Colorfall by Chrissy & Brad

This year’s winner for the Marbles co-op with the Industrial Design program at Colombia College Chicago is the Colorfall. Designed by Chrissy Quinlan & Brad Hoffman, the Colorfall, is a really sweet concept. A classy take on domino ‎which cleverly enables you to get creative with consume made domino blocks. To simplify, you can now paint with colorful blocks. This product should go into production in the near future and will be available for the world to enjoy. Tom Platt. also from Columbia College, made a video that tells the story of the product:

Pen/cil

If you haven’t heard about Sharpie’s new invention, the Liquid Pencil, it is… well… a liquid pencil. A true hybrid between a ball point pen, which gives you the ability to write without the usual sharpening mess, and a pencil, which allows you to easily erase anything you put down on paper. It uses liquid graphite that can be erased within 24 hours from the moment the liquid touched the paper. So… Don’t sign checks with it!

For the designers amongst us, the Liquid Pencil performs pretty badly. I was left dissatisfied after trying to sketch with it a few times. The line weight is limited and a constant residue that is accumulated at the pen’s tip messes up the sketch. The lines are just not crisp enough for a good ID sketch.

This pen is for Lawyers.

Check Your Head Out

It’s practically impossible to find a decent bike helmet that does not look like a beaten poisonous mushroom. That’s why I regularly check at other extreme sports’ accessory stores. Well this might be a thing of the past now that Poc came out with their award-winning (Red Dot 11/12) design for the Trabec Race helmet. Made from aramid fiber-reinforced EPS it’s designed to be both tough and flexible. Originally meant to be used for mountain and extreme terrain biking, I don’t see how this is different from riding the streets of Chicago.

In Top Form #1

Ora-Ïto is the brand name of the French designer Ito Morabito. His sense of form could be very inspiring at times. His work spreads around products, architecture, fashion, packaging, and sculpture. Among his clients are Vuit­­ton, Ap­­ple, Nike and Bic.

Ora-Ïto’s website is a good place get form inspiration.

Tangible Decibel @ IDEO

I am all for technological advancements (as long as they serve us positively). I recently finished FLACing and selling most of my CDs. Leaving behind a small collection of CDs I got as a gift and those which have a deep emotional significance to me. I still own a bunch of vinyls and I enjoy listening to them. However, I must admit that being able to carry your library with you is priceless (with a cap).

So now that most of our media is extracted from files, we are left with no unique physical connection as we used to experience when putting on Revolver on the turntable or inserting Kill ‘Em All into the cassette deck. IDEO‘s Boston office has a fascinating idea that can bring back these forgotten tangible moments. The c60 Redux uses cards embedded with RFID tags that when dropped on a special platter would send a signal to start a song from a data base. With some imagination this concept of physical connection to our music may take some interesting forms that could potentially elevate our experience of consuming the media.

The idea for the concept came from Martin Bone and Kara Johnson’s book, I Miss My Pencil.