Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog

Derick Holt: Bonita Takeout Menu

As people can probably tell from this site , I tend to be a bit retro-leaning in my design sensibility, and I have a particular love for old postcards, movie posters, and the other ephemera. So it’s no surprise that I immediately fell in love with designer Derick Holt’s work for Bonita, the newest restaurant in the Brooklyn “Diner” empire.
This particular piece, a takeout menu, gives me an idea for a great piece of Sci-Fi Hi-Fi swag I’d like to create: a calendar reminiscent of the kind given out by Mexican restaurants.

As people can probably tell from this site , I tend to be a bit retro-leaning in my design sensibility, and I have a particular love for old postcards, movie posters, and the other ephemera. So it’s no surprise that I immediately fell in love with designer Derick Holt’s work for Bonita, the newest restaurant in the Brooklyn “Diner” empire.

This particular piece, a takeout menu, gives me an idea for a great piece of Sci-Fi Hi-Fi swag I’d like to create: a calendar reminiscent of the kind given out by Mexican restaurants.

Radiohead “All I Need” Video

Simple, effective, moving.

Uhuru Recycled Bourbon Barrel Furniture

(via Materialicious)

I wish there was more info on what these are going to cost, because I love them. Might have to make the trek out to DUMBO to check them out in person.

1950s-1970s Advertising Flickr Set

(via anyways)

“ There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world’s smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently.

— Fake Steve on Google and their use of the worlds’ smartest and brightest. (via David Karp)

“ People think, Freemans is cool—let’s get the Freemans guy to design something,” Somer says. “Most of the time they just want me to kind of remake Freemans, which I refuse to do.”…“It’s kind of like the fifties, when Mies van der Rohe built a glass building. At the time it was totally unexpected, and really cool because the mirrored surface reflected all the old brick-masonry buildings around it. But then it was kind of weird, you know, when all buildings are suddenly mirror and glass. It’s that moment when the different thing becomes the same thing—to me that’s when you know it’s time to go somewhere else.

—

New York Magazine: How Freemans and Rusty Knot Proprietor Developed His Downtown Anti-Style

I know it makes me an awful hipster to say this, but Taavo Somer, the New York fashion/restaurant impresario behind Freeman’s and the Rusted Knot, just has an undeniable touch when it comes to “making a scene”—in much the same way that Steve Jobs, say, has a preternatural instinct for product design. I admire his restless creativity, his refusal to repeat himself, and the way he gets so heavily immersed in his projects that he thinks of himself as a “method designer” and imagines elaborate back stories behind the restaurants he’s designing.

“ I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the next century. The great airports are already suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose faubourgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centripetal city whose population forever circles its notional centre, and will never need to gain access to its dark heart.

— J.G. Ballard: Airports

(via Aaron Straup)

I’m always kind of intrigued by the suggestion that the world’s megacities are now becoming more connected to each other than they are to the rest of their respective countries. And, having spent quite a lot of time in them in the past year, I think that Ballard’s quite right that there’s nowhere you get a sense of that better than in airports.

» MOVE (Maps Optimized for Vehicular Environments)

(via Andrew Wooster)

I first started using an iPhone around the time I started spending a lot of time wandering around New York City, so consequently I’ve gotten a lot of experience using its Google Maps application for finding my way in unfamiliar territory. While I would say its mere existence definitely revolutionized the way I discovered one of the world’s great cities, I would also say that, in many ways, it is a long way from living up to its potential.

One of those ways is definitely in the area of route finding, an area where I think Apple’s designers could learn a thing or two from Joonhwan Lee’s research project, MOVE (Maps Optimized for Vehicular Environments). In much the same way that Harry Beck’s famed London Underground map simplifies the user’s wayfinding experience by presenting a stripped-down, abstract rendition of a city map, MOVE removes extraneous geographic details, and concentrates detail only in the part of the route the user is currently traversing.

MOVE is primarily aimed at car navigation systems, but it would be interesting to contemplate how a similar system for people on foot would be designed.

The Standard Hotel, New York

(via nevver)

I recently became somewhat fascinated with the building going up on top of New York’s abandoned, elevated railroad-cum-park the Highline down in the Meatpacking District. Thanks to Curbed, I now know it’s the New York branch of the Standard Hotel chain. Clever idea repurposing the old railroad tracks to hold deck chairs for lounging guests.

“ Why do Objective-C programmers make horrible politicians?” “They don’t retain their delegates.

— Colin Barrett: Essence of Cocoa

(via Ammon Skidmore)