Furniture Design Spotlight: HUG Chair

Why your girlfriend is interchangeable with your MacBook Pro.

Spotted at the Bulgarian Design Biennial: The HUG armchair by furniture and industrial designer Ilian Milinov. (Thanks, camera battery, for dying and forcing us to resort to the crappy cell phone camera.)

The designer’s inspiration comes from the simple gestures in human relationships, like hugging your loved one, and even accounts for the intimacy deprivation of a long-distance relationship: The organic HUG silhouette makes room for a laptop when your loved one is away, for those late-night videochats that keep the relationship alive.

Gotta love the simple brilliance of its form/function hybrid — the intimacy of a loveseat sans the girlfriend-induced leg umbness, plus the comfort of a laptop lounge setup, sans the overheated quads. We want one.

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Mad Men Illustrated

What Madison Avenue and Upright Citizens Brigade have in common.

We love Mad Men. We also love illustration. And we’re obsessed with Flickr.

So, naturally, we’re all over the Mad Men Illustrated series by NYC-based freelance illustrator, designer and comedian Dyna Moe.

If her style seems familiar, it’s because Dyna Moe’s credentials include posters and other work for cult comedy outfit Upright Citizens Brigade, for whom she’s been the “unofficial official house designer” since 1999, plus a ton of album artwork for various indie labels.

The illustration look and style are inspired by the work of commercial artwork legends from the Mad Men era, including Aurelius Battaglia, Alice & Martin Provensen, and J. P. Miller. The collection started with a holiday card capturing the Mad Men Christmas party from last season, after which Dyna Moe, um, didn’t stop. Right now, all of the images are available as desktop wallpaper downloads, with the most popular up for sale as custom prints at Zazzle.com.

We, for one, are all the more inspired by the far-reaching resonance of this show, which has revolutionized the scripted drama television genre, rekindled some of history’s most taboo controversies, spurred intense debates on consumer culture, been credited with skewing retail fashion, and now inspired an art following.

We bet it can even do our laundry.

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Geek Mondays: LEGO Time

How to relive childhood geekdom without the bullies, from the safety of your own computer.

LEGO TIME

We’ve decided to start a little something called Geek Mondays, where we explore the coolest, most fascinating, most diverse facets of geekdom.

So, fittingly, we start out with a wired version of a geek stand-by: LEGO, only digital design edition.

LEGO Digital Designer is a nifty little piece of free desktop software that lets you build 3D LEGO models right on your computer. We’re talking serious stuff — you can even go all Nathan Sawaya on it…except, of course, you’d have to eventually shell out some cash for the pieces. Which is actually another neat LDD feature: You can buy the pieces with the click of a mouse directly from the LEGO store once your model is complete, so you can start laying it out on your dining room floor, to your girlfriend’s utter horror.

So download this bad boy and find yourself a new favorite timesuck that puts your Second-Life-and-Digg diet to shame.