Dear Stella Artois and iTunes,
There are 30-plus million of us Canadians. Did you think there was a chance that none of us would notice your commercial appropriation of one of our most popular non-commercial national symbols? Why not just put the Canadian flag in your campaign? Yes, we know, Burton Kramer’s 1974 logo for the CBC is a pretty excellent piece of typographic and geometric design, but you know what? There’s hardly a Canadian over the age of 12 who doesn’t recognize this object and harbour a fair amount of nostalgic affection for it, so maybe you will consider removing it from your advertising repertoire. Maybe go steal the NBC peacock or something.
Yours sincerely,
Canada.
Photo credits: CBC logo photos and video are via the Canadian Design Resource, and see the CDR’s article on the appropriation here. Even balder appropriation of the logo in the Stella ad’s designer’s own artwork here. iTunes photo by laurenlgmarch.
This tiny sample of photos is from the new website of Vancouver interior designer April Tidey. They include shots of her own amazing loft in Gastown, one of Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhoods. April is a landscape and outdoor designer as well, and in that capacity she worked as designer and stylist for the HGTV series “Take It Outside” for several years. Photographs here show great interiors by April in Vancouver and on nearby islands. Photos by Vancouver photographer Heather Ross.
I have one of these white heart pendant necklaces, and easily a hundred people have asked me about it. It’s by Toronto jeweller Tosca Teran, whose studio is alternately known as Nanotopia and Nanopod. Teran’s pieces, most of which look like a naturalist’s specimens, are classified according to her own funny hybrid proto-scientific taxonomy, viz.
There’s something about these that distinguishes them from other objects that reference nature – they’re sciencey, but also not. Maybe it’s the rounded edges that give them a sort of mysterious personality. My own doctor noticed my heart pendant one day and mentioned its anatomical correctness. I said “Yes! But doesn’t it have too many blood vessels? What’s this one at the back?” And she said “no, that’s correct, it’s the pulmonary artery.”
The Nanotopia website is here, but the Nanopod Etsy shop seems to be the place to buy items. There are some amazing photos of the jewellery in her Flickr and if you just search for “nanopod” on Flickr you can see photos her students have taken of her very nice teaching studio.
This blog post by Mr. Skona wins this week’s prize for ingenuity and charm.
My lovely wool socks (please excuse the pills) were starting to get a little threadbare around the heels and the ball of the foot. The rest the sock was fine so I didn’t want to recycle them or resign them to dusting pile just yet. There weren’t any holes, the fluffy wool (fleece? is that the right term?) had just worn off leaving a fine grid of threads (they must be made of a blend). I had this idea that I could weave yarn over and under the grid which would fill in the threadbare area. Little did I know that’s exactly how you darn something.
Great execution of a great idea in this public xylophone bench by designer PaulAloisi for the BenchMark Project in Toronto, Canada. From the Canadian Design Resource. There’d be pressure, though, to stand up whenever a musician came by.
“You told me to wear pink! This tie is lavender!” Don Cherry, the most daring dresser in Canadian television, probably, let alone in hockey, wore pink last Saturday in support of a cure for breast cancer. Cherry, the hockey commentator whose fractious half-time show, Coach’s Corner, is a strange Canadian institution, is here complaining to his ironic sidekick Ron MacLean that the NHL’s designated breast cancer tie is lavender, not pink, and that it doesn’t really match the properly pink ensemble he’d asked his tailor make for the occasion. Cherry, whose views on most topics can hardly be considered progressive (that’s an understatement), has at least never been worried about conforming to the rules of masculinity, or to anything else for that matter. How often do tough guys mix stiff Edwardian collars with hot pink carnations? Or daisies, or chrysanthemums, or… all the other flowers (see links below). I’m not a hockey fan, or a loudmouth fan, but Don Cherry’s sartorial experimentalism is the utmost. From here, and other suits here. His longtime tailor, Frank Cosco, died last year, and his son is now having to deal with Cherry’s finicky requests.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay about the strange, hybrid, and surprisingly impure histories of objects and buildings. It is skewed toward the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and mixes of all kinds. Since design isn't divorced from other things, it's also about art, social issues, urban and community planning, technology, philosophy and anything else that intersects with design, which means everything. "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, it's the same upside-down as right-side-up, it refers to both zeros and ones, and it is pronounced uno. My name is Lindsay and I'm open to your complaints, disagreement or general crankiness. Free free to comment or email. This is an anti-intellectualism-free zone and around here we don't try to dampen critique by calling it negativity or whining. We call it thought!
