Create your own monster!

The newest member to the studio has arrived. Say hello to Tentaclopse.

When you use a computer to make things all day, its great to go back to paper and a craft knife. The hardest part about making Tentaclopse was finding the right glue and making him look like the picture on Readymech.com - I think he's a pretty good clone.

How much does it cost to Google

About a year and a half ago I wrote a post about Blackle.com, the black google that may reduce the carbon footprint of search. But now the results of an official study which has been released. Its quite surprising. Read it here

Extreme Respect!

This really appeals to me. This looks so steep and so fast, I would definatey be in line for a trip down this slipway in Wales. Check it out.

I guess that wont be surprising to some of you, especially since I went down this escalator at Angel in London at about the same pace. Only, I did it without skis, broke a knee-cap and lived to tell the tail.

The greatest magic trick in the world

Ok, so this is a shameless test of how a headline can affect the visibility of a post, I admit it. I do know a good card trick or two. They are just better in person.

Saafi Brothers gets my vote today for their Mystic Cigarettes album.

The superweed gets my vote for being shot in time lapse and being brought to the worlds attention on the bbc website. What a famous weed! Respect. But hold on someone hooked up a plant so that it could make its own blog posts. That's so ridiculously green.

The little robot that can ride a uni-cycle gets my vote for US president. Come on, everyone thinks Barack is better than McCain, but have you seen Barack without his teleprompter?

And lastly - this is a an amazing picture from today's web-surfing.

Peace.

Throwing yourself off a cliff for guts and glory

Im afraid this blog has been a bit off piste recently. Usually I blog about technology or design, or throw up some cool links, but today its all about bikes and the insanity of freeride.

This is the biggest canyon jump I have ever seen. This would make Evel Knievel proud, because this is like turbo charging the stakes, cloning the legend, making him compete for best trick against himself, and distributing the results on dvd and blu-ray. This is Red Bull Rampage.

On the weekend I took my 10 year old nephew for a ride in Tokai. Shamefully I tried to show off a bit, pulling a few wheelies and taking a few jumps. He knows whats out there, I must have looked a fool.

The best coffee in Observatory

I woke up on Saturday in search of food and coffee. So I ambled down to Tina's coffee shop on lower main road called Queen of Tarts and ordered a cappuccino.

It arrived with a small kiwi looking fern leaf embroyded out of smooth foam and espresso cream. It was the best cappuccino I have ever had.

If you have been to our studio in Observatory, you will know that we love coffee. We have had 3 different espresso machines downstairs, a Breville, an Expobar, and now a San Marco. Our current one is in for a service. Its seen some action. We found it on gumtree and it makes an amazing espresso. But if you know your flat white from your latte, you'll also know there is a real science to get it all right, and then hand it over for a tasting.

Tina (Queen of Tarts on Lower Main Road) has a new Barista and he is a legend. Go and see for yourself.

iphoned you from my iphone in my dreams

Is this a joke?

I have no idea who has that sort of cash for an iphone which will either, get nicked, be dropped or run out of storage space.

[update] - turns out that Gary has that sort of cash.

Creativity comes as radiohead stems

no need to apologise for brilliance, just nod your head and accept the compliment graciously. radiohead: a rock band that rocks has again open sourced under GPL (so to speak) their various stems from one of their tracks, Reckoner.

I received an email from radiohead about this development personally, although it did not say "dear trevor" at the top, which was a bit of a let down, because they know me, it was beautifully to the point and did not include a single graphic or piece of design. no need to dress up and leave a false name here, just us, radio (rock your mind control) head sending you a quick mail about something thats not sugar coated.

(sigh)

Creativity comes in many forms

Light-Paint Piano Player from Ryan Cashman on Vimeo.

I am rediscovering VIMEO. I should be doing a proposal but the temptation of surfing started when someone sent me this link of two crazy guys riding their skateboards at incredible speed, in suits. Turns out it is a viral campaign made by the fashion designer Adam Kimmel. I downloaded the HD version without realising, and now Im too scared to close my browser and feel it would be rude not to surf the internet.

girls and boys

I was in Konstanz Germany on my way to Zurich, when I stopped to use a WC. For those Canadians out there who dont know what that is, its a toilet. And look at the rad little icons I found on the doors. Makes a nice change from the standard icons that look like they were designed in days of shoulder pads and bad hairdo's.

People are obsessed by the strangest things, I have stumbled upon an entire FLICKR set dedicated to this subject!

Large Hadron Collider, whats all the fuss about?!

I got a little sucked up in the media hype last week about CERN, and as a result I went and ate a McDonald's burger because I thought that our earth space time would be sucked into a little tiny black hole.

The LHC started up today, and it seems the earth is still here. I found a very interesting article as why the earth is still here today. Anyway, that's such good news because I had so much still to do today.

Do you have a business card?

What do you do when your supplier doesn't deliver the stuff you requested before a trade show?

The one thing you really need at a trade show is business cards. When you're a designer you need business cards that are cool.

This is a sheet of stickers. The plan was to pull them off and stick them to my plain white cards.

I emailed a regular supplier some artwork for printing and asked for a cost. The correspondence went something like this.

-----
Hi,
Please see the attached artwork. I'd like these printed on A4. What would it cost per page?
-----
Hello, R30 + vat per A4
-----
Can I have 5 copies by 12 tomorrow?
-----
you can pick up at 2pm
-----

Literally, those were his last words. Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty conclusive to me. When I arrived at about 3pm on my way to the airport, he looked at me as if I was mad, and said "You didn't mail me back so I didn't do em."



Anyway I don't have the stickers that I wanted to stick to my plain white cards, so I'm drawing pictures on them.

Peace!

A new morewood website

We very happy to announce the launch of the latest morewood bikes website. And we managed to do it the day before Eurobike started.

Eurobike started today. It is the biggest bicycle expo in the Europe and probably the world. Its great to be here doing some research for the brand and to chat to the suppliers and distributors that we work with.

There is plenty to blog about here at the bike show, from weird bike company names to decals that look identical, or the new flavour of the month, I'll keep you posted.

By the way, we also did all the sticker designs for the bikes, and chose the frame colours so take a look and tell us what you think: morewoodbikes.com

Should we be conCERNed?

What makes us change our mind, or do something that we thought we wouldn't?

For those of you who know me, I'm anti McDonald's. There's plenty of reasons why it might be a bad idea to eat it out there.

But today, being on the road on the way from France to Germany, hungry and considering the slight possibility of a black hole swallowing up the earth on the 10th September when they start up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, I thought, to hell with it.

What would you do with your time if we only had a week left on the planet?

future proof

Sorry, I have been on the move. I am in France and on my way to Germany next week to the biggest bicycle expo in Europe called Eurobike. It should be fun. It will all be revealed on the new Morewood website which is being launched next week. Our studio will posting pictures and videos everyday to keep the forums and traffic buzzing.

It seems technology has been on the move too. Did you know that Intel is doing this?

But the jury is out on who was first, of course, and so there will be a lot of noise from these guys, and maybe these guys about who gets the credit.

Personally I hope we dont fry ourselves with all the electromagnetic radiation. Or are they gamma rays? Aaaaaaah, shut it down!

I'll be back at the blog, with serious posts, next week.

GO FIREFOX GO!

Isn't it great how the underdogs of this (virtual) world can stand up to the Goliaths by capturing the imagination and rallying the popularity of the people, even for something which most people don't give a second thought to, like your web browser.

The browser wars have been going for well over a decade now, and finally we have a serious contender in Firefox. Please, lets support a world in which the little guy gets an even better chance to stand up to the corporate behemoth, by breaking a pointless world record!

Firefox will get a lot of free press if they do break a record, and maybe just maybe, we can shake some sense into the corporation that brought us MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows XP, Vista, Internet Explorer, and their funny box model, and now also Silverlight.

So please, spread FireFox, and contribute to breaking a world record today (17-18 June 2008) by being someone who downloads this great web browser.

Living in the future

It is products like this that make me feel like we are living in the future.

When you watch batman ripping up the streets of Gotham City in his batmobile that can morph and change shape, and then you see a real car like this, its easy to wonder about what the future might hold.

Same same, but different

Oh man, what a classic.


I noticed this old tractor, which I had never heard of before, while riding my bike in Tokai. It's called a SAME. Which marketing genius named this product? How about a name like Atlas or Titan rather. But the real surprise came when I found the logo on the front of the tractor was different to the logo on the side of the tractor. Same same, but different.

Its a marketing nightmare, but it made me smile. These days brands which are trying to be new or fashionable reset their logo in different typefaces so that it can be slapped on a tee shirt in an attempt for mass appeal. Billabong comes to mind. But then so many others do too. And now we have low price copycat brands like the Mr Price Red clothing label flooding the market with homogeneous tee shirt graphics that look like Billabong or Volcom. I wonder who copied who first.

Maybe these guys were way ahead of the game. This tractor is easy 20 years old.

Maybe all brands are the same, and its just the budgets that are different.

Writers strike or writers block

In light of the recent writers strike in Hollywood, I felt it was necessary to express my own radio silence on our blog. Admittedly it was a strong mix of sympathetic writers silence and pathetic negligence for the soapbox.

But I'm back. And I dare say that we have something rather interesting to post, right now.

the never ending quest

When will this dream be a reality?