Bookmarks: The Durutti Column

Hardformat lovingly unpacks the packaging of the first Durutti Column album:

For some of us this album approaches the status of a secular holy relic because, in addition to the beauty of the object and the music, Vini Reilly states that Joy Division were paid by Tony Wilson to assemble the sandpaper sleeves to earn some extra money. In another report, Ian Curtis allegedly did most of the work while the other three sat watching television in the next room.

Gordon in the morning: Home o'intolerance, home o'phobia

This is tiresome:

Pineapple Dance Studios star Louie, or Louise as I like to call him

Do you see? Because he's gay, Gordon has given him a woman's name.

Yes, that's tiresome. But this is unacceptable:

Bender it like Beckham

You can't throw a word like "bender" into a headline about a gay man. Not in a newspaper that still pretends it has any sort of standards. Homophobic name-calling isn't the same as a witty headline.

The "story" - which is about Louie Spence being invited to spend the night with the Beckhams, apparently blissfully unaware he was being patronised - throws this up, though:

And the shenanigans left Posh with another howler of a hangover as she turned up yesterday morning for a session designing new Range Rovers.

I'd love to think they were making her come up with a more efficient crankshaft. Somehow, though, I suspect she'll just be pointing at a shade of paint.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Hardformat

Today, we've been enjoying looking at Hardformat, a celebration of physical music format design. It's a collection of record sleeves, but that sells it short.

Radio without controls

Ah, design. When it's great, it enhances our lives and our world. When it's rubbish... well, you wind up with a radio without buttons being pushed as a leap forward:

Developed by Cambridge Consultants and Armour Group PLC, it is due to hit UK shelves in time for Christmas.

Rachel Harker, Business Development Manager for Cambridge Consultants, said: ''We realised that digital radios are difficult to use and you have to be quite techno-savvy to use them.

''We thought wouldn't it be great to have a radio that anyone from a child to your granny could use.

''The Q2 Cube is designed for everyone, not just 'gadgety' people. It's really quite simple.''

Given that current digital radios are quite like ordinary radios, it's not entirely clear where the demand for something less confusing comes from, but let's say there is. How does it work?

With no buttons, knobs or display, you switch to one of four pre-programmed digital radio stations by turning the cube onto the appropriate side.

The stations are selected via an online account on your home computer, and then wirelessly streamed to the cube anywhere in the house.

Users can change the volume of the speaker on the front panel simply by tilting the cube forwards or back.

So it's really simple to use, providing you can handle the bit where you set up the channels originally on your PC and are able to get your wifi, PC and radio to all speak to each other. Which is the bit that usually makes IP radio difficult. Oh, and if you decide you want to listen to something other than one of the four stations, you have to hike back to your computer to make the change. That's really simple, right there, then.

[via @drivelcast]

Kanye West imitates that episode of The Simpsons with Danny Devito

It's just like that episode, only instead of getting Homer to design a car, Nike have got Kanye West to design a sneaker.

Oh, and instead of financial ruin in the face of some horrible design work, everyone seems to be cheering:

"This just seemed like Kanye actually had his whole footprint in the design, from the tongue to the glow-in-the-dark [sole]," said Jason Ayers, another customer. "The way he's very flamboyant with his style, it's a very flamboyant shoe."

Aha - I see what you've done: you've confused "flamboyant" with "what the hell is that thing? Get it away from me. Bury it. But not for the love of God anywhere near a watercourse."

It's called the Air Yeezy. That should be enough. But if it wasn't, surely the idea of a glow-in-the-dark sole on a shoe for adults should have rung a few bells at Nike. Presumably only cost concerns led to the lack of compass in the sole?

Sleeves removed: Design Republic closes

Something we'd missed in the stream of stuff over the last couple of weeks: Design Republic has gone out of business. A combination of tax demands, lost pitches and a client suddenly not paying a bill conspired to bring the organisation down; amongst their work they were responsible for turning Pop Will Eat Itself from a bunch of scruffy greebos into a space-age digital outfit, and found a visual style to match The Age Of Chance's grounded futurism. Ian Anderson plans to start again, though, so if you're a band and looking for a distinctive cover art image, you might want to hang around in Sheffield and hope to get lucky.

Williams, make sure you keep all four feet on the ground

Because nobody seems to be able to tell anyone working in hip-hop when their idea is a rubbish one, this chair - the Perspective chair - is going to go into production, a design on a cocktail napkin by Pharrell Williams. It represents the love between a man and a woman, you see, and isn't just the sort of thing your never-married uncle would have bought in the 1970s to furnish his one-room-with-folding-bed pad. Oh, no. This chair comes loaded with cod philosophy:

“I had often wondered what it’s like to truly be in love, not lust for once..So I decided not to ask what it was like in someone else’s shoes or what it was like to sit in their seat..I decided to sketch out my own experiment; the perspective chair.”

So, sitting on a bright red chair is like being in love. Next week: hatred expressed through the medium of toaster-ovens.