The Finnish furniture manufacturer ASKO made the following entertaining short film in 1960, showcasing some of their products from start to finish.

And here is another one (with English subtitle):

Gizmodo has compiled a great list with IKEA catalogue covers from 1951 to 2015.

If you're a fan of vintage business cards, this Flickr group will give you ample inspiration, but not overwhelm you.

And when you're done looking on those, why not look through some of the vintage business cards that were used by the people responsible for building America's nuclear program in the 60's and 70's.

Featured image: Via Flickr user Alan Mays.

If you're a designer or a blogger that want to create designs that remind of the colors of India, design magazine Rudecolor has put together a nice color guide for you entitled "2016 Color Trends Forecast for India".

You can download the pdf here.

This compilation of VHS logos from the 80's is a great source of inspiration to designers, either in print or video. The compilation "Ident-a-Thon" has previously been taken down but has now been reuploaded.

Sleepwear designer brand Peter Alexander's latest collection "Happy Little Vegemites Collection" is an homage to Australia's famous spread Vegemite, a food paste that is made from yeast products.

Eye mask:

Pyjama pants:

Dog neckerchief:

Industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger (@frogmut), founder of the global design and strategy firm Frog Design, gives designers some sound advice in this short video treat by talking about five key subjects in the area of design.

I still keep my business cards in my wallet and/or in a little cigar box, which suits me just fine for the moment. But, an alternative to these are the hand-knitted card cases by James Lotter, called Business Cardigans (sadly sold out, as of now).

In Giulio Iacchetti's exhibition "Razione K – Meals for Soldiers in Action", food rations used by the military around the world are on display.

Spain:

France:

New Zealand:

Italy:

Sweden:

United States of America:

Via @Aweiland and designboom.

Artists Marsha Blaker and Paul DeSomma's stunning collection of glass vases and sculptures are inspired by ocean waves. And being based in Hawaii, there are plenty of room for inspiration.

Photo credit: Images via Creative Boom.

Via @dennyshess and Creative Buzz.

A group of design students at Bangalore’s Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, created a satirical poster mimicking the well-known and classic Indian poster “An Ideal Boy”, a poster aimed towards schoolchildren, as an consequence of politicians and influential individuals blaming female victims for getting assaulted.

Alison Byres, who has been teaching students at Srishti visual culture for the past six years, said that in that period, she's seen the conversation shift "from being an ideal boy to a bad girl."

"It seems like there’s nothing you can do to be the perfect girl because being a girl itself appears to be the problem," Ms. Byres, who assigned the theme for the project, said.

The poster named "A Bad Girl" consists of 12 illustrations with a woman carrying out one “bad” habit:

In their "Metro Cuff" series, Designhype has created some beautiful cuffs, that will help you find your way in the metro system in some of the largest cities, instead of having to use a traditional fold-out map.

A "City Cuff" series is also in the making, for those cities when using the metro isn't the most convenient way to travel.

The city of love:

Luca Iaconi-Stewart builds a 1:60 model of an Air India Boeing 777-300ER entirely out of manila folders. The work is incredible well done and the details are absolutely amazing.

He’s now spent more than 10,000 hours building an exact model replica — at 1/60th scale — of a Boeing 777-300ER plane entirely out of cut-out manila folder parts. He’s not even done.

[…]

Iaconi-Stewart began work on the model while attending Lick-Wilmerding High School, a private school in San Francisco.

He made models of skyscrapers, but it was the Boeing plane that drew him.

[…]

And so as he was finishing his junior year, in 2008, he began finding photos on the Internet, and the dimensions of the 777 from the Boeing website.

Air India had posted an extremely detailed schematic of the seat arrangements, and Iaconi-Stewart managed to get hold of a training manual for the plane.

[…]

Then, using Adobe Illustrator, he drew out everything.

[…]

There were 303 economy seats, 35 business-class seats, and 4 first-class seats that had to be made.

One first-class seat took 6 to 8 hours to make. Iaconi-Stewart got the making of the economy seats down to 1 hour each.

Some of the parts he had to make were literally the size of a pinhead.

“It’s hard to keep up that level of focus day in and day out,” he says. “When you have to create everything from scratch it can be very draining.

“There were times I absolutely hated it. But then I could see the end in finishing the project. But then you get a certain amount of satisfaction in reverse engineering something and making it out of unconventional material.”

The main landing gear works great:

You can see more of the project here.

Via Boing Boing.

The small town of Palm Springs, was once the creative playground to several great architects such as William Krisel, E. Stewart Williams and Albert Frey.

In the film Desert Utopia: Mid-Century Architecture in Palm Springs by Jake Gorst, we get to see rare archival images and footage from this very special era, together with interviews with some of these great architects, homeowners and historians, and learn more about the preservation issues that face the region today.

Featured image: The Tramway Gas Station designed by Albert Frey and Robson C. Chambers. Via Modern Design Interior.

I saw these coins during one episode of Antiques Roadshow. I liked them instantly, thought they were beautiful and somewhat special because of their special history. Thankfully, it´s easy to buy them from different outlets. The coins were used by coal miners as an advance on wages and goes by many names:

These tokens, also known as Scrip, Dingles, Clackers and many other names, were issued by coal companies as an advance on wages when miners needed to buy mining supplies for their work, food or necessities for their home, pay rent on the company owned home, obtain medical care or almost any other aspect of life in a company town. Of course, they could only be used at company stores, where prices tended to be high. The value of the scrip would then be deducted from a miners pay on payday. Miners could easily “owe their soul to the company store”. Metal tokens were widely used from the 1920’s to the 1950’s. During World War II fiber scrip was introduced in order to save metal. Most tokens had the name of the mine or store on it, and were often punched with the mine number or initials of the town.

5 cent clacker. The New River Company, Glen Jean, West Virginia. Via ebay user creelbm:

50 cent clacker. Citronelle Turpentine Company, Mobile County, Alabama. Via Collecting Alabama:

In George Clarke's Amazing Spaces we got to see artist Stephen Turner´s environmental friendly houseboat The Exbury Egg, which took 6 months to build with the use of 8km of cedar:

This giant floating egg on the River Beaulieu could well be Hampshire's quirkiest living space.

It may look like it comes straight from the set of a low-budget science fiction movie, but the giant wooden pod cost £40,000 to build and will in fact be the home and workspace of artist Stephen Turner, 58, for the next year.

Interior and hammock:

The 40ft self-sustaining structure, which is registered as a boat, floats up and down with the tide and is designed to have minimal environmental impact. Stephen hopes to highlight climate change while living there.

Images via FWD Home.

Ruan Hao of Hong Kong’s LYCS Architecture has designed a beautiful "multi-task" table called CATable. It will not only store your magazines, but your cat aswell.

If your cat keeps distracting you from work by sitting on your laptop keyboard or batting at your hands, the CATable, designed by Ruan Hao of Hong Kong’s LYCS Architecture, is the perfect solution. The desk features a smooth workspace on top with a warren of cubby holes just big enough for a kitten to crawl through below.

Cats’ characteristic curiosity is “greatly satisfied through repetitively exploring the unknown path behind the hole,” the designer writes. “It is a table for us, and a paradise for cats.”

It’s the ultimate blogger desk: play with your cat and get some writing done at the same time. When you’re ready for a break, just scoop the feline out and put it back on your lap.

Get that camera out of my face:

Images via Freshome.

Chicagotype is the name of the ongoing project by graphic designer Shawn Hazen who moved to Chicago in 2006, in which he captures and collects typography to be found all around the city. A great way to get to know your city!

Chicago has so much history, but isn’t too precious about it, so the city is just layer after layer of architecture and design. I’m a graphic designer, so this unique visual heritage continues to blow me away, specifically the commercial typography. I can’t help but snap pictures of all the old, cool, or quirky type. And there’s so much of it—I literally can’t got out to get a haircut or a hot dog without having to make a stop to shoot some funky sign.

Via Campsite.

Julien De Smedt, founder and director of JDS Architects, created a living space that makes good use of it´s roof.

Elmegade district is probably one of the most densely populated areas of inner Nørrebro, Copenhagen. The triangular block Birkegade / Egegade / Elmegade has a very high density, turning its courtyard to a close to zero surface. When we were asked to design 3 penthouses on top of one of the block’s co-owned buildings our concept became to use the roof of the newly designed top floor to create the ‘missing garden’ for its community of owners. In order to qualify ‘the missing garden’, we looked at the Copenhagen typology of garden, which characteristically has an associated functionality.

The hedonistic rooftop is reflected in a playground with shock-absorbing surface and a playful suspension bridge, a green hill with varying accommodation backed by real grass and durant vegetation, a viewing platform, an outdoor kitchen and barbecue, and a more quiet wooden deck.

We seek to optimize and fully exploit the situations the site has to offer, and thereby design a potential for the future exploitation of the roof to the delight of all the co-op’s residents. Usually a roof defines a final measure of any construction. We imagine cities where people will be the last measure of the environment.

Here is a segment (video) from German television featuring Elmegade.

Field Notes is now released entirely in wood with the Shelterwood Edition. Watching the manufacturing of these books, you can really feel the love going into a project like this.

We all know that paper is made from wood. Our 22nd FIELD NOTES COLORS seasonal release is made OF wood. The “Shelterwood” edition features covers made from actual American Cherry wood, sliced ever-so-thin and bonded to a substrate of kraft paper for durability. We believe we’re the first notebook company to manufacture such a product at such a scale.

Thanks to the natural texture of the wood, no two “Shelterwood” memo books are the same but all share their origin in the same few hand-picked cherry trees from Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin. The wood covers are sustainably produced, with one 60″ wide log converted into 5000 feet of “Sheer Veneer,” with very little waste (the waste is recycled into wood pellets to heat the factory!). The process can be seen in the film above.

The covers are left uncoated with text printed in a triple-hit of “Ghostflower White” which remains slightly opaque, the wood texture showing through like a faded whitewashed fence. Inside covers are mossy green text on kraft paper. The guts of the books are Finch Fine “Soft White” 70# text stock, the same beefy stock you loved in our “America the Beautiful” Edition. They’re ruled in “Maidenhair Green,” and bound together with three sturdy gold staples