Best of Bike Culture: Innovation Top 5

Brainwear for smart people, going Dutch on trash, backpack to downhill in 60 seconds, documenting the two-wheel lifestyle, and how to get yourself a private bike lane.

We love bikes. We love riding them, we love looking at them, we love everything they stand for. So in this bike-loving spirit, we honed down the five most inspired pieces of bike-centric design innovation.

YAKKAY HELMETS

We’re big believers here in the inherent insufficiency of mere aesthetics. But when an object is smart by concept and aesthetically delightful by design, we’re all over it.

Case in point: YAKKAY bicycle helmets, the marriage of safety and style.

Rather brilliantly dubbed “brainwear for smart people,” the helmets are basically a hard “core” covered by a soft hat-like “skin.” They’re available in a multitude of colors and currently come in 4 models, each named after a major fashion capital and reflecting its iconic style.

YAKKAY is the brainchild of 5

Danish designers who felt the need to reconcile their love for bikes with their hate of above-the-neck dorkiness.

BIKE TRASH CAN

Reason #3,587 to love The Netherlands: Bike-centric garbage disposal.

No more slowing down, no more obscene pressure for Major League hand-eye coordination. And that’s just the tip of the Dutch cycling infrastructure iceberg.

via Copenhagenize

BACKPACK BIKE

Folding bikes have been around for a while, regarded with anything from indifference to ridicule. But thanks go Bergmönch, we’re about to enter a whole new era of folding bike street cred.

The Technik folding bike is a slick, beautifully engineered technological marvel that folds into a rather regular-looking backpack weighing a measly 20 pounds. It includes a helmet net and 12 liters worth of storage space for other stuff you may choose to lug around. Best part: It takes less than two minutes to go from backpack to downhill cruising.

via Inhabitat

I-CYCLE

Few of us suspect just how broad and diverse the bike-centric lifestyle really is.

Always the subculture explorer, PUMA recently partnered with bike-minded filmmaker Daniel Leeb to release The I-Cycle Film Series — five wonderful short films documenting the contributions of five different influencers to bike culture.

Each film explores a different passion for the two-wheel lifestyle, from the artistically driven to the socially conscious to the urban-utilitarian.

Featured in the series are Matthew McGuinness, co-founder of Brooklyn-based art collective The 62, George Bliss, mastermind of New York’s Pedicabs, Brendt Barbur, founder of The Bicycle Film Festival, Matthew Modine, actor and founder of Bicycle-For-A-Day, and PUMA’s own CMO, Antonio Bertone.

via PSFK

LIGHT LANE

Even in the most bike-friendly of cities, there are never enough bike lanes. Their scarcity is as dangerous as it is annoying — with nearly 1,000 people dying in bike accidents each year and over 40,000 getting injured, alleviation is desperately needed.

Luckily, the smart design folk at Altitude came up with LightLane — a brilliant concept that equips bikes with a set of lights, which project a moving bike lane a few feet in front of and behind the cyclist.

And while there’s no prototype yet, the idea is simply too good to perish — so get ready to roam the city from the safety of your own private bike lane while enjoying the bewildered looks of drivers and pedestrians alike.

via GOOD Magazine

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Animation Spotlight: Big Buck Bunny

Seven months in Amsterdam, a very fat rabbit, and some really, really mean rodents.

In October 2007, the Blender Foundation decided to invite seven of the world’s best 3D animators to Amsterdam, where the team was to spend 7 months collaborating on a short film licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Dubbed the Peach Open Movie Project, the effort resulted in Big Buck Bunny — a delightful animation showcasing both world-class talent and the ability to create phenomenal content through collaboration.

So if you’re a believer in this kind of idea propagation, do scroll down to the bottom of this page an make a modest PayPal donation.

Meanwhile, the film is also available to download in a variety of free formats. Or, you can buy the DVD, which includes a number of super sweet extras besides the HD film — the original script and story files, all models and textures used to animate the characters, commentary tracks by the animators themselves, and more.

Here’s to the power of creative collaboration.

via Abduzeedo

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Famous Designers on Design: 5 Beautiful Book Covers

What the hate of Helvetica has to do with Nine Inch Nails and a three-legged lemon juicer.

It’s often said that the true measure of how famous you are is how many books you’ve published in your area of expertise. Surely enough, when it comes to design, the most iconic designers have bookshelves worth of design wisdom they’ve bestowed upon us mere mortals.

Today, we look at how well they’ve put their money where their mouth is with our selection of the five best covers of books by the world’s most famous designers.

PAULA SCHER

For a designer whose career was shaped by the violent hate of the Helvetica typeface, Paula Scher has done quite well for herself, becoming one of the most iconic magazine and theater graphic designers of our time.

Make It Bigger, a much-detested client refrain for all graphic designers, is a delightful exercise in switching sides: A look at design from the vantage point of the business community it serves. The indisputable stride-stopping power of the cover, as we cringe at its intentionally awkward grotesqueness, makes the book’s point before we’ve even opened it.

(On a bit of an aside, we’re be remiss to talk about Scher without mentioning her phenomenal Maps project — do check it out.)

DAVID CARSON

David Carson is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking magazine design and his passionate affair with typography. In trek: david. carson. recent. werk, Carson does what he does best — he sweeps us up with unexpected typography and hurls us into nearly 500 pages of turbulent impact with graphics that tug at our most polarized gut reactions.

The book also includes Carson’s work for Nine Inch Nails, whose design sensibility we’ve praised before, so we’re tres happy.

PHILIPPE STARCK

Philippe Starck is, in our subjective opinion, the designer who has made the most dramatic, convincing leap between greatness and genius. (In what’s easily our favorite TED talk to date, he shares profound insight about the distinction between the two.)

His self-titled book, Starck, captures every ounce of genius and quirk and revolutionary vision of the eccentric French, revealing over three decades of his groundbreaking work. The cover itself is brilliantly appropriate — personal and odd — as every piece of Starck’s design work is so loudly stamped with the designer’s quirky personality.

From Starck’s infamous three-legged lemon press to the fast food shop in Nimes, Starck also includes architectural projects, furniture, and interior design. Mostly, it fully lives up to the promise of the cover design — to take us on a journey into the liberty of vision, to help us believe again that as designers, we’re bigger than the sum of our work because every piece of creativity we offer to the world is deeply and unmistakably infused with our own unique personas.

KARIM RASHID

Karim Rashid‘s prolific work in interiors, fashion, furniture, lighting, art and music has landed him multiple MoMA gigs and just about every cultural praise there is. But he is perhaps best known for his advocacy of “democratic design” — the idea that even the best of design should be accessible to the masses.

Driven by that conviction, his book Design Yourself is a brave exploration of design’s role as a social actor rather than a mere aesthetic feature.

From socialization to work to sex, Rashid dispenses radical advice on how to handle the self, all framed by the breadth of his user-centric work. Essentially, Design Yourself is a book about optimization — optimizing all areas of life, from the aesthetic to the spiritual, in a way that leaves our physical, emotional and cognitive environment in a better state than we found it in.

STEFAN SAGMEISTER

Stefan Sagmeister is often considered the most important living designer. His design has helped define some of music’s most iconic personal brands — Lou Reed, David Byrne, Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones.

Things I have learned in my life so far grew from a list in Sagmeister’s diary from his year-long commercial hiatus. The book is a reflection on life, being human, and the meaning of happiness, all communicated through the medium of design at its most powerful.

In Things I have learned in my life so far, the very medium is just as playful and enticing as the message — Sagmeister’s relationship with design doesn’t unfold on the first page, it begins at the book’s cover itself.

Things I have learned in my life so far invites us to come along for a rollercoaster ride of tongue-in-cheek facetiousness and profound human truth, all reflected on through deeply impactful imagery and brilliant typography.

On a final aside, more confirmation for Sagmeister’s brilliance: He is one of the few cultural icons who have spoken at TED not once, but twice – both talks are more than worth the watch.

Update: That’s thrice now — we had the pleasure of seeing his third TED talk at TEDGlobal in July 2009.

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