Change The Record by Paul Cocksedge
Used vinyl records turned into a simple speaker for iPhones/iPods by heating the record and stretching it over a mold. The final result is a cone which magnifies the sound coming from the speaker. The project was launched at the 2011 London Design Festival, where Paul formed records right on the spot and even asked people to bring their own records. A really great design and DIY process.
If you are interested in purchasing you will need to go to his site and send him an email.
The Lori Bracelet by EVRT Studio: : Behind The Scenes
Check out the process of how the bracelets are made! Lots of photo extras.
I couldn’t be happier with the way this hand-crafted beauty turned out. I am continually inspired by the work my husband has done. He leaves me in awe on a daily basis.
I believe the journey to this bracelet began years ago on the night before our wedding. Brian gave me a beautiful wooden pendant…
Rachaelw - How long does it take you from inception to completion on an average project?
Great question, I’ll give several examples since there are so many factors that control a timeline.
If I am working on a personal project the process is usually pretty quick. This is mostly because as soon as I have an idea or thought worth hammering out into some sort of end medium I try and force myself to sit down and sketch it, then take it into a digital program of some sort. I also write a list of ongoing ideas, but often if I don’t start on them right away they will sit there for months. Ideas that I work on immediately usually get near a prototype phase within 2 - 3 weeks.
For example the Lori Bracelet was a very quick idea that I sketched out and then hand made, all within a week. And once I did that I decided, yeah I can definitely do these hand made and sell them (obviously I’ve slacked on that a bit).
When working my day job it is much more process driven so it might take months for something because of all the research and sketching and prototyping to get to an end result.
Thanks for your awesome question!
Princess by Process
Another really nice design from Process. I may have to steal the mirror idea for a built in vanity some day.
Treasury Table by Process
The ultimate dream desk. I always find myself not having enough storage in the office. I think this would take care of my problems. Plus it is just flat out awesome.
Lori Branding: texture process
I thought it would be nice to share some of the technique I used behind the branding I recently did for my bracelets. This is a quick look at how I got the paint texture for the lettering.
The first step is to have a vector of your lettering, and I prefer to have mine set up as a compound path.
Next, this gets printed as a 5% black outline on paper of your choice. Sometimes I use a watercolor paper or heavy construction depending upon what kind of texture I am going for. In this case I used a smooth card stock.
Next, you need to paint the lettering. I use black acrylic for most of my projects, but you can use just about whatever you want. A lot of people use watercolors. I like acrylic because I can get a full black which is important for changing the color. Some folks also use blue. Make sure you paint outside the lines. Ignore your inner childhood because you will need the paint to bleed past your line work.
Scan the painted piece in after it dries. I scan a pretty high resolution so I don’t have to potentially do it again down the road (800 dpi or more). Bring this into Photoshop and adjust the levels according to what you want. Overlay your solid vector (step one, which you can import from Illustrator or directly copy & paste) on the paint making sure all the lines are within the painted area. Control click the vector layer to get your selection, highlight your paint layer and do a ‘layer via copy’ (command J)
The next step is converting the color, which there are numerous ways of doing this but here I did a gradient map with Warm Gray 11c for the black and just leave the white transparent. And that’s it. For the last image I added the wood grain in back and a simple ‘Multiply’ layer property for the paint.
Where were these wooden cars when i was a kid? I saw these at a small boutique toy store and while they are slightly expensive for a toy car, i think they are awesome and nearly bought myself one…i still might.
There is a crazy story about Patrick Calello (the designer behind Automoblox) that was told to me a couple of years ago. I can’t confirm if it is true or not, since the story has most likely been filtered through lots of people before reaching me.
One of the scariest moments for any product designer is actually following through to the manufacturing and production phase of their product. Especially if the product has a very limited budget, and end price point. And even more especially if producing that product in a foreign country. Months of mental sweating ensue.
When Patrick took his car designs to China to have them manufactured, he worked for an extended amount of time with one factory in particular. Every time they prototyped his designs, they came out wrong. How could that happen when detailed drawings are being supplied to the factory? This cycle continued on for months. Nothing but problems.
Somehow Calello met up with an Engineer, who just so happened to speak Mandarin. The Engineer traveled to China with Calello, and sat in on one of the meetings with the factory. However, the fact that he knew Mandarin was kept a secret.
After leaving the meeting, the Engineer turned to Calello and told him to sever the relationship with the factory entirely, and he would help him find a new factory.
It turns out the factory was intentionally making the prototypes wrong, in order to stall the designer while they produced and sold the designs and working product to other people. Talk about a nightmare.
Lesson learned.
Again, this was a story told to me a couple of years ago, so I’m not sure how accurate it is. But my point of sharing this story is to show what can go wrong. I wouldn’t recommend that any designer first run off to China (or any other country for that matter) to produce his/her product idea. You might be surprised to learn there are lots of possibilities for producing here in the US.
Folks, we INVENTED mass production and lots of other amazing things. Let’s continue…
