Peter Saville's Unknown Pleasures album art for Joy Division is everywhere. While you've probably seen questionable placements on every article of clothing from T-shirts, to nail art, to oven mitts, the shaky waveforms (derived from images of radio waves emitted from a pulsar) actually work incredibly well in the 3D printed format.
To create his 3D version, designer Michael Zoellner edited the original album art using the programs AutoCAD and OpenSCAD, and printed his version using a Makerbot printer. In the spirit of all things open source, Zoellner has made his printable image available for download. [via Hypebeast]
With little fuss and a two-tone palette, A.OK's simple packaging design for its candles seems to radiate confidence and quality. The candles, which are hand poured in California, are anything but minimal in terms of performance. Available in a variety of scents, including cucumber, bergamot, rosemary, thistle, and fig, A.OK candles are made of 100 percent pure soy wax and deliver more than 70 hours of burning time. If the quality matches the sleek look, we're sure even the toughest minimalist will be lighting one in the chill-out room soon.
A.OK Candles are $38 at Oak NYC.
Folks who play with flowers for a living haven't always been on the radar of forward-thinking visual culture vultures—cue nightmares of the most expected arrangement in the whole world ever: stark red roses surrounded by the sweet white buds of baby’s breath. But when a group of young, cool, Brooklyn-based florists cropped up, it marked a sea change in the world of floral arrangement. Now, it’s becoming the norm to expect artful, inventive, overflowing arrangements and bouquets, often for magazine photo spreads, and sometimes for picture-perfect weddings. Our favorite of the bunch is Amy Merrick, who spends her time arranging overwhelmingly beautiful bouquets for both high-end events and favorite publications like Kinfolk (she was the mastermind behind the flowers-as-ice-cream shoot from the magazine’s latest issue.) She documents everything on her beautiful blog, which helps us feel a little more connected to visions of natural beauty, even while in front of a computer screen. And when she's not styling for editorial shoots, Merrick is imparting her skills to aspiring arrangers, teaching flower classes in Brooklyn and on a Washington state flower farm. Keep an eye on her blog and Twitter feed for updates.
Marvel at Merrick's portfolio online.
Ice cream flower photos by Parker Fitzgerald
YOY, the Tokyo based design firm, unveiled its latest creation at the 2013 Milan Design Festival: canvas furniture. Not to be confused with furniture that is simply just made out of canvas, this furniture is actually a piece of canvas art that can be hung. Made from a frame of wood and aluminum with an elastic fabric stretched across it, each of the pieces appear to be two-dimensional from a distance. Come closer and you’ll discover that the chairs are actually functional, somewhat three-dimensional objects that can be sat on—although we wouldn't quite describe them as furniture.
Families in developing countries, says Designboom, often use a system consisting of three rocks and a bundle of firewood to cook food at home. While the three-rock stove can be put together on a small budget, it only uses about 10% of the fire's heat for cooking. When the trip to get more firewood takes an entire day, conserving firewood is essential.
To create a more efficient stove, the designers at Claesson Koivisto Rune worked with families in Kenya to test prototypes and provide feedback at each stage of the design. They mimicked the function of the three-rock stove with a recycled aluminum structure that could concentrate the heat of the fire, and still use a families' existing cookware. The final product, the brightly colored Baker Cookstove, is manufactured locally in Kenya and distributed directly to villages.
In some cases, stoves are available for $29. A crowd-funding campaign is ongoing.
Not long after announcing a switch to a subscription cloud-based model for its ever-popular Creative Suite, Adobe steps into the hardware market with the "Project Mighty" stylus and "Napoleon" ruler. The devices are designed to work together, using Bluetooth and an upcoming Adobe app, to mimic the experience of sketching with a pen on paper. From a tactile perspective, the stylus features a pressurized tip to make line drawing feel more natural. Conceptually, the devices are built for collaboration, and have sharing functions built-in to move assets to and from the cloud and whatever tablet you're working on. When we get our hands on them, we'll let you know. [via Design Taxi]
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]
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.
After spending five months as ex-pats in São Paulo, Brazil, designers Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves who work as Studio Swine, turned to the city's trash for their new line of lamps. Both the green glass bulbs and the pine woodwork were sourced from refuse (the wood from a local carpentry shop), and the glass from bottles found around the beach. But don't think that bottles in Brazil are naturally that interesting: instead of completely recycling the glass, the pair simply heated and re-blew the found bottles. It saved a considerable amount of energy, and left subtle textures from the original forms. [via]
