Wednesday, March 3, 2010

intheCUTTS- BENNYGOLD from In The Cutts on Vimeo.


I would say Benny Gold seems to be living the SF Graphic Design version of the dream I would love to have doing Industrial Design in NYC

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Lenny Bacich




There isn't much I can say about this that hasn't already been said, or felt, but Lenny Bacich has passed away. I've had him since my freshman year here at Pratt, and I can't imagine finishing my senior year without him. He's been immensely important to me and my education here at pratt, design or otherwise. There was so much passion coming from this man for all of his students that it really was astonishing. Hands down he was my favorite teacher here and I could always go to him whenever I needed advice, comfort, or just a good talk. He was an important part of continuing the legacy that is pratt's 3-D industrial design program and I feel extremely lucky to have known and learned from him. Although he is gone physically, he will really live on through all the students. I'm so sad about this loss, i'm just one of hundreds and probably thousands of students who have been profoundly changed by Lenny over the past 30 something years he's spent teaching at Pratt, and one of the many who loves him dearly.

Visit Josh Longo's blog for some really wonderful things being said about him.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

keys open doors

I was on TWSNOW today and found this great article in memory of Craig Kelly.


"Keys To Reality
by Ken Achenbach
It’s kind of funny how you can go from walking around with nothing but lint in you pocket and being totally stoked, to walking around with a pocket full of keys and being totally bummed.
It starts out simply and seductively. I’ll just get this car so I can snowboard more. Wrong. Anything that let’s you snowboard more is a scam. It won’t let you snowboard more because you ride every day and a car can’t add days to the week.

“I’ll just get this little night job so I can buy gas,” you hear yourself saying. There’s another key. Then your job starts making you miss sleep, so you can’t snowboard as hard or as long as you used to. And you need stuff to wear to work. You need a place to change and store your stuff. Now you have an address, that’s another key. Soon you have to get a day job because you’re not making enough money at night. The keys start adding up.
Now that you have a job, girls know you’re not a total loss and you end up with a girlfriend. She wants you to hang with her once in a while instead of going boarding all the time. First, she gives you the key to her heart, and then the key to her apartment. That’s two more. You can’t give her the key to your heart because snowboarding put a combination lock on it and only your snowboard knows the number.
Now you have a bunch of keys in your pocket. They’re high-maintenance items. You have to take care of them. They’re weighing you down. Snowboarding is slowly slipping away, and you don’t even notice.
One day, cruising to your full-time office job that you had to get a few years back to make payments on all your keys, you drive past a guy on the corner with his thumb out and a snowboard under his arm. While speeding by you start thinking about the guy you just passed. He looked like you used to—snowboard and nothing else. As you pull into the parking lot at work, you can’t get the hitchhiker out of your head. Your mind keeps wandering back. Pulling all the keys out of you pocket and jingling them, you think about what you really want from life.
Running back to your car, you reverse out of the parking lot and squeal a Rockford in the middle of the four-lane highway. You’ve got to get away from your keys. You begin throwing them out the window as you blow down the highway. First to go is the key to the door at work. Then you backhand your girlfriend’s apartment key out the passenger window. Flick, there goes the key to the storage unit, then the key to her car. Flick, flick, flick. You feel better each time a key flies out the window and goes bouncing down the pavement at 100 mph. You don’t even slow down for the tollbooth, paying instead with the tossed key to your office and the executive washroom.
You only have two keys left. You unlock your house, run in, grab your snowboard, and dash out of the house. You leave the key to your house sitting in the lock to the front door. Whoever finds the house open can take it, and all your stuff. You don’t need it anymore. You jump back into the car and start burning rubber through all four gears back to the highway where you saw the hitcher.
He’s still there. You slam on the brakes. When he opens the car door, you look into his eyes. It’s you. It’s the life you left behind when you sold out."

awesome. original .pdf link can be found here.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Glass Competition





Sneak peak of what i'm working on for a glass competition... my favorite is the last one.

Future Primitive



So dope.. skateboarding really has changed a lot.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Garmisch-Partenkirchen olympic ski jump

I can't even begin to pronounce the name of the city this jump is located in but it is amazing. I watch a lot of Universal Sports these days because they have a lot of pre-olympic coverage of really bizarre and interesting Winter Olympic sports. Lots of figure skating, luge, bobsled, and various categories of skiing mostly. What has caught my eye the most is the Four Hills tournament for ski jumping. What these athletes are doing is amazing, and even more amazing is the beautiful piece of sculpture built for them to compete on.











It's such a weird sight to see coming out of the mountains, and the sculpted cantilevered design is so interesting. I love the exposed beams on the bottom, and how the lift in the middle of the landing pad is so thin and seems to float right off the mountain. A good write up can be found here and the architecture firm who designed it can be found here.

my favorite part of the write up is:
"Topographic integration links up with sculptural expressiveness, giving the new jump in Garmisch-Partenkirchen its unique characteristic appearance. At the same time, its architectural impression and formal dynamics also invites associations with the risk and acceleration of the ski-jumping sport. The quest to overcome gravitation, inherently linked with ski jumping, is architecturally expressed by the cantilevering inrun of the ski jump."

This is a wonderful execution of the design of a form being visually meaningful for its purpose.