The Baja BBQ Firepack with it’s eco-friendly paper pulp container and natural charcoal chunks can be lit quickly, as is, with minimum mess. Being a lifelong fan of the barbecue, and having a dad who is subjected to fanning furiously with a newspaper for 1/2 an hour to get it started, I have always been of the opinion that there must be a better way. This is probably it :)

Designed by Mike & Maaike for Lazzari.

The Classics of Everyday Design

See you at the end of next week!

Jenn

For more info about the adop-ted project, please visit www.adopteddy.wordpress.com

Cadin Batrack is a motion graphics designer who created the Pencil Farm. Besides this and his showreel, I have no idea who Cadin Batrack actually is. His showreel is lively and full of graphics you will have seen on popular TV channels and movies, such as X-Men so do watch it. The music for the reel is happy and entertaining and starts off “Hey, mister fancy-pants…” I liked his work right away. 

The Pencil Farm has a cheerful demeanour and contains games designed by Cadin, each with cute little graphics and quirky gameplay. The ideas expressed are fun, simple and beautifully executed. It even has a “Game builder” with which you can customise a simple collect and drop game to put onto your blog or website.

I made a game with dragonflies to put on here, but it won’t show properly so I’ll have to figure out how to get it working. In the meantime, visit the pencil farm and www.cadinbatrack.com

PS: Cadin’s surname makes me think of the batmobile and snowboards.

The Overlap Tray by OFFI is my idea of an ideal home desktop. Unlike a regular tray table with foldaway legs, the Overlap Tray is meant to stand out and be used. Functional, aesthetically pleasing and great for breakfast in bed – it even has cork mats for cups of tea and a place to keep your books & papers while you’re carrying it! This is my kind of tray!

The price has gone up since I first discovered it ($149-$189 US), so again I await the sales… Available here in Birch (below right) or Walnut (above)

Giving a new meaning to “soft light”, the D*Light Huggable Pillow is warmer in more ways than one. Soft, cuddly and gorgeous to look at, I LOVE them – give one of these anytime of the year and you’d be on my Christmas and Birthday card list forever.

“The amazing effect is the way you see people interact with the pillow, they start to smile, immediately begin hugging it and just can’t seem to put it down at all… Think of it as a soft and intense version of the SunJar, that lets you hold the sun in your arms.”

Available from Diana Lin Design for $160 US in Glamourous Gold, Powerful Pink or Wonderful White. This is no bargain bin give-away and considering how highly the designer values top quality materials and is working on sourcing them at better costs, I reckon it’d be worth every shiny penny. My favourites are the white then the gold (I don’t do pink)… Maybe the other way round.. Oh heck I like them both :)

UPDATE: If you are in NYC on May 17-20, Diana Lin Design will be at ICFF booth 855. They will be introducing new products and new covers for d°light Huggable and they would love to see you there!

From the dynamic Skies in Motion to the serenity of Mystic Waters, Dan Powers knows how to captivate a viewer with his well-timed photography. The five images are shown here are my favourites so far, the most captivating is the curving skyscraper (above) from Skies in Motion.  To me, this image says majestic, sweeping, a part of things larger than itself.

Originally from a medicine background that saw him through service with the US Marines, Dan is a self-taught photographer whose work has won several awards. His speciality is photographing time and he says about this topic,

“Most photographs are two-dimensional pictures of a three-dimensional space.  But when a photograph is taken with exposures as long as fifteen minutes, time becomes a part of the image.  Suddenly, the three-dimensional space is moving through time, leaving a trail of its former presence on the photographic canvas.”  

“Previously, photography was heralded for its capacity to render a moment in time…The Perfect Moment.  My photography reveals not only what is there, but what was.  Only film photography, or its modern digital equivalent, can capture this so precisely.”

In this age of digital photography and inkjet printers, Dan Powers also retains his skills as a darkroom professional and he “spends hours reviewing and editing every shadow and highlight, every nuance of color, and in choosing the right medium for the image.  There is nothing in one of my prints that was not intended to be there.” His attention to detail and quality are paramount, and he guarantees his prints for a lifetime. Now that’s a guarantee!

Dan currently lives in Newburyport with his family, where he continues to work with his camera and slow shutter. Most of his photos were taken in and around Massachusetts where, noting from his blog, he takes a keen interest in the local photographic community and gallery events. The music selected for his own photo website matches his imagery very well.

The image below is from Mystic Waters, and reminds me so much of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader from The Chronicles of Narnia. I love because it’s as the shore on the other side might disappear and the water carry on into forever.

These three pictures below do not go without comment! I find the contrasting soft whites and solid blacks of the clock tower image very striking. The centre photograph (part of the Language of Morning collection) could be sold to Mac as a desktop background, and the creeping mist by the lighthouse makes me think of breakers and the salty smell of the sea. Fabulous images Dan, I look forward to seeing more of your work!

All of Dan’s prints are available for purchase from his website, www.danielpowersphoto.com

All images used with the kind permission of Daniel Powers.

Want some for your kid’s next party? Available here.

This bookshelf is almost worth the ridiculous price (if you buy it online from Europe and have it shipped) for the kudos it’ll get you when people exclaim “Hey! How did you do that?!”.

One by a sofa makes for a cool talking point, but why stop there? Be one of the supercool and get several – I recommend either 3 or 5, odd numbers look the best – to create an aethetically pleasing artistically awesome floating library. There is another kind called “the Selfshelf” which has ‘Ceci n’est pas un livre’ as the title, ‘this is not a book’ in French, but it doesn’t look quite as cool in groups (why would you have 3-5 copies of the same book?)

Almost, but not quite worth the price from Europe*, however I found the Invisible Bookshelf in US dollars here.

*unless they decide to have a massive 90% off everything sale

You should enjoy a break from the computer too :)

Jenn