Inspired t-shirts by Michael Sy. Michael creates gorgeous customised t-shirts by creating variations on his own designs using hand painting and embroidery. The results are lovely t-shirts that will make you stand out.
www.servicestudio.com
Tags: Fashion

This lovely website tells the time. What's so special about that? Well it tells the time using photos submitted by real live people. So, 11:31 was spelled out by some orange peel in Somerset and 11:32 was a shot of a shot of shot of someone holding a CD with the time on it on their computer screen, if you follow.
www.humanclock.com
Tags: Ideas

This Australian designer first came to my attention late last year when he collaborated with Nike on the Zvezdochka shoe. Since then I've taken a closer look at his work and want to share it with the world! Thanks to his recent exhibition at London's Design Museum I was given the chance to see many of his designs up-close and personal. These included: his 1986 Lockheed Lounge, his 1999/2000 concept car for Ford, the Kelvin 40 2004 concept jet and of course the Zvezdochka.

'Marc Newson is one of the most accomplished and influential designers of his generation. At 41, he has already worked across a wide range of disciplines to create everything from chairs, household objects, a bicycle and a concept car to restaurants, a recording studio and interiors of private and commercial jets, for clients based in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.

In 1997, Newson moved to London, where he set up Marc Newson Ltd as a larger studio capable of tackling more ambitious industrial projects. He has since designed mass manufactured glassware for Iittala, kitchen and bathroom accessories for Alessi, furniture and household objects for Magis and B&B Italia, Idée and Dupont Corian. Newson has also designed vehicles such as a bicycles, the MN01, for Denmark's Biomega, a concept car, the 021C for Ford, and the interiors of a Falcon 900B private jet. In 2002-3 he designed the Lever House Restaurant in the famous Lever House Building in Manhattan, New York, a Business Class seat, Skybed for Qantas, a cookware range for Tefal and a bathroom range, The Newson Suite, for Ideal Standard. He opened a second studio in Paris

In 2004, new works include Talby, a mobile telephone for Japan's KDDI, the uniforms worn by the Australian Olympic team designed in collaboration with Richard Allan and worn at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, a shoe, Zvezdochka, for Nike, a range of clothing for G-Star, luggage for Samsonite, and aircraft interiors for the new A380 fleet for Qantas.'
www.marcnewson.com
www.designmuseum.org
Tags: Design

These guys believe that podcasting is the future. Odeo are a company who believe that podcasting will be the next blogging and plan to make money from its growing popularity. They aim to 'enable this new distribution channel and medium by creating the best one-source solution for finding, subscribing to, and publishing audio content.' It will be interesting to see how a non-visual medium takes off on the web, especially when people are so used to free content.

'Odeo (pronounced OH-dee-oh) means to be podcast central - an all-in-one system that makes it possible for someone with no more equipment than a telephone to produce podcasts and also makes it possible for users to assemble custom playlists of audio files and copy them directly onto MP3 audio players.
The company plans to make money by selling audio content and advertising and, eventually, software for producing and editing podcasts.'
www.nytimes.com
Odeo Blog
Tags: Ideas

Will the 2000s be to Asian culture what the 80s and 90s were to black culture? Already this decade we've had the bollywood trend, the increasing influence of asian sounds is impacting the mainstream with asian tinged tunes by Missy Elliot and Talvin Singh (Winner of the Mercury Music Prize 1999). In addition, we have the impending release of Harold And Kumar Get The Munchies - not a cultural high point i'm sure, but it's not often that a hollywood film stars a young asian man, is it? And with the continued rise of China and India's economies we're sure to see a lot more.
Last but not least the launch of Theme Magazine argues all this and with interesting features on those at the forefront of this exciting trend.
Tags: Trends Magazines

According to Design Boom IKEA will soon be releasing flat-pack housing. This could be a major major bonus in the UK, especially in the south east. However, I hope they make them a lot prettier than the one in the example.
For some interesting houseboat designs (kind of relevant) look at this on Gizmondo
www.ikea.com
Tags: Design

Josh Rubin has a great post on his site today, K adorable. The premise of K adorable is that you pay an annual subscription and as a result are sent five t-shirts with exclusive designs over a period of time. I love the idea of getting the freshest designs almost every other month delivered to me - think of the possibilities for other mediums!
www.kadorable.com
Tags: Ideas

For those of you lucky enough to receive BBC2 they've had a pretty cool programme called Dragons' Den on. The basic premise of the show is that budding entrepreneurs pitched their ideas to secure investment finance from the Dragons... elite business experts. The business experts are all successful entrepreneurs who will stump up cash for ideas they truly believe in. Any way in the last show one of the winners was Huw Gwyther who will launch Wonderland Magazine in September. The magazine itself promises 'a visual explosion of fashion, beauty, culture, travel, people, celebrity, parties, art, film and music - for both guys and girls.' Sounds pretty good but if you want the blueprint for this try *Wallpaper.
www.wonderlandmagazine.com
www.wallpaper.com
Tags: Magazines

'The magazine has your typical fashion, art, photography, and articles but in a different form. These topics aren't treated as mere topics. They are each embraced in their own unique way. Everything in the magazine is raw and real. It's contributors are both famous and unknown. Everyone is someone to / and the pages show that. Homeless people become contributing photographers, friends become psychological drawing subjects and writers range from $1 a worders to best friends writing about their day. / puts tself into a new category on the newsstand shelves. It's a category that can't be defined.' Apparently.
Check out the photography and interesting skew on the world. Sadly it's only available in the US.
www.slashmagazine.com

Once you delve inside this website there are some lovely, simple house designs from Power Unit. All gorgeous to look at and presumably not too expensive to build. I want one!
www.pus.jp
Tags: Design

A cool London design agency with some lovely illustration in their portfolio. Not only that but they also have an excellent online magazine - this issue is titled 'Dirty'. Definitely worth checking out. My favourite? Why, page 17 of course.
www.drinkbleach.co.uk
Tags: Design

The latest sound to emerge from East London the UK's creative hotspot for sometime. Mashing up UK Garage, Dub and Hip-Hop it's already had mainstream recognition in the form of a Mercury Music Award for Dizzee Rascal in 2003. Could 2005 be the year that it makes it?
www.beinghunted.com
www.dirteestank.com
Tags: Music

Recumbant bicycle pods and motopods - people want their own personal space when they travel - I keep on seeing recumbant bikes in London and followed a velomobile for 5miles on my way home the other night. Not only that but check out Josh Rubin for the latest and greatest recumant bicycle.
Velomobiles - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velomobile
Microcars - www.gizmag.co.uk/go/3647/
Segway - segway.com
Tags: Transport

Grafedia turns New York into a potential webpage
Grafedia , created by John Geraci, is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to images, video, sound files, etc. It can be written on walls, in the streets, or in postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it.
Viewers "click" on the grafedia hyperlinks with their phones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" to get the content behind the link.
You can make street art with grafedia, or leave behind simple calling cards for others wherever you go. You can have running dialogues between authors, or create interactive narratives or poetry in public spaces. Every surface becomes potentially a web page, and the entire physical world is joined with the Internet.
How to do it? Choose a word. Then, send a media file from your cell phone to that chosen word plus '@grafedia.net', e.g. 'myword@grafedia.net'. Write that word anywhere in the real world in blue with an underline. That word will then be linked to the media file the author sent to grafedia.net, and viewers will be able to retrieve the file. You can also upload media from your computer directly to the grafedia.net server in order to create grafedia with more precise images.
via: www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/004204.php

More interactive habitat trends
SMS displayed on walls - www.studiotroika.co.uk/flash/index.html
SMS guides - www.yellowarrow.org/
Pacmanhatten - www.pacmanhattan.com/
Spaceinvaders - www.space-invaders.com/
Tags: Ideas

Increasingly people are becoming more aware of the dangers of modern life - be it processed foods, too much salt, Dasani, obesity etc. People are trying to become more healthy; from medicine (natural herbal remedies & homeopathic) to going down the gym (although not to come out looking like Brad Pitt, just staying healthy). This has led to a rapid increase in the number of gyms that aren't a one-size-fits-all offering instead gyms are moving with the rest of the world towards segmented fitness.
www.springwise.com/
Tags: Trends

Not only is everyone making there own media now they want to make their own clothes. From screen printing your latest Photoshop creation on to a t-shirt to customising those jeans that you'd never wear otherwise, people are doing their own thing. Next up recycled clothing. And also an increase in the number of trendy thrift stores and second hand boutiques. Noted in Covent Garden, Brick Lane, Notting Hill and Kingly Court - people are prepared to pay more of a premium for stuff that someone else has worn but that they can buy in a cool environment.
www.rokit.co.uk/
www.joshspear.com/index.php?itemid=197
Tags: Fashion

Everybody else - Creative and Archos, has brought out a portable video device to complement their MP3 players - why haven't Apple? Presumably they are going to once they have sorted out all the legal stuff to support an iMovie store. Why else would they have brought out the nice but pretty pointless ipod photo?
However, the Sony PSP could blow ipod, Archos and Creative out of the water. Amazing games, music, photos and video - a bit bigger than an ipod? Wow.
www.sony.com
www.engadget.com
Tags: Technology

Do anything anywhere with the spread of Wi-fi and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). You may have heard of Skype, far and away the market leaders, quite simply Skype allows you to actually talk to your buddies over the internet using VOIP. This is either free, if calling another internet device, or very cheap if you are calling a mobile/landline.
The proliferation of wi-fi is leading to a connected 24/7 culture with people online anytime anyplace it's even affecting what we wear. Burton and Motorola have released a snowboarding jacket containing a Bluetooth control pad for your phone and for an MP3 player - Bluetooth ipod anyone?
www.engadget.com
www.skype.com
Tags: Technology

Blogs continue to dominate and proliferate - this will be assisted by the wide adoption of RSS.
A direct result of RSS has been the invention of Podcasting which is set to become a huge phenomenon. - bored of your radio station? do it yourself and let everybody else listen in. Not only that but using Apple's iLife you can create your own music, radio shows and even movies.
www.apple.com/ilife
podcasters.blogspot.com/
live.curry.com/
www.blogger.com
blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss
Tags: Trends Ideas