Cool Hunting Video: Christopher O'Riley

Transforming pop music hits into classical piano masterpieces

In a private residence on NYC's Upper West Side, we recently had the pleasure of attending a thrilling performance organized by Culture Shock featuring pianist Christopher O'Riley. Renowned for his flawless renderings of classical masterpieces, O'Riley (host of NPR's From The Top and composer of original work) explains how, during intimate performances for artists and members of high society's creative class during the early days of his career, he began to bridge the gap between pop culture and classical music with his traditional arrangements of mainstream songs. At this recent performance, he performed songs by Radiohead, Nick Drake and The Velvet Underground.

Ferdi Trihadi’s Tuby Project

The artist, Ferdi Trihadi, interpreted several pop-culture characters like you’ve never seen before.

Ferdi Trihadi is a 24 year-old Indonesian-born visual artist. He is now based on Kyoto, Japan as an illustrator and graphic designer after studying at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore. As a visual artist, he said that he experiments on diverse forms of digital media. Ferdi, first and foremost, is into digital illustration then he dwell on the world of motion graphics, interactive, and most recently on game development.

His trademark are his boldly lined characters and black outlined illustrations. When we talk about subjects and inspiration, the most evident theme of Ferdi’s art are consumerism and greed. He finds it fascinating that humans have limitless cravings and longings. Ferdi believes that it is in our nature to be kept unsatisfied and that greed is a condition that we all suffer from.

Ferdi applies these themes on his illustrations usually in the form of morbidly obese characters like the ones in Tuby. Tuby is a character design template from his other project entitled “Hardiness & Determination“. The design of the Tuby is Ferdi’s vision on human consumerism of technology and products such as: television shows, films, games, etc.

Canvas Furniture

Creative furniture designed by Japanese studio YOY can be hung on the wall and displayed as paintings when not in use. Sofa, chair, and armchair painted on canvas transform into real furniture when they are leaned against the wall. “Canvas Furniture” is made out of wood, metal, and elastic fabric

Dead links on the Million Dollar Homepage

Remember the Million Dollar Homepage from 2005? It sold ad space to anyone who was interested for one dollar per pixel, and there were one million pixels available. All spots were filled, and it gave a burst of bunch of other million dollar homepages that turned out to be zero dollar homepages

Retro Poster, T-Shirt, Sticker, Case and Print Designs

inFORM, a Revolutionary Design Tool

inFORM is a Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way. inFORM can also interact with the physical world around it, for example moving objects on the table's surface. Remote participants in a video conference can be displayed physically, allowing for a strong sense of presence and the ability to interact physically at a distance. inFORM is a step toward our vision of Radical Atoms: tangible.media.mit.edu/vision/

15 Web Apps for Web Designers

As technology changes and improves, the web shapes itself around it. If you told me two years ago that I could code a website using browser applications, I would have laughed and asked if you were kidding. Now, when I’m on the fly – I’ve found that coding on browsers has become as second nature as breathing and I strain to remember the last time I installed an .app file into my system. There are some in browser IDE’s that let me do more than Dreamweaver

ListenUp

A Boiler Room birthday mix, Todd Terje's debut album, a Frankie Knuckles tribute.

Todd Terje: It's Album Time

Next week dance fans will finally be able to get their hands on the highly anticipated debut album from the self-dubbed "remaster of the universe," Todd Terje. The aptly titled LP, It's Album Time, arrives 10 years after the Norwegian DJ and producer dropped his first 12" (which includes the brilliant cover of Cloud One's "Don't Let My Rainbow Pass Me By")

JIHAE: Illusion of You

After a successful crowdfunding effort for her new album "Illusion of You," NYC-based JIHAE released the record's first single of the same name, now available for download.

Slough Feg: White Cousin

Last week we interviewed brothers Tom and Matt Berninger, the latter known as The National's frontman and the former, a burgeoning filmmaker.

Typography Rules

If words had a face it would be the typeface (or fonts to most people). In this edition of Awesome Web Design of the Week we are not only celebrating the beauty and intricacy of typefaces but we are going to feature the new Fontshop

the butterflies and the gloves of stingers

mynd design