Something I never would have thought to use as a medium: concrete.
But why not use the most highly manufactured material in the world for everyday design, too? These guys haven’t left it alone for parking garages, basement foundations, highways, and various outdoor garden knick-knacks.
Self-proclaimed wood-bench tinkerer, Ray “Whamodyne” of Etsy likes to use hollowed out light bulbs in his various projects. What is more resourceful and simple as using one as a petite vase combined with a dimpled puck of solid concrete molded for use as a stand?
Mix fine concrete with glass fibers and you’ve got Litracon, concrete that light can pass through. Swedish patented in 2001 by Hungarian architect Áron Losonczi, why hasn’t this caught on?
Susan Urquhart is one of many jewelers who have banked on the trend of juxtaposing dyed concrete and silver for small scale pieces.
Even polished cement floors have gotten a face-lift with the help of Design Milk and Transparent House.
On another note, The People’s Republic of China (home to approximately a fifth of the world’s population) currently consumes four-tenths of the world’s cement/concrete production. Thank you wikipedia.
So I figured I’d kick things off with a design firm I stumbled upon today while browsing the intarwebs (Looking for things completely unrelated to design and more related to my new… dungeons and dragons character…). Anyway! The Barbarian Group is an award winning company that focuses almost entirely on interactive design. They’ve designed countless websites since their founding in 2001 and have had some huge name clients (VW, BK, Red Stripe, CNN, Samsung and plenty more. You can view a full client list here.) As well as offices around the country.
One thing I was very happy to find was that they worked on the new VW website. This is by far one of Volkswagen’s most successful site in my opinion, it’s simple and clean, but has the trademark Volkswagen wit that we’ve all come to know and love since those old VW posters. One of my favorites is the Passat page, showing 120 different ‘not-so-standard’ features.
This page brilliantly illustrates all of the features the Passat has through clever videos showing their usefulness.
I definitely recommend checking out more of their amazing work.
Welcome to the first posting on the Fox and the Hound graphic design blog. We know there are a ton of blogs out there about Graphic Design. We also know how easy it is to start your own blog. So, it’s obvious that we thought that we too, should have a great blog about design. Some of the stuff we talk about you’re sure to see on a lot of other blogs, but we plan to make sure that there will also be a lot of stuff we talk about that will be unique to us. So, for now, sit back and relax while we get ready to make something awesome.
