In what has been one of the best British summers for several years, the nation is going crazy for picnics. The problem is, once you’ve been to a couple of them, they all tend to blend in to one. Unless you can find someting funky to spice them up…
These glasses from the lovely The Way We See The World have the rather excellent quality of being totally edible. They are made from agar agar, and come in flavours including lemon-basil, ginger-mint, or rosemary-beet, so you can match the glass to your drink. We love the idea of Pimms in a ginger-mint glass, for example…
The other brilliant thing about them being edible is that they are of course also completely biodegradable. In fact, they actually aid plant growth. So when you’ve finished (or just when you inevitably break a glass) you can throw it in to the flower bed and feel good about it.
Now we know the whole marriage thing can be expensive, but we’d assumed that was just one of those facts of life.
Pete Geyer and Andrea Parrish are however much more ingenious. They set themselves a wedding budget of $4000, and decided to raise it purely by recycling cans. 400,000 cans to be precise.
And they succeeded, in just 197 days, and have even learned something in the process:
When I got further into the research of the impact that the just 400,000 cans would have, I would definitely say that the environmental impacts are equal to, if not more important than the budget friendliness.
So they’ve even learned something in the process.
We’re big fans of this whole recycling thing, but it does seem to lack something by way of romance…
Snoutcups play on that thing we all do (yes, even you) with plastic cups when we’re drinking from them. And as silly as this might be, the results are excellent – we especially love the dog nose.
And okay this might all be a bit inane, but the really excellent bit is yet to come. On the maker’s site, it says the following:
As we care about animals we donate an amount from every pig snout cup sold to Pigs in Need, a Dutch organisation who cares about the health of pigs.
This has to be one of the most bizarre methods of charity giving we’ve ever seen. And can you think of a more worthy cause?! We’re pretty sure we can…
This has to be just about the geekiest bit of advertising we’ve ever seen.
These ads for Fritz Kola feature a character based on a caffeine molecule… who is concentrating. So firstly you’ve got the caffeine molecule turned into a character – and been scientifically accurate. Then you’ve got the bad pun on the word concentrated. Just terrible.
That said, we secretly think they’re brilliant.
(for video versions of these ads (possibly even better) go to artverrtising)
The cafe culture seems to be one of those things that just keeps on growing. And of course alongside this, we therefore have cafes all trying to do something new and different to make sure they get a slice of the pie. Which is why we were a bit mystified by la Boite when we first saw it.
It is, at first glance, an old trailer. Not much threat to Starbucks and co. However, we were slightly missing the point.
The idea of la Boite (designed for designSTUDIO by Mark Meyer) is that it is portable. The cafe comes to wherever it is needed. During the day, it could sit outside a huge office block, and then it could move to sleepy suburbia for the evenings and weekends.
And what’s more,
La Boite is a green, environmentally sensitive cafe with locally baked goods, sandwiches, and coffee, built from an old shipping container. For the project, DesignSTUDIO used Rainwater HOG’s for greywater collection, biobased spray foam insulation, and Forbo linoleum for the floor and one wall.
So all in all we’re rather impressed. We’re just still not sure we’d have coffee in a trailer.
We’re loving this new Coca-cola packaging which sees the iconic bottles revolutionised to become square and streamlined.
Unfortunately, it’s actually the work of design student Andrew Kim, rather than something by Coca-cola themselves, but nevertheless it looks pretty awesome. And it might just be an undergrad project, but its brilliance lies in taking what has to be one of the most ‘accepted’ designs around, and trying to make it better.
Firstly, we really like the simplified logo and graphics, but this isn’t the main selling point of the design. The square edges mean that these bottles can be packed tighter and closer, especially into huge (square) containers and packaging crates, and they even stack. Consequently, an extra 4,000 bottles fit into every packing container, saving huge amounts of money and oil on transport.
This might not sound like a big deal but we’re guessing that there are quite a few containers of Coca-cola shipped around the world every year, and decreasing the volumes can’t be bad…
Now from the title you might think we’re talking about some dodgy place in the wrong end of Istanbul, but we’ve actually found somewhere even older.
This was in fact the fast food shop of Vetutius Placidus in Pompeii, which closed one thousand, nine hundred and twenty one years ago, and reopened yesterday, with quite a bit of the original decor still in tact.
Fast food of course seems like a very modern thing, but the Romans apparently loved the stuff, with many people in Pompeii not even having kitchens and getting takeaway on a regular basis. And if you look closely, you can see there’s not even that much that has changed.
You’ve still got the long, L-shaped counter, and people could either sit in or take away. Apparently the real difference is the food, with considerably less kebabs and pizza, and more cheese, honey and assorted fruits.
Still, it’s nice to know that at the height of the Roman Empire, they were still no more cultured than a bunch of boozy students…
Kotik design have recently launched an online shop which sells jewellery constructed from bits of branded packaging, such as bottle tops or bits of cans. It might not be to everyone’s taste but we love the concept.
It’s all available to order online, with prices ranging from $20 to over $400. This may seem like a lot for a load of bottle tops and scrap metal, but we think the finished items are cool enough to warrant it. And we really want some of the cufflinks.
We also want to know what happens to all this stuff once the tops and bits of can have been used, and wonder whether they employ someone to drink all the leftovers. If so, we want that job.
We love this stunt from Heineken Italy. We don’t want to say too much, but they basically managed to convince over a thousand fans of football team AC Milan to abandon the game of the year so far (the Champion’s League fixture against Real Madrid) to go to a night of poetry and classical music…
As far as experiential advertising goes, this has to be just about one of the best examples we’ve seen, purely for the look on all their faces.
Skyscrapers are ugly things. Even most of those supposedly pretty ones over in Dubai and Shanghai. And, despite all efforts, they all look roughly the same. Apart from this thing.
Design Crew for Architecture have created what is in fact a huge water purifying tower. Each ‘soap bubble’ is in fact a greenhouse full of mangrove trees.
Mangrove trees have the unique ability to grow in brackish (salty) water, and then “sweat” clean water. Designed to be built on the Almeira shore in Spain, the whole thing would be filled with huge tidal pumps, and then drained to irrigate land. The designers reckon it could irrigate one hectare per day. We have no idea if that’s good or not, but it sounds like a big area.
All this aside however, it was the beauty of the thing which captured us. We’d love to see something similar made but as a residential block, with each bubble forming a luxury flat…
