I have no idea who the target market for these is. Chinese tool manufacturer Arrowmax sells these Black Golden Honeycomb tools: Drivers, Allen wrenches and reamers.

They're sold individually or in sets.

On the company's website, there are literally no product descriptions for any of the tools—no explanation of the handle design, nor even what any of the tools are made out of. The only thing I was able to learn about the tools, was in the company's thin bio: Apparently these were featured, somewhere in the background, in the Marvel movie "Ant Man & the Wasp." Of course they were.

German company Brabus provides aftermarket upgrades to Mercedes-Benz, Maybach, Porsche and Rolls-Royce vehicles. They also produce their own limited-edition rides, and this is their largest: The Brabus Big Boy 1200, a luxury motorhome.

At nearly 40' long, 8.2' wide, and 13.1' tall, it's shocking you don' t need a CDL to drive the thing. (To make it a little easier to pilot, there is a 360-degree camera monitoring system.)

It offers 320 square feet of living space. Once you park the vehicle, it self-levels. You can then deploy the slide-outs, extending the width of the bedroom and living room to 14.8'.

The bed, which is in a transverse orientation, is the European equivalent of a queen-size (63" x 79", versus the 60" x 80" we've got on this side of the pond). The mirrors beyond the bed conceal a large closet.

The bedroom features a desk and a 43" 4K television with an integrated Playstation 5 system and, thanks to satellite internet via Starlink, access to the internet and streaming services.

The living room features leather-upholstered sofas with Alcantara wood accents.

The kitchen boasts an induction stove, oven, coffee machine, dishwasher, and refrigerator with an interior freezer. There's an additional dedicated wine fridge.

The bathroom is done up in actual stone and features a "rainforest shower."

Directly above the driver's cabin is an electrically lowerable bed, also 63" wide. I have no idea why they don't show this in the photos, it sounds pretty cool.

Lastly, it's got a 12.8-liter six-cylinder turbodiesel, and the vehicle tops out at 56 mph. (I'd be terrified to drive this thing at half that speed.)

"Thelma & Louise" alternate ending

The message from Autodesk and the many companies that presented and exhibited at Autodesk University (AU) last month in San Diego was clear: for the product design and manufacturing (D&M), architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO), and media and entertainment (M&E) industries, AI is a driving force behind productivity.

Autodesk University Mainstage

Data, data, data

AI-driven productivity is customized to the specific needs of each industry, with various generative and multimodal AI models providing solutions for tasks like workflow optimization, manufacturing quality assurance, regulatory compliance, and design visualization. However, the value of AI across these sectors—and beyond—is determined by the quantity and quality of data used.

Quantity matters because more data enables AI systems to learn and improve. Quality, however, is more complex. It requires obtaining relevant data, ensuring data accuracy, and verifying that data usage complies with ethical standards.

Dell demonstrated how their workstations can run generative AI 3D content with NVIDIA Edify trained on Shutterstock ethically sourced content.

Customers are key

The importance of AI and data was evident throughout AU, with presentations and product demonstrations highlighting customer-centric solutions. Hardware providers showcased high-performance workstations equipped with powerful processors, optimized to support AI workloads. Meanwhile, data and asset management providers emphasized AI’s capabilities in extracting valuable information, managing metadata, and monitoring workflows in real time.

Lenovo displayed next generation workstations designed with a customer-centric focus. Partnering with Intel®, NVIDIA and Aston Martin, they offer high-end graphics, memory and processing power.

Autodesk’s Design & Manufacturing team showcased how they are addressing their customers' needs by delivering AI-powered efficiencies through Fusion, a cloud-based, unified platform for design and manufacturing. They also introduced Project Bernini, a research initiative focused on a new approach to generative AI. Unlike many generative models that prioritize the appearance of 3D objects, Bernini emphasizes generating structural 3D data from the inside out, which aligns closely with real-world production needs.

Experimental research project Bernini model generates shape and texture separately and does not confuse or meld those variables.

AI provides a wide range of possibilities based on industry-specific needs. For entertainment and gaming, AI can generate lifelike product and character models, while in manufacturing and design, it lays the foundation for real-world production. With tools like Fusion and research projects like Bernini, Autodesk aims to empower creators and makers to leverage AI for both efficiency and innovation.

The Formlabs User Summit, the company's annual 3D printing user conference, starts tomorrow at 9am ET. The company's SLS and SLA printers will be on-show, along with industry folks discussing the impact of 3D printing across a variety of industries.

The event will feature a keynote presentation with Formlabs CEO Maxim Lobovsky and aerospace engineer and renowned YouTube influencer Tom Stanton. Other key speakers will include:

- Nihat Isitman, Senior Materials Engineer at Apple

- Matthais Shulz, Technologist for AM Polymer Series Manufacturing at Brose

- Patrick Marr, Senior Director of Prototype Development at Hasbro

The free event will be livestreamed on YouTube. You can register to watch it here.

This Mambapod was invented by Taiwanese photography accessory company Silence Corner.

It's a mini tripod that can also be used on non-flat surfaces, thanks to an innovative feature in one of the legs. Two small jaws can be unfolded from the leg, and dialed towards each other by rotating a handle at the bottom of the leg, essentially becoming an F-style clamp.

Alternately, just one of the jaws can be flipped out and used as a hook.

The clamping arrangement provides a lot more security than bendy legs, allowing you to hang your expensive SLR or smartphone in precarious places.

The Mambapod is a hit on Kickstarter, with over $200K in pledges at press time and 25 days left to pledge. Pricing starts at $129.

I love October. Crisp mornings and hot cider help me welcome autumn. Change is in the air—you can feel it. One of my very favorite things about October...

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This is a story that evolves over time. Every year as I explore new parts of town or even revisit other parts at different times of the day, there are new buildings emerging. Not new in the sense of being just built but new in the sense of discovery. Especially when its not your town and even not your region, everything is so different.

There is nothing more wonderful than exploring new tools or ways for something you are passionate about.

Many times we see wonderful scenes and landscapes right in front of us.  Our emotions are stirring especially since for the last few moments our vision and senses are taking it all in. Therefore, it must make a wonderful photograph.

We take the photograph and move on knowing that we have a great shot because that's how we perceive our visual and sensory experience for this site.

But when we get home it seems to lack that something special we experienced back at our location.

Others who see the image may say it's nice but in reality it's just another tourist type shot. The experience we had is missing.

The key ingredient missing is patience, or just plain waiting for the scene to evolve in either light-shaping or the actors in the scene. These actors can be real people or elements in the changing  landscape.

Light, it's strength or absence, is the key to all photographs. After this, it's the context of element within the science that further define the photographic experience.

As an example, the photographs of a set of wonderfully painted stairs help to demonstrate the importance of patience to wait out a scene until the elements define it in a new perspective.

That is certainty a self serving title and its fraught with many definitions of term 'fans' but it is also a chance for me to understand something about my readership.
This blog is just a few members shy of 1200 subscribers. I'm very grateful that so many find the photographs and articles enjoyable. There are also those who arrive by way of search engines, but from this total group I wonder how many committed fans of my photography I have.

Fine Art Print – Bicycle and Orange Wall The photograph, which looks more like a watercolor painting, was taken at the entrance of Square of King Frederiksberg's Castle grounds in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Many layers were used to bring in the tones and textures, some detailed, others lost, to create the final version shown below.  See the original article about techniques used Painterly Effect with Photo Enhancement

This photograph is another image from my trip to Denmark. While the bicycle was taken in the large and historic city of Copenhagen. The image of the boat in the tall grass was taken on a secluded beach on the Isle of Mors which is situated within Jutland but is surrounded with salt water due to an opening on the west coast.

Peonies provide wonderful opportunities for close-up photography with their delicate streamer like petals. Almost like flags waving in the breeze.

As with the previous print, this is also one of those lovely peonies flowers but from a closer view.

For this image, which I kept B&W, I wanted the soft petals to appear to be like dancing flames in a fire.

The image is low contrast and there is not a lot of fine detail. Therefore I wanted the paper to add tones in the soft areas. This paper, which I can no longer get, is very close to the water paper I use for my paintings

Opportunity, timing and position are well know cornerstones in capturing fleeting moments. Sometimes it's even a suggestion.

Unsolicited redesigns are fun. They’re also always criticized for their superficial approach that only takes care of surface level problems. Developers at Raureif have done yet another redesign of Wikipedia, but with one big difference from all the other redesigns: they’ve actually created a real, working app.

Since Wikipedia has a permissive license, you can repackage (and even sell) its content if you so wish, so there is little stopping anyone from implementing a functional redesign of the site (besides all the hard work). The team at Raureif have seized this opportunity and created Das Referenz – an iOS Wikipedia app. Apart from seeing your ideas tested in the real world, this hands-on approach to redesign also gives you an opportunity to profit from them: if the new UI provides enough value, people will pay you for it through app sales or via ads (Das Referenz uses both ads and a pay-for option to remove ads). That’s how you do a Wikipedia redesign.

A design pattern that is currently growing more popular is the fixed position bar at the top of the page. Sometimes the bar stays the same throughout, sometimes the header morphs into a slimmer bar as you scroll down, sometimes a completely new bar appears.

For example, as you scroll down on the New York Times website, the top navigation bar shifts from displaying typical site-wide navigation to article specific controls, showing the title of the article, the share link, the comments link, as well as compressed site-wide links:

At the Forbes website, as the user scrolls down the page a fixed position bar appears at the top promoting links to other articles the reader may find interesting, as well as a drop-down site navigation menu, search and user controls:

While these bars may be useful, they take up vertical space, reducing the reading space the user has chosen for themselves by picking the size of their browser window. Additionally, information displayed on these bars does not do anything to aid the reading of the actual content, making the bar more of a nuisance than help.

An interesting way to solve the issue is to hide the bar when scrolling down, and show it when scrolling up. On mobile interfaces, where space is precious, this technique is used to hide chrome, such as Web browser controls, but it’s also a good pattern to use on the Web. For example, Medium has just updated their new navigation bar. As you scroll down, the bar goes away, but it can be revealed at any time by scrolling up. Here’s what it looks like:

Less annoying than bars that just sit there as you scroll down, and makes the menu easy to access without having to scroll up to the top of the page. Scrolling up won’t necessarily mean the user wants the navigation – they may just be scanning the content – but 100% of the people wanting the navigation will be scrolling up, making it a pretty good compromise.

Update 2014-06-16

For anyone interested in using this design pattern on their own sites, Eduardo Martins Barbosa has created a jQuery plugin that performs much the same way as the bar on Medium, including the subtle effect of revealing the bar at the scrolling speed of the user rather than simply sliding it down upon scrolling up.

Anthony Colangelo makes the case for letting the browser and operating system decide how form elements should be styled:

Dropdowns and date pickers are just a sampling of the things that are better handled by systems themselves—a device will always be able to make better decisions about its use than the device-agnostic web.

The simplistic interactions of early input types gave us room to experiment, but the more complex interactions of modern fields leave little room for that. There’s only so much we can control before the browser and operating system take over, and then we’re at their whim. The web isn’t stopping any time soon—we’re headed for more complex input types with even less control exposed.

I agree. Trying to control form styling is a bit like trying to build sites for a specific set of screen widths. Yes, you can keep creating and managing more breakpoints, but you’ll always be fighting a losing battle because there will always be more screen sizes to design for. A better strategy is to choose a minimal amount of breakpoints to suit the content, and use a liquid layout to fill the rest. In the same way, browsers will always be evolving the implementation of their form elements, so trying to keep your own implementation consistent across all platforms will introduce an ongoing maintenance burden. Of course there will be cases where you have to implement your own styles – the form element you want may not exist, or may not be suited to your needs – but if there is no great need then it’s best to leave the specifics of form implementation to the browser.

Google has recently been experimenting with burying the full URL of the page you’re at and showing just the domain. Yesterday Apple unveiled their next installment of the OS X operating system in which we can see the new Safari interface doing just the same: truncating the full URL to just the domain name. This behavior is consistent with what Safari currently does on iOS powered devices. In another change, the title bar is now completely gone, its place taken by the simplified address bar.

So that’s at least one major browser deciding to go the route of hiding the full URL. I’m not sure whether I like this change or not, but I do like the idea of dropping the title of the page. Since page tabs already show the title of each page (albeit truncated), it doesn’t make sense to duplicate it again just a few pixels above them. Dropping that title bar removes a whole line of interface chrome, making the thing feel cleaner and more compact. This is what other browsers have done long ago, and it’s nice seeing Safari follow suit. Obviously the title still remains very important in the tabs – you cannot use the domain for the tab label because that won’t let you differentiate between different pages on the same site – but it doesn’t make sense to dedicate much chrome to it when its main purpose is quick identification rather than description. The purpose of description is handy in a different context, e.g. managing bookmarks. There, you’d want to see the titles in full.

Co.Design asked Tobias Frere-Jones of Hoefler & Co. to give his thoughts on Apple’s choice of Helvetica as an interface typeface for the upcoming OS X Yosemite update:

Despite its grand reputation, Helvetica can’t do everything. It works well in big sizes, but it can be really weak in small sizes. Shapes like ‘C’ and ‘S’ curl back into themselves, leaving tight “apertures”–the channels of white between a letter’s interior and exterior. So each shape halts the eye again and again, rather than ushering it along the line. The lowercase ‘e,’ the most common letter in English and many other languages, takes an especially unobliging form. These and other letters can be a pixel away from being some other letter, and we’re left to deal with flickers of doubt as we read.

This reminds me of what Erik Spiekerman wrote about Helvetica:

[Helvetica] really wasn’t designed for small sizes on screens. Words like milliliter can be very difficult to decipher. If you ever had to read or write a password with 1, i, l or I, you know the problem.

Still, I wouldn’t keep Lucida Grande for HiDPI displays. With a 2× resolution jump (4× pixels) pixel fitting becomes less of an issue, and pixel optimized typefaces like Lucida Grande begin to look crude in comparison with typefaces made primarily for print. Legibility obviously still matters just as much, but the choice need no longer be bound to fonts optimized for low resolution displays.

Min Ming Lo analyzes the various designs of the share icon currently in use. He concludes:

The best icon is not the one that is the simplest, nor the one that makes the most sense. Instead, the best icon is one with which most users are already familiar. An effective icon is one that requires minimum effort for the user to translate that symbol to an action.

I think part of the problem with coming up with a good share icon is that the concept of sharing physical items doesn’t directly map onto the concept of sharing digital resources, which oftentimes simply involves posting a link on a public feed. The latter is closer to broadcasting a message rather than dividing up a resource or experiencing a thing simultaneously. Icons with more specificity – e.g. a tweet icon, a Facebook like icon – are unambiguous; they relate directly to a service and the kind of interaction that service allows. Trying to cover them all with an umbrella of “sharing” is difficult, if not impossible, to do clearly.

The problem doesn’t lie in the icon, but in the vagueness of what it represents. For this reason I think Apple’s icon resembling an upload action is probably the best choice because what it represents is not so much sharing but putting the content somewhere else. Whether the full file is uploaded or just the link is given doesn’t really matter, what matters is that the thing in question is transmitted somewhere. It’s also worth considering whether the fight for an icon-only button is worth it, and that it may not be easier and better to just use the words “share” to describe the action. There’s a reason why the stop sign just says “STOP” – you can represent it with something else, but the negative effect on clarity is just not worth it.

Joel Unger approaches the blurry, semi-transparent window aesthetic, recently introduced in iOS7 and now making its way to OS X Yosemite, from the standpoint of evolutionary biology. He argues that the reasons for this latest trend, as well as other trends, are: 1) the visual effect is relatively rare, and 2) the effect is expensive to achieve (in this case expensive in terms of graphics processing power). Both of these go hand in hand given that what is expensive to achieve is probably also going to be rare, at least for the period it still remains expensive. While these two things are initially the differentiator for the trendsetter, they will inevitably be mimicked by others, resulting in a design trend.

Curt Arledge ran a user test to find out whether hollow icons perform any different to solid icons. Hollow icons are an icon aesthetic popularized by iOS7 – icons that are composed of thin lines rather than filled in shapes. It was previously theorized that this icon style required more cognitive processing, and thus would perform worse than typical solid icons.

Arledge found no significant variation between the icon styles. One combination performed worse than others: white hollow icons on a black background. Others performed similarly, irrespective of whether the icon was on a white or black background. What seemed to matter most is not the style itself but how meaningful the design of the icon itself is. For example, a filled in speech bubble is less recognizable than a hollow one because a speech bubble is something that is often depicted as an outline. On the other hand, an outline doesn’t add anything to the icon of a cloud, so a solid shape performed better in that case. Arledge also found that the lock icon performed the worst. Looking at the lock icon used in the test one could guess why: the thing has no keyhole, and so looks just as much as a shopping bag as it does a lock. Adding a keyhole would likely provide enough of a clue to dispel the confusion. The takeaway here is that the style doesn’t really matter – at least not enough to make a significant difference. What matters is how well the icon represents its object. If the icon is good, then it will work whether or not it is implemented as a solid shape or as an outline.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.¹

Publilius Syrus

When software in a particular category stops rapidly evolving and its interface begins to develop along a set of accepted patterns, designers begin to decorate. Decoration is a luxury, it is something you can only afford to do once the functionality of the thing you are working on has been implemented to a high degree. It is in the period of gradual evolution and established interaction norms that designers begin to decorate, begin to focus on small aesthetic details for the visual experience alone. Prolonged times of slow evolution lead to decorative excess. Unable to differentiate software on the level of how it works, developers try to push it ahead on the level of how it looks. When the buttons in all the apps are the same, when the controls all appear in about the same place, when all the interfaces are laid out in a similar fashion, designers begin to differentiate their work by changing the appearance of the interface rather than its function or its structure. The interface begins to gather decorative moss.

The recent minimalist trends in software design – Metro, flat, iOS7, Material – are attempts to scrape away the moss without a radical alteration in the underlying function. It is a reaction to the friction felt between the old stratum of software that has cemented its implementation and thus could afford to wear a rich visual coat, and a new stratum of software that yearns for a radically different approach to interface design. The old and the new cannot co-exist in harmony because the appearance of the two look nothing alike. The layers of visual excess painted over old software apps – e.g. skeuomorphic visuals, rich textures, reflection effects, etc – became baggage to designers who wished to develop something new, for example, using animation to help differentiate between the different states of the app and create a more fluid experience. If you wish to move content around, scale things, change colors, morph one element from one into another, all the superfluous visuals like gloss and textures simply get in the way. Minimalist design makes animation simpler.

The old paint was scraped away not for the sake of a minimalist style, but to allow the designer to create a new kind of experience, an experience where the content making up the interface would be more alive and more dynamic than ever. Buttons morph into panes, panels bounce back and forth to reflect the speed of the finger used to pull them across the glass screen, bits of content fly from place to place signifying a change in state or context, icons move or change shape, and everything gently slides in or fade out as you navigate around the digital canvas. Without the baggage of skeuomorphic visuals, rich textures or decorative styles, the designer can now experiment with motion, can begin to craft a new kind of visual experience from the content itself.

1. The saying has two interpretations. In one, moss is seen as a sign of stagnation. If you don’t act, if you don’t keep moving, you will begin to rust away. In another, moss is seen as something desirable. If you keep changing projects, if you keep losing focus, you will never be able to build up anything worthwhile. I think the duality of the message is quite fitting for the analogy in the post. Excessive decoration is bad design, it is a distraction that adds unnecessary baggage to our work, but decoration is also beautiful, something that enhances the experience of people using our work. Decoration is not in itself good or bad, just as design is neither good or bad – it is how it is implemented that makes all the difference.

Paul Stamatiou on the role of motion in modern design:

Times are changing. Things like page transitions will still exist but involve more of the elements on each page. You’ll begin choreographing. In the next few years consideration for motion will be required to be a good citizen of your desktop/mobile/wearable/auto/couch platform. It will be an expected part of the design process just like people will begin to expect this level of activity and character in software.

Motion is becoming an essential component of design, and with the recent transition to a minimalist aesthetic across platforms animating the interface has become a whole lot simpler. With the advent of solid CSS animation support and speedy animation frameworks like Velocity.js I expect Web design to move in this direction as well.