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Archive for July, 2007.
Everything that Chris Cornell lends his voice to turns to gold as far as I am concerned and I must check out his new album, Carry On, but in the meantime here is a great oldie but goldie from Soundgarden’s ‘Down on the Upside’.
This video for ‘Burden in my Hand’ is one of my faves, with Cornell in the desert with his band of desparados, looking mean and brooding and giving great hair…!
When it comes to layout I tend to come from the ‘if it looks right, it is right’ school of design. However, if ensuring precise proportional harmony is your thing then the Phiculator could be just the tool for you.
Given any number, it will calculate the corresponding number according to the golden ratio. Useful to anyone wishing to create anything with divine proportions!
Phi, also known as the Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio, the golden section, the golden mean, and the divine proportion, is found in art, architecture, design and even nature, where it has been recognised throughout history for its aesthetic beauty.
+ Download Phiculator, the Golden Ratio calculator from Thismanslife
Taken from one of the finest surf movies, Sprout, directed by Thomas Campbell.
International Klein Blue is such a remarkable colour it is considered worthy of it’s own website, www.international-klein-blue.com, where it’s just all about the blue..!
Incidentally, it is also the colour I have just painted my front door (well an approximation anyway - see comments).
Britain’s coastline has numerous outstanding attractions but I have to agree with the Guardian, who this week awarded the Cornwall town of St Ives the title of Britain’s best seaside town 2007.
I have been going to St Ives at least once a year since early childhood - it is pretty much my second home. It’s even where my wife and I chose to get married.
Set in Penwith’s rugged landscape, it has everything you could want. Good surf, great places to eat, stunning coastal walks and art galleries including Tate St Ives.
Illuminated by it’s own solar ringflash, St Ives is bathed in light reflected from the white sands of the three beaches that encircle the town, Porthmeor, Porthminster and Porthgwidden. It’s this luminous quality to the light that has attracted artists to the peninsula for many years
Find out more about why St Ives beat 12 other nominations in the Guardian’s interactive guide to the town.
And if you are wondering where the old postcard of St Ives Harbour at the top of this post came from, I found it here in a stunning collection of postcards of St Ives and Lelant.
The Super Normal project is a manifesto for a design philosophy adopted by Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa. It is basically a reaction to much of the ‘over design’ we see nowadays - questioning the need for design for design’s sake surplus to the aesthetic or functional value of an article. As Morrison says:
“Design, which used to be almost unknown as a profession, has become a major source of pollution. Encouraged by glossy lifestyle magazines, and marketing departments, it’s become a competition to make things as noticeable as possible by means of colour, shape and surprise. It’s historic and idealistic purpose, to serve industry and the happy consuming masses at the same time, of conceiving things easier to make and better to live with, seems to have been side-tracked. The virus has already infected the everyday environment. The need for businesses to attract attention provides the perfect carrier for the disease. Design makes things seem special, and who wants normal if they can have special? And that’s the problem.”
“Not that old things shouldn’t be replaced or that new things are bad, just that things which are designed to attract attention are usually unsatisfactory. There are better ways to design than putting a big effort into making something look special. Special is generally less useful than normal,and less rewarding in the long term. Special things demand attention for the wrong reasons, interrupting potentially good atmosphere with their awkward presence.”
And why ‘Super Normal’? Fukasawa explains:
“Designers generally do not think to design the ‘ordinary.’ If anything, they live in fear of people saying their designs are ‘nothing special’. Of course, undeniably, people do have an unconscious everyday sense of ‘normal’, but rather than try to blend in, the tendency for designers is to try to create ’statement’ or ’stimulation’. So ‘normal’ has come to mean ‘unstimulating’ or ‘boring’ design.”
“It’s not just designers; people who buy design and clients who commission designers do not see ‘normal’ as a design concept or even entertain the idea of creating a ‘new normal’. To dare, then, to design something ‘normal’ within this prevailing scheme of design common sense raises the stakes; it makes for a consciously designed normal above-and-beyond normal that what we might call ‘Super Normal’.”
You can read more about Morrison and Fukasawa’s Super Normal philosophy here and the International Herald Tribune has a written a nice piece on the subject - ‘Celebrating the beauty of ’super normal’ little objects of daily life’
Reference:
Super Normal
Jasper Morrison & Naoto Fukasawa
Super Normal - Sensations of the Ordinary
Jasper Morrison & Naoto Fukasawa
Both published by Lars MĂĽller Publishers
Just tested this blog on IE7 here on the office PC and for some reason it just will not display the front page.
It starts to load then flashes up a message declaring “Internet Explorer cannot load http://www.iainclaridge.co.uk/blog - operation aborted”
Every other page of the site loads ok in IE and the whole site works on every other browser across both mac and PC platforms.
Does anyone have any experience of this or ideas as to why this might be happening?
In the meantime - screw you Internet Explorer - you suck…!
And I urge anyone who is viewing this blog in Internet Explorer to try another browser - not just so you can see this site glitch free but because of lots of reasons.
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