Sendai Astronomical Observatory
Posted by Smitha | Filed under astronomy, design, japan
Brand New recently covered the newly redesigned logo for the Sendai Astronomical Observatory in Sendai, the capitol of Miyagi Prefecture and one of the major cities of northeastern, Japan. It’s rare that a brand campaign makes me sit up in my seat and blurt, “Gorgeous!” but this one did, in its simplicity and the brilliance of its execution, in how gracefully it handled the bilingual depiction of the name (nice, sleek typeface for the kanji, too!), and in drawing out “hidden” astronomical imagery from everyday items. The rendition of a gas giant and its rings in the curve of a cup and saucer is deliciously wonderful.
Web 2.0 cuteness overload
Posted by Smitha | Filed under commentary, design, products, site, web
Lately I’ve been getting pretty sick of this influx of social networking apps–not their existence, but their names.
Flickr. Tumblr. Pownce. Reddit. Utterz.
Give me a freaking break. So now it’s the “in thing” to create an app and give it a name that omits or twists a letter around in a preexisting word? Thanks to Flickr, I can no longer type or read “flicker” without it looking strange. I’m sure that wasn’t what they set out to do, but now everyone is doing something similar and it’s crossed that line from being cute to being ludicrous.
And it’s cool that these apps have all been created out of a movement to connect people online further and to facilitate the faster retrieval of information, but after reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s article on the death of the personal website, I can’t get it out of my head when I think about all this stuff. I remember the days when I–when everyone I knew–would put everything up manually. Photos, current music faves, books we’d read recently, favorite bookmarks. But now there’s Flickr, last.fm, AllConsuming, and del.icio.us, and dozens of sites just like them. People embed these apps and applets into their personal sites–which have typically evolved into blogs–and so their sites have become a lot more effortless, and in some ways, a lot less personal.
I do have a Flickr account. It became a necessity in terms of uploading the 3200-plus photos I took during my two years in Japan–there was just no way I had the time to thumbnail them and manually code and update my website to host them. I will admit that I hesitated in signing up for Flickr, though, in the hopes that I could indeed do it myself. But with the exception of creating a del.icio.us account a while back and updating it maybe twice, I haven’t touched it. I also have an active account on Facebook, but that’s a little different from these labor-saving sorts of sites.
I’m the type of person who digs my heels in when some new, flashy item or fad comes along. IPhones? Pfft. mp3 players? Why, when CDs work so well? (I did give in and I own a Creative Zen 30GB media player…but I will never give up on CDs. The mp3 format is, by definition, quite lossy and compressed, and I can’t stand listening to a symphony or quartet or violin concerto when it’s all muffled due to minimizing the file size. I lament that stereo systems have become obsolete, and that I now have to shell out money for a home theater system to get the best possible sound when I don’t even own a TV!)
In terms of these “new-fangled” apps, I’m definitely digging my heels in. I know SXSW Interactive this year revolved around Twitter in terms of meeting up with folks, and since I left straight for Osaka from Austin, I couldn’t bring my laptop with me and missed out entirely on that aspect of the conference…and if I go again next year, I might sign up just to take advantage of that way to network…but only for that.
And whatever new websites I develop, I definitely won’t be giving any of them cutesy names.
In search of the perfect bag
Posted by Smitha | Filed under design, personal, products
I’m on a mission to find The Perfect Messenger Bag. I’ve never been a purse girl–I bought a black one at Target I use every so often, but it just doesn’t hold enough to make me happy. I also don’t use leather products.
I’ve been eyeing this one for a while…
It’s the Kyoto Messenger Bag at ShanaLogic, which is perfect. Chocolate brown is my current color addiction, and anyone who knows me knows that I love sakura motifs like this and favor simplicity in many aspects of my life, including visual aesthetics. However, I only just realized that the sakura isn’t screenprinted but stitched on, and I don’t want the flowers to tear off over the months/years this bag gets slung around.
While searching around, though (which is challenging, because searching for “sakura” brings up hits for several anime characters, and “cherry blossom” brings up all sorts of stuff, including lingerie on Amazon), I found something completely unrelated but totally fantastic:
In their spring 2008 Large Patterns collection, Noni Designs features this oven mitt design. How adorable is that? I know I’m totally contradicting my statement about preferring simple things, but to quote Nathan Lane’s character in The Birdcage, “One does want a touch of color.” You really can’t say no to a splash of bright cheer like this. But if only I knew how to knit…
I’m also wondering if I should just get a standard brown canvas bag and paint a sakura motif on it myself. My coworker has been extolling the virtues of Timbuk2, and for a bag that’s supposed to last for years, the price is pretty reasonable. I just wonder if I’ll screw up on my paint job and end up defacing it for life, even though I know myself well enough to know I will have very carefully planned the design out, crafted it to scale, chosen the paint colors and type carefully, and charted it all out step by agonizing step…only to lose my grip on the brush and have it slip and dash a garish streak of pink across the face of the bag. I’m not particularly spontaneous, nor do I tend to decorate my own things that often, preferring to buy things with well-made designs that I already like.
Anyway, the search is on! Hopefully I can find something that hits the spot.
