimes in the oddest of places, and we're sure that some of us still need them in a pinch. By now, their increasing rarity makes them ripe as a photographic subject. #payphoneography is a bit like a chronicle of the last days of a connected, cheap public communication network—with the occassional shot of an exotic callbox from a far-flung locale. Particularly sad, we think, are the "carcasses" of ripped-out phones.
As part of an exhibit at this year's Design/Miami Basel fair celebrating Swiss design and promoting tourism, seven designers were given discarded gondolas from the Verbier resort in the Swiss Alps and told to use the materials to create new work. Some kept the basic form of the gondolas and created rocking benches and tables, while others deconstructed the cars entirely, creating new installations that only vaguely suggested the shape of the classic gondola. The seven designs will be shown during a brief tour of Switzerland, and auctioned by Christie's to raise funds for the Make-a-Wish foundation. [via Yatzer / photos © Annik Wetter]
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