It is week #206. Two hundred and six has the strange characteristic of being the lowest positive integer (when written in English) to employ all of the vowels once only. There are also 206 bones in the typical human body. Week #206 also shares its name with 206 Hersilia a large main belt carbonous asteroid. Its size is debated, but it is around 100km. To put that in perspective, the comet that Philae landed on was a little more than 4km.
It was a strange week this week, spent mostly prototyping lots of new projects and taking a few old ones off the shelf and taking a giant leap forward. Part of the way we work is to create lots of small, seemingly random projects. It means there are a lot of things up in the air, but when the client work finishes, you always have something you can pick-up.
This week we finished-up a dashboard and UI project. Which lightened our workload. We’re also starting to prototype another project with some folks on the west coast of the USA. This means an 8 hour time difference, plus busy schedules means we are currently in a holding pattern on that one too.
In that gap, we’ve quickly picked-up an old design project and cleared out a few older todos. From previous weeknote #196, you know we’ve been interested in Tyvek paper. One of the things holding us up has been that the company wouldn’t ship a small 10 yard batch internationally. Rather than sort it out then and there through a US address or finding another provider, we put it on hold. This week we did some searching and found a provider which not only provides Tyvek by the yard, ships internationally, and it’s half the price of our original provider. Needless to say, we got a confirmation that our package has already shipped!
We also dug into our T-shirt idea archive and resurrected an old design. It features one of Iceland beloved characters, the Puffin. We spent some time in week #205 and #206 perfecting the vector files. Now we’ve sent it off to the printer to get a small batch of stickers and magnets made. We’ll gauge interest amongst friends and the keen-eyed and see where we take this project next.
We also were serendipitously introduced to a friend of a friend who’s a lighting designer. We quickly pitched our old idea of the Sjónabók style lampshade. We had made some laser cut prototypes for that back in week #181. We loved the design and how it looks on the lamp, but struggled with packaging and how the light being shown through was poorly projected onto the walls. Now we’re getting some professional advice about how to move forward and recommendations on light sources. Maybe it’s a hopeless cause, but maybe not – stay tuned.
This week we also were wondering aimlessly through a local big-box hardware store and stumbled across, what appear to be inkjet printed bathroom tiles. They wouldn’t sell us a single tile, but we did manage to convince them to rent us one. Now we’re looking around town for someone who can print onto ceramic tiles. Again, we have some older design projects which would look great on tiles, tiles for the bathroom, kitchen, drinks coasters or hot plates.
This is partly why we like to have so many small random side-projects brewing, catalogued and available. Some weeks you take what’s been sitting on the shelf for 6 months and make massive leaps forward. This has been one of those weeks!
Bric-à-brac
With some training, we are slowing making Mario sentient. Now if we could give him some morals and stop him from senselessly killing all those goombas.
Who’s heard of stick bombing? Nope, us neither. Apparently, if you position tongue depressors or craft sticks in tension, usually three sticks pressing on each other, they will remain static. Once one is released all hell breaks loose. This is a video of over 13,000 sticks exploding before your eyes with nothing more than potential energy locked-up in the sticks under tension.
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was a phenomenon in its own time. The opening night was a complete fiasco! This is the entire song visualised. It is a beautiful depiction of what your ears are picking-up and processing.