As many times as I’ve listened to Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker and thought how perfectly the cover suited the music, for some reason it never occurred to me to fin out who designed it. Luckily today I stumbled across the answer. Leif Podhajsky, the artist behind the Tame Impala packaging, is a Melbourne based artist and creative director. Really beautiful, psychedelic stuff in there. Loving how he blurs the lines between the found art and the post work, all very fluid. I believe he also works with And Melbourne who have some equally stellar work in their portfolio.
Black Design Associates have whipped up a pretty interesting iPhone / Leica i9 fusion camera concept. The device would cost around $1000 and shoot 12.1 megapixel images. It’s a long shot that anything like this will ever be produced but here’s hoping it sees the light of day.
More greatness from a blog that should be in every self respecting designer’s rss reader: Project Thirty Three. So nice to have access to an archive like this; now if we could just convince them to post some high res images I could start decorating the studio.
Work by Rolf Harder; this may be some of the most inspiring stuff I’ve seen in a while. More info from Harder’s bio at Roch and Harder:
Rolf Harder was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1929 and studied design at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. In 1959 he moved to Montreal and established Rolf Harder Design. In 1965 he founded Design Collaborative—a graphic design and industrial company with offices in Toronto and Montreal—with Ernst Roch, Anthony Mann and Al Faux. Together they produced catalogues and booklets, trade marks and symbols, bearing “visual clarity and direct, effective communication”. The style of their design work “combines constructivism with a leaning to playful experiment”.
More of Harder’s work can be found at the MOMA archive. Interesting to see the progression of his work all the way up through the ’90s. It seems like right around end of the 1980’s the style of his work (at least what is represented at the MOMA site) sort of got watered down. No doubt a reaction to the times and the needs of the client. I wonder if, looking back, a designer like Harder would prefer any era of their work over another. I guess for me it’s obvious what I like most, but I wonder if Harder himself would say those Esprit covers, for instance, were better than his earlier work.
This is pretty bad, but due to the unusually high walnut to nostalgia ratio I couldn’t resist. If you don’t know what a Neo Geo is you’re either too young or there wasn’t that one rich kid at your school who, according to legend, had one with like ten games. This whole thing really could have worked with the inclusion of some stainless steel (a’la the Jupiter 6/8 side cheeks) and the omission of the my-uncle-built-these-cabinets-for-me rounded cartridge bezel. All in all pretty cool idea though; one of the only gaming consoles I wouldn’t feel obligated to hide.
This abomination of our collective unfulfilled childhood dreams can be yours for about the same (ridiculous) price as the original — $650 — direct from Analogue Interactive. Of course, if you actually want to play games on it, you’re going to have to doubledown.
Really refreshing illustration work from Kilian Eng. I’m really getting an Avant Garde Magazine / 70’s-80’s illustration vibe from all this. Love the use of texture, it all feels so authentic.
More of Eng’s work and inspiration can be found at His Tumblr. (thanks Francisco)
Here’s a slightly different take on the Monome / grid sequencer idea. Automata is a fun — and actually quite nice sounding — little Flash app by Batuhan Bozkurt in the same vein as Sound Matrix. The cool thing about this one is the directional settings allowing for some pretty complex interactions between notes (click a note multiple times to set direction). Have a good weekend.
