While one can rightly agree that the photos stairporn does play host to does fetishise the stair form itself it is in an appreciative way throwing good comment to form and function, commenting visually on the design and giving high-fives where necessary. In essence stairporn is a collection of very well designed, interesting stair like constructions that make the audience both admire and feel strangely attracted to what is otherwise a simple medium for moving up or down.

I have included below a small gallery of my favourites from browsing stairporn.com and would reccomend you view them and then go visit the website for some more beautiful architecture!

Gallery

I have in the past linked to several interesting design projects, and as a community we all applaud the most recent designs and illustrations; indeed places such as deviantart are abundant with them. However it is rare to see outside of academia people applauding designs and illustrations that are themselves dated and non-current. I like to refer to these as vintage-designs and vintage-illustrations.

There is a lot that can be said in favour of these vintage designs, firstly they get the information they hold conveyed to the audience as simply and easily as possible giving at times anatomically correct depictions of processes as they happen. In contrast many of the modern illustrations are more flow charts than anything else, leaving a great deal to the audiences imagination rather than laying out processes with glorious detail. I have included a gallery of those vintage illustrations I could find for your enjoyment.

Gallery

While I have seen many different tree house designs in the past (none of which I appear to have blogged about), this one has to be one of the most impressive to date. Although it is dubious as to whether it can be considered a true tree house by the childhood definition of planks of wood nailed to a fork high up in a tree, the one pictured above is indeed a wooden house built 16 feet above the ground and supported by the surrounding trees which is good enough a reason for me to call it a tree house. Whats really good about this one is the fact that you may rent it out on holiday to spend a nice time exploring the local forest and getting to know nature a little bit better.

Above you can see what looks like a very cosy interior of the aforementioned tree house, it has a second level in the loft space however from the description that sounds like its the sleeping area for two people while the second couple would have to make use of the two sofas pictured above. Beings based near the Edisto River makes this an unlikely holiday destination for myself due to being thousands of miles away; which is unfortunate because it looks amazing.

The beauty that you see before you is an interesting concept for an alarm clock that visualises time designed by Antrepo Design Industry (source) the large numbers on the left signify the hour of the day while the red line moves across the bar to visualise the movement of seconds within each minute.

Unfortunately the above is very unlikely to reach our gadget shops any time soon, while it is super beautiful and pleasing on the eye we just dont have the technology available that would be able to reproduce it in the real world for a reasonable amount of money – any engineer will tell you that much. While bi-colour and tri-colour LED’s are widely available in many colour selections from red to green and red to yellow and so on I have yet to find a single one that goes from red to white (or grey as shown here) without having to use a tri-colour (RGB) LED which would certainly increase the complexity of manufacturing and costs. With that said, hats off to anyone who can manufacture this in the real world and make it available for less than £200 as David Forbes says:

It’s too bad that this clock can’t be produced at a reasonable cost, since it is a nice looking design. The LED dot matrix display itself would cost over 50 dollars and would get rather warm in operation. The retail price would have to be several hundred dollars.

If I had a few spare weeks and a couple hundred pound spare I would cirtainly give it ago, even just to have one myself, it would certainly need a light detector to automatically dim the LEDs during night time because I can foresee this illuminating a whole room. In any case some more pretty picutres below to please your viewing organs.

This is the Spud model based upon the concept of chopping pieces of a bike to make it lighter and thus faster. The Spud is available in both red and black however from the looks of it you could respray it any colour you liked as these designs appear to be made as customisable as possible by the typical bike enthusiast.

The Ruby model shown above honestly (at least to me) looks like just a slight modification of the Spud design with a smaller exhaust and slight changes on the front and rear metal bits as well as a more flowing body design but with that said it is arguably its own design all-be-it similar to the aforementioned. The manufacturers description of the Ruby design is that its much like the girl-next-door the first love with its flowing design and likeable accessories. The Ruby model comes in two shades black and blue, the blue is really nice.

The above bike design is called the Pea Shooter and comes in the above Silver as well as black, in addition to my previous comments on the Ruby design there does seem to be very little difference between the Pea Shooter and the previous two bikes however all three do contain discrete design modifications which keep them apart. The Pea Shooter for one has a different tank design and a distinct exhaust, from their scrap book you can see the design influences of each design which come across in each really well. With that taken into context I believe these new bikes from a brand new British manufacturer are well worth supporting and while a British motorbike licence is required due to the bikes being powered by the Buell® single cylinder, air-cooled, 2-valve, push rod, 492cc, 5-speed ‘Blast’ engine as they have a bit more oomph than your typical 125cc. I would really love to have a go on one of these, but a I would need to actually take a bike test and pass before going out on the road and b starting bike riding on such a machine might be a bit of a death-wish, still I bet they sound awesome!

There is no pricing up on the manufacturers website however you can get in touch if you are interested, or just wish to give the chaps at mac motorcycles your support.

Sources: designzen & yankodesign.com.

When glanced at quickly you could be excused for believing that the above illustration is the wood block print The Great Wave by Hiroshige. Instead it is a clever illustration drawn up by the art group kozyndan.com whom had been commissioned by Giant Robot Magazine to produce a front cover. It is a unique and interesting homage to Hokusai and something I have been meaning to find the time to post here myself. Below is the original blog print by Hiroshige which he printed some time between 1823 and 1829, the original source can be found here.

I saw this over at design you trust and thought it such an amazing idea that I am suprised you cant buy these in the shops already. I can however see some flaws in the idea, namely what if somone sees it lying about on your desk and throws it away; seccondly it would only take a serial sandwedge theif to notice its an illusion once before they strike again. Still it is an incredible consept, slightly flawed but all together quite a marketable item I think.