small ritual

the return of old influences

have just rediscovered on the web a couple of magazines that have had a lasting influence on me, both now in purely digital form.

first, level - i have all 11 issues from the print run of 99-00 and loved it to bits, but it folded just as it was getting going. the originators chris and mark noble restarted it in june as a purely online affair, but with more or less the same cast of contributors and the same design that so affected me then. look at these pages from the original print mag:

now go look at alternativeworship.org!

the other influence/inspiration of the same period was knowledge magazine, until they changed the design from issue 44 on. i kept a few copies for years but must've thrown them out in the last move - i regret it now! but fortunately the new kmag site has online back issues, including some of my favourites - see here for a good example. the clean design, the coloured rectangles - still looks good to me. and of course i've returned to the music...

in praise of the sci-fi corridor

wonderful article about an essential aspect of nearly all tv/movie scifi, bringing it into full view. you won't look at these things in the same way again. my personal 'first scifi corridors' are the ones in the dalek city on skaro in the original 1963 'doctor who and the daleks'.
 
the crosswalls contain metal doors that rotate downwards to cut off sections, and on the wall in each section is a dalek eye stalk.

paradigm

my new nooka watch reminds me of 'paradigm' by pippo lionni:

the large dots are the hours, and the horizontal bar consists of thin vertical lines each representing one minute, with small dots giving five minute intervals - so the exact time can be read. but i tend to just glance at the proportion of the hour remaining, as one reads the angle of a traditional minute hand. an analogue clock face is an efficient use of a clockwork mechanism, but the dot-matrix and linear readout could always have been done mechanically - one imagines a medieval version where the hours are rotating pictures of the twelve apostles, and the linear display is a pilgrimage of animals. but really i was just after something futuristic.

images from the other 2001

came across these stunning images of spacecraft from the alternative world of 2001:a space odyssey, of which the pearl is this shot of a lufthansa orion 3 spaceliner.

i am reminded of the end of eternity where one of the catalysts for the hero's rebellion is the beauty of the spaceships in an alternative future he is obliged to delete...

teenage sketches find audience

this set of 1976 design sketches was never blogged or added to any flickr groups etc, and had very few views while it was near the top of my flickr stream. and then it started to rack up hundreds of views. turns out that things magazine had picked it up [7th paragraph down]. not sure how except that i linked to things magazine pelican project a long time ago on my delicious.

robot pole dancers

vaguely obscene robot pole dancers and dj at the boss design showroom launch party tonight

the event photographer was snapping me filming this so it might turn up in an industry magazine with who knows what caption.

stuffed animal magic

best thing at 100% design - or at least the most startling - is the jericho hands tent. not sure if i want to applaud or scream. www.jerichohands.com

on the adjacent stand stephen johnson does slightly less disturbing things with kitsch sculptured animals. check his website for the 'now isn't that lovely' section.

communist postcards

in the 70s and 80s one of my uncles used to travel behind the iron curtain on business. he sent us postcards, as much for us to see the stamps as anything. i found a few of them over easter - here on flickr. there may be more to follow if i can remember where they are. on one such trip he brought back the tu-144 brochure.

the postcard from north korea strikes me as especially remarkable now - it can't be a common thing to have. my brother noticed that the description is in spanish - why would a north korean postcard have a spanish caption? we presume it's because the only visitors were likely to be from cuba. it's also unusual for stamps to feature aggressively brandished machine guns.

interior design

the relative lack of blogging or any other creative activity lately is because most of my spare-time energies have been going into sorting out my flat. my delicious links tell the story [of inspiration more than purchase, i should say!]. hopefully the wall panels will go up this weekend. then it will be finished enough to take some photographs.

in the meantime take a look at this marvellous 60s home. the stuff's mostly mass-market kitsch, but put together so well it's a design triumph. in this country one would call the national trust and ask them to preserve it for ever. the house is in los angeles, but almost every aspect of the interior is familiar to me from my childhood in england - clearly this idiom was universal. it brings back nagging non-specific memories - that wood wallpaper behind the dining table - who in my childhood had just that, and similar dining chairs too? my mum would know.

urban church set

this is a expanded version of the 'urban church' drawings on smallritual.org, based on the talks i did in melbourne and adelaide last year. the idea was to draw together a whole range of things that i've done into an overall picture of what 'church' might mean, from small things to big, from your pocket to the city. it's best as a slideshow so things are in order, but i'm beginning to wonder if linear order matters. there are some more slides to come, especially in the 'objects' section, but i haven't been getting round to it and i'm tired of these just sitting on my hard drive.