There is a new stylish space saver in town. Theres a lot of horrible junk-invention masquerading as industrial design these days so its refreshing to see something both new and good. Its nice to have a Cheval mirror if you have the space so you can evaluate your look head to toe. Its also nice to have a full size ironing board so you can, you know, iron your clothes. Using them both simultaneously is extremely rare yet once you see what Aïssa Logerot has done, the combination seems so obvious (which is always a sign of good design) and graceful. Hopefully Aïssa continues refining the design for durability and practicality and gets these into mass production soon.

[Aïssa Logerot]

Jack Schluze and Matt Webb’s design consultancy in London has produced Here & There (seen above) which visualizes Manhatan simultaneously as a map in bird’s eye view and as a projection at eye level view. They invert the curvature of the earth to create a horizonless view. It seems pretty effective in visualizing the environment both. Thankfully they aren’t silent about it too. If you check out their Blog they go in to detail to explain their influences and what they were thinking. They even go so far as to offer prints for sale.

[Schulze & Webb]
[Here & There]

Get a load of this handy little tool design from Lee Valley & veritas. It’s called the Brush lugg and it helps you open paint cans, but also can be either clipped or magnetized to them such that they provide a handy place to put your brush when not in use via another inclined magnet. They even have design consideration factoring in the fill level of the can in question. Wonderful design work here.

Shaun White Snowboarding has just dropped in a shelf-filling seven flavors (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, DS, PSP, PS2 and PC.) With home video game consoles the Wii is in many ways the runt of the pack, lacking the raw horsepower of the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 (both powered by the award-winning Assassin’s Creed engine). Usually with large multiplatform games like this, the Wii version ends up being a crippled and relatively neglected cousin of the other larger versions.

With this title the Canadian developers at Ubisoft Montreal rethought that typical move and instead made a custom game variant for the Wii, compensating for the shortcomings of the console by capitalizing on the unique possibilities the hardware has to offer. Shaun White Snowboarding – Road Trip is not just an attempt to cram a large power-hungry game in to a small and relatively weak console but instead a differentiated stylized experience which shows both consumers and other developers that with a little creativity you can make multiplatform games which take advantage of what each platform uniquely has to offer. continue…

Far Cry was an interesting game years ago. It was a first person shooter with a difference. It really shook things up in the genre with its tight AI and amazingly far draw distances in a seemingly open world. It also has a significant problem where the game fell apart in the second half with an unfortunate plot and gameplay twist which was seen to many as being three steps back. Its first official sequel is here now: Far Cry 2 and many are watching it to see if it repeats the accomplishments or the problems of its namesake. On top of that, the Canadian developers at Ubisoft Montreal have tried to push the envelope once more and give players an ambitious experience.

To make a point: Far Cry 2 by Clint Hocking has almost nothing to do with the original. It does not continue or have any significant ties to the original narrative and is intentionally divorced from Far Cry. That gesture seems to be an admission of guilt for letting the first game devolve so rapidly in to a horrible mess. Consider Far Cry 2 an apology to fans as they make amends this time to turn Far Cry 2 in to what we all wanted the first Far Cry to be. continue…