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Since it launched a little more than three years ago, Kickstarter has established itself as a boon to budding designers, bringing nearly 3,000 often ingenious design concepts to some stage of development or completion. On August 22, Chicago’s MNML design studio, a crowdfunding success in its $1 million-plus campaign for the TikTok+LunaTik Watch Kits, will host a Kickstarter All-Stars night, showcasing a curated collection of some of the platform's biggest success.

 The Vers 1Q Speaker 

The 25 items on display include the following:

CST-01, Porthole, TidyTilt/JustMount, Pebble, Designing Obama, Vers 1Q, HiddenRadio, Zooka, More/ Real Stylus, Ouya, Lumio, The Glif, TikTok+LunaTik, Cosmonaut, 10-Year Hoodie, Wabi Nabe, Tylt VU, Resketch, Kern & Burn, Pinch, LUNATIK Touch Pen, Sharpener Jar, Piccolo, Biblio, Chromatic, Hex6agon, LUNATIK Taktik, and Facet.

The Kickstarter All-Stars Exhibition will be on display during the MNML Maker Mixer on Thursday, August 22 at 9pm. RSVP to attend at mnml.com then bask in the glory of the latest wave in design. 

If you were keeping up with Make Zine's Maker Camp this week, you'd already have built a homemade marimba, a set of tube-driven speakers with LED lights, a one-string Diddley Bow guitar, and by the end of the weekend, an LED organ. In addition to daily DIY tutorials, the Make editors also curate a series of Google Hangout lectures every Tuesday, the most recent featuring sound artist Jesse Seay. Check out the full schedule here, including next week's "field trip" to Pixar.  

The Maker Camp is a six-week Google+ based program organized by Make Media for teenage students.






Seventy-eight might be an inauspicious anniversary to celebrate, but ad agency Leo Burnett is evidently staffed in part by fervent music geeks who just can't help themselves. To commemorate the 78th of the agency founded in Chicago in 1935, the agency commissioned the pressing of an actual 78 rpm record—music curated by the Numero Group with graphics designed in-house as seen below. It also asked Numero to put together a playlist of Chicago tracks—you can download that mix online. It also invited Chicago creatives to design spaces within the office for the anniversary—and sent them one-of-a-kind hand-painted invitations on 78 rpm records to do so.

You can find out more about 78lb at 78lb.leoburnett.com.

 

Increasingly, shops and municipalities are pursuing bans of plastic shopping bags altogether. Ad agency Mother London takes a different though still aggressive design approach in an effort to end the culture of the disposable bag. The second edition of the Uncarriable Carrier Bags shames plastic bag users by displaying outlines of questionable items such as knives, guns, heroin needles and massive sex toys that could be contained within.

Back in 2008, Mother London's first run of Uncarriable Carrier Bags took a less subtle approach with full branding identities for embarrassing fictional locations like a Phil Collins fanclub, a fast food place specializing in dolphin meat, and a sticky looking sperm bank.





Daisuke Tsumanuma and Kenichi Yamada named their miniature hydroponic terrarium company 10¹² TERRA to reference the number of new cells a plant in one of their containers can produce a day. Their minimal designs, the tallest planter standing at just under one foot, have a big advantage over sealed terrariums in that the separate top and bottom chambers make replacing murky water easy. [via Spoon Tamago]

Each terrarium is made by hand, and cost around $100 depending on the size.









Designer Andy Welsh's Floating Structures series began as a way to look at architecture without context. His manipulations present multiples of the familiar lines and shapes of recognizable buildings in cities like Singapore, Tokyo, and London, in new orb-like forms colored only with fuschia and pale yellow tones. 

See more Floating Structures at andywelsh.com





A blast of clean water at a camp site is an invaluable resource. Aquabot is a new compact water pressurizer that fits on top of most standard drinking bottles with the potential to make our time off the grid less grimy. The product works by swapping the lid of a water bottle with a hand pump made with food-grade plastic, capable of three spray patterns of varying intensity. Outside of obvious creature comfort uses like improved camp showers and hand washing, the Aquabot's Kickstarter points out it's also useful for cleaning game and fish on hunting and fishing trips without running water.

Check out the ongoing Kickstarter campaign to read more and pick up an Aquabot, starting at $29.




The masterwork of renowned arts educator Josef Albers, Interaction of Color has occupied a hallowed place on many bookshelves since its publication in 1963, becoming a go-to reference on pigments and perception. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the design firm Potion, in collaboration with The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation and Yale University Press, created an interactive iPad app updating this bible of color theory for the 21st century, allowing users to delve into his ideas and, as the teacher would certainly approve, play and experiment.

The former Bauhaus professor, who worked alongside Klee and Kandinsky before emigrating to the United States in 1933, spent decades teaching at institutions including Yale and Black Mountain College, experimenting and refining his ideas about how colors influence one another. This new version of Interaction includes more than 125 of his original color studies on the topics of intensity, transparency and temperature, as well as more than 60 interactive plates and a palette tool, allowing readers to directly apply his ideas. Archival videos of Albers, as well as commentary by contemporary practitioners like textile designer Christopher Farr, graphic designer Peter Mendelsund and painters Anoka Faruqee and Brice Marden, round out the educational experience. If only all textbooks were this exciting.

 

The App Stores released a free version of Interaction of Color today containing a full chapter and color palette. The full version, with more than 125 color plates and 60 interactive studies, is available as an in-App purchase for $9.99.

When it comes to jewelry, finding a uniquely simple yet adventurously original necklace is a mission and a half. But it's an important one, as the right necklace can make our daytime outfit ready for a nightlife rendezvous. So when we found Puerto Rican artist Nora Maité Nieves and her jewelry line My nOma, we quickly embraced her pieces. Neon woven closures, chunky hardware pendants, and bound chains are well suited for quick day-to-night turnarounds. Her upbringing in the Caribbean, where the island life is translated in mix-and-match looks, informs her choice in colors and textures.

Shop online at My nOma

French designer José Lévy wants to make the exotic comfortable and familiar, and gosh darn it, he's excited about it. He's even given his collection, Morocco!, a not-so-French exclamation point.

Morocco!, an eclectic and minimal range of tables, seating, ceiling tiles, and mirrors, picks up elements from 1950s Moroccan design and combines them with a Parisian outlook and a little bit of luxurious fantasy. We love how Lévy has married the East with the West, building a tension between modern design and beldi, the Moroccan embrace of skilled trades and craft in everyday objects. His Beldi rug, fittingly, is hand-tufted in Casablanca. The patterns and textures evoke Morocco's love for the decorative arts, but here the pieces are meant to function in various interior settings far from North Africa.

Find out more at José Lévy.