Minimal Web Site Design
Minimal Sites believes in “less is more” and has stated “doing more with less” as their goal. The site is an awesome collection of screenshots and links to websites that are shining examples of minimal interactive design. (One of the most minimal we found on the site was Swapped.cc — see screenshot below). Anybody can visit the site, of course, but to participate requires an invitation to membership (aspiring members must at least have their own blog). MinimalSites.com’s own design by Jung is elegantly sparse and worth examining.
I IZ COLD PAWS
The sidewalk on Broome Street in Chinatown is so cold and uncomfortable on this bitter New York City winter day that this cat has chosen to sit on a bundle of cabbage outside a wholesaler’s shop.
Copyright 2010. Ivan Corsa Photo. All rights reserved.
Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh
We dug up this wonderful (if trainspotty) travelogue piece about the city of Edinburgh in the Guardian newspaper, in the U.K., by “Scottish noir” novelist Ian Rankin.
As Scotland’s political, financial and cultural capital, Edinburgh is a city whose prominence is not in doubt, but it is a most unusual city with a fascinating cultural history. Its urban geography and topography are dramatic and unusual.
The city feels relatively small and pastoral, filled with parks and bounded and intersected by green corridors. It’s near the sea, with a busy port and beach communities nearby, but it’s not a city of the sea, not a seaside town per se, as opposed to well-known beach-fronted cities like Brighton or Blackpool.
The Rankin article is a personal four-hour journey through the author’s favorite haunts, side streets and neighborhoods. It’s a must read for anyone who has a claim on the city, resident and visitor alike.
Blogger Overdoses on Food Network
We’ve been at home in bed on the eve of this weekend nursing a bad cold during this bone-chilling winter snap on New York City. And when we’re stuck at home for long periods of time that usually means we’re watching a lot of TV that we might not normally get a chance to see.
For some reason, we’ve been watching A LOT of the Food Network, the wonderful cable channel filled with celebrity chefs, Iron Chef, cooking shows and all manner of programming that is in essence the equivalent of anthropological food-exploration.
Case in point is “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” hosted by the bleached-blond, spiky-haired and aptly named Guy Fieri. We’ve been watching a lot this show and we’re loving it. Especially this episode — see video below — where Guy visits a Fab Hot Dogs, a wiener joint in Reseda, in Los Angeles, California, that makes a deep-fried hotdog wrapped in bacon and a double-hot-dog burrito! Hells to the fuckin’ yeah!!!’
Techno Fossils
We LOVE the concept for the sculptural art work by artist Christopher Locke. He creates faux-fossilized sculptures of contemporary technology artifacts, stony objects of things likes cell phones, iPods, and the controllers for the Sony PlayStation 2 (pictured below) as if these were just discovered and rescued from the dirt on an archeological dig. AWESOME. You can see all his work on his website at Heartless Machine.
San Francisco Graff Truck
We found this graffiti-art pwned truck in Chinatown in San Francisco. Love it.
Night View of L.A. from a Plane
Here’s the awesome view of the big, wide, spread-out greater Los Angeles metro area as seen at night from a commercial jet plane headed for New York City.
Hello, 2010!
Happy New Year, Everybody! Hope you had as great a 2009 as we did. We’re looking forward to an awesome 2010! We’ve been away the past couple of weeks on a nice, long winter holiday break out in California, spending time with friends and loved ones in LA, San Francisco and points in between on the coast. We’re back in frigid NYC now and more or less refreshed from the vacay, but another week exploring the San Francisco restaurant scene wouldn’t have hurt. 
Darth Vader Opens Wall Street
As the dude sitting next to me in a cafe in downtown NYC said when I watched this on my laptop, “That’s some droll muthafuckin’ shite, man!” Word.
Twitter in Plain English
This clip explains Twitter so well …
Dan Bricklin’s Awesome iPhone App
From the “There’s an App for That” File … We love Note Taker, a new application by Dan Bricklin for the Apple iPhone. The user-experience (”UX”), user-interface (or “UI”) and interactive design is ingenious and awesome. Check out this video demo of the app below and read about how Bricklin arrived at the idea for this app on his blog.
Guitar Hero + 21,000 Christmas Lights
A dude rigged his house in excessive display of Christmas lights to synced with Guitar Hero game-play performance on a Ninetndo Wii. Say no more. Just watch the video …
Lost LA Photos of Ansel Adams
The ever-so-wonderful Jason Kottke has posted on his blog today about a trove of little-known photographs by Ansel Adams. See three of these images below or check out all of the images on Flickr. Gerard Van der Leun discovered a batch of 1940s images of Los Angeles shot by Adams that had appeared to have been lost to obscurity within the LA Public Library. Van der Leun has posted the images to his Flickr account (his personal photostream is worth checking out too).
Here’s a quote from Van der Leun that Kottke posted:
So I would conclude that with the LAPL material we are getting a rare chance to look at photographs a great photographer chose not to show the world. Obviously none of these images even touches upon the vast and central work that establish Adams as one of the greatest American photographers, but they do provide an interesting footnote to what Ansel Adams saw and thought worthy of photographing while ambling about Los Angeles during the opening months of World War II.
Most Beautiful Air Terminals in the World
Check out Flavorwire’s list of the world’s most beautiful air terminals. Among the architecturally awesome air hubs on the list: Beijing Capital International Airport (see pic below), Terminal 4 at Madrid Barajas International Airport, and, of course, architect Eero Saarinen’s iconic TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport in New York City. Love it.
Wonderwall
The website and work of Japanese architectural and interior designer Masamichi Katayama and his firm, Wonderwall, is AWESOME. Katayama is probably the most influential force in contemporary interior design in Japan. His work includes creating spaces for A Bathing Ape (BAPE) shops around the world, among many, many other projects.
Clever Guerilla Marketing of Furniture
The NY Times magazine recently reported on a clever marketing stunt by Blu Dot, the furniture design-manufacturer and retailer.
In what the company dubbed “The REAL GOOD Experiment,” the Blu Dot team worked with an agency called Mono to strategically place several of its beautifully designed “Real Good” chairs (see pic below) on the streets of selected New York City neighborhoods, like Tribeca, Park Slope and the Upper West Side.
They hoped that people who noticed the chairs would assume the items were discarded — “garbage” for taking — and bring the chairs home. (As the article points out, many a New Yorker is wont to do a little “curb-mining” from time to time; they eye furniture left as trash and take anything in half-way decent condition home as their own.)
Each of the chairs was fitted with a GPS tracking device so that Blu Dot could locate the people who took the chairs and interview them. The project would be documented for short film to be screened at Blu Dot parties. Ideally, right buzz would be generated, as well as some business, in the process.
Check out the locations where the chairs were placed and how Blu Dot tracked them.
John Hodgman on DiggNation
Actor, comedian, and author John Hodgman of the Daily Show and “I’m a PC” fame joins Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht on the latest episode of the DiggNation weekly video podcast, recorded at Hodgman’s office in Brooklyn, New York City. It’s a riot. Among other high-jinks, Hodgman makes gin martinis during the show. Check it: http://revision3.com/diggnation/hodgman
Macbar
Mac n’ cheese heaven has a name in downtown New York City and it’s at Macbar in Nolita / SoHo. It’s a tiny restaurant “100% devoted to mac and cheese.” The menu is simple, but offers an intriging variety of mac-and-cheese combinations. Macbar has been open for a few months now, and it’s a bona fide hit with the punters. The four-cheese mac is our personal fave. Mmm-mmm-good. The restaurant’s interior and architectural design concept is yummy too.
Reads for Week
We’re seriously enjoying both Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s Soccernomics and Niall Ferguson’s The of Ascent of Money; A Financial History of the World.
Soccernomics has been described as “Freakonomics for soccer.” It’s filled with statistics and analysis and offers particular insights into the business and cultural aspects of global football. The authors explain how these facets of the professional game are inter-related. Among the conclusions in this book is this gem: The U.S.A. mens team is the biggest under-performer in global soccer (though well-ranked, the team’s potential to dominate the sport is so much higher) and the sport’s biggest achiever is Iraq (it started from practically nothing).
The Ascent of Money is an exceptionally well-written and thoroughly researched look at the foundations of our modern finance and banking systems and how these evolved since earliest recorded history. The book is especially fascinating in light of the global credit meltdown and financial crisis of the past year.
International Center of Photography
We went to the Dress Codes exhibition this weekend at the International Center of Photography in New York City. The show is part of the ICP’s Year of Fashion and is a third triennial of photography.
Dress Codes is a survey of artists and photography that critically examines fashion in art and society. It includes several works of large-format, projected videos, as well as other media, notably an interactive experience in Second Life and a singular graphic-design installation on a mounted lightbox. One of the videos features Australian actress Cate Blanchett, which along with a few of the other clips can be viewed on the New York Times website.
There’s an excellent slideshow of some of the photography here. Great stuff. Below is a picture of the entrance to the ICP School, which we shot with the camera on our Blackberry Bold phone.
