Invisible Art?

Walking regularly through the Brussels Wetstraat, heading for the centre, I pass an open air exhibition set up by the www.thehumanrightsproject.org. Kinda hard finding them online, if you Google stuff like human rights project.org ... but found them anyway. The frustrating thing is that so far, no one ever bothers to stop, look and digest what they are seeing here. Let me quote from the site as to what the aim of the project is: 


"The Declaration of Human Rights is a manifest that evolved from the founding of the United Nations in 1948. Whether or not it was meant by all UN participants as an achievable maxim for the post war world, it does remain a vital testimonial to the assumption that the people of the entire world should have access to the dignity of their species. However, a cursory glance around the world today makes clear that the 30 articles contained within the declaration of Human Rights have, for the most part, been ignored, and are likely to remain ignored (...) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is translated into 360 languages, there has never been a visual interpretation of this kind of the complete Declaration of Human Rights." Which means it's picture stories we get to see here, powerful images.

This one illustrates the fact that everyone has a right to education (article 26).


Please take a moment to look at them, when you pass them by? 

I'm a sucker for Moleskin notebooks. For lot's of notebooks actually, for nicely made notebooks and writing tools in particular. Ordning & Reda for example or Paperblanks with their incredibly beautiful 'old' covers. But Moleskin tops them all. Thats' because they not only hold on to the legendary aura of little black books used by journalists, coppers and writers but because they also keep up with changing times.

Moleskin has created an e-reader cover, a Kindle cover to be more precise. On the outside it looks and feels like a Moleskin, rounded corners and elastic band included. On the inside you can insert your Kindle and keep it in place with ... 4 elastic bands. What's more, it comes including two reporter-style notebooks with blank ivory paper.

The nice thing is: the original idea comes from a community of so called Moleskin hackers. They can be found all over the web, creating new tools based on the classic Moleskin product. Moleskin is just smart enough to listen to them and to use these ideas. Check out the Moleskin site, it contains interesting way's of digital-analog marketing.

Back to the future: Tron

This is an oldies post. Or a Geek Dad's post.

Who remembers Tron, the hopelessly flopped movie, released in 1982? Notwithstanding the fact that it got Oscar nominations, it failed miserably at the box office. Tron was the story of  hacker who is literally abducted into the world of a computer and forced to participate in gladiatorial games where his only chance of escape is with the help of a heroic security program (called TRON). 

In 1982 computers could generate static images, but could not automatically put them into motion. Thus, the coordinates for each image, such as a lightcycle, had to be entered for each individual frame. It took 600 coordinates to get 4 seconds of film. Each of these coordinates was entered into the computer by hand by the filmmakers. So imagine what we could do today, with the technology we have.


Well: TRON is back. Disney is planning a release for the end of this year and is already merchandising the toys that are to go with it. Check out this cool "zero gravity light cycle' that cas run across ceilings.

Something tells me this new TRON will be incomparable to the old one. Which makes the old one vert futuristic indeed. With thanx to www.fastcompany.com for the image.

Newspapers for adolescents? Manga them!

They call Japan a newspaper-crazy country. The Yomiuri Shimbun has a circulation that's 10 times the circulation of The New York Times (not that this is saying much: the NYT circulation has nosedived these last months). But just as everywhere else the younger generations are not reading newspapers as much as their parents, here's an interesting alternative: the Manga No Shimbun.

Now how cool is that: a website employing more than a 100 Manga-artists who cover the week's news and breaking stories, updating up to 15 times a day. Available for iPhone and Android. With thanx to Wired.

Somewhat less fed up or worried ...

... as our elections turned out to deliver two totally-opposing monster-victories on both sides of the language border they are doomed to get together and TALK.

Which means we might actually move forward.

Fed up and worried sick ...

... about these upcoming elections. Will we wake up in a totally different country altogether on Monday morning? Do all these people who will vote for NVA and Bart De Wever really want an independent Flanders or do they just want to make clear some things urgently need to change and change is not going to come from the traditional parties? What will happen to our economy if it takes months again before we have a new government? Do the French speaking politicians really only care about language issues instead of the economic crisis, the need for budgetary cuts and a very stringent policy the coming years? How is it possible that a major PS politician claims she has never ever even spoken to Bart De Wever? Will he really become Prime Minister? How can a Flemish rightist nationalist become Prime Minister of the whole country? Why are the words "Flemish" and "rightist" synonyms? Doesn't the fact that 75% of Flemish voters will not vote NVA count for nothing? How long would a government De Wever 1 last? Why won't these questions in my head stop?

An unexpected design subject: license plates

You might not have paid attention but we have been having these absolutely ridiculous discussions in Belgium on migrating the Belgian white-plate-red-digits license plate  towards the European format (7 digits, area for European flag and country code, black digits on a white background). And instead of just deciding to change, we are now fighting over which colours to use and it has become a language issue ...

Anyway.

How nice it must be to be able to design your own license plate (and I'm not talking vanity plates here) or have them designed by real designers.

Check out these cool designs for numberplates in the US.  Some of them are really over the top and some, like this one, are really quite cool. For the fans: an overview of designs going way back to 1969, when cars still looked great and so, apparently, did license plates.

Or at least they looked colourful.