“If you’re driving down the highway with your girlfriend, a really cute thing to do when you pass a smokestack is to naively ask her if that building is a cloud factory.“. (Sometimes Clouds Just Look Like Clouds, from Defunker)
“We still get about two or three emails a week telling us that we’re idiots for mixing up countries.”.

From the top:
Life shirt, detail, from Defunker. “It’s life, and it happens to the best of us.”;
Greece shirt, detail, from Busted Tees.

“The Dyane 6 does 70 miles an hour for as long as you want. An oil cooler looks after the life of her engine.”. “No water pump, no head gaskets, no pipes, no distributor. And you never need anti-freeze because she’s air cooled.”. “You keep Dyane outside. You don’t need a garage, and Dyane is ready to go all times in all weather.”. “You won’t find any useless gadgets or switches on Dyane, but you will find all essential controls carefully placed and well within reach.”. “This is no minicar. There’s plenty of room inside. Remember, too, that the Dyane Weekend has a folding sunroof.”. “If you happen to see another Dyane riding over pavé, watch her closely: it’s quite spectacular.”.

Citroen Dyane: the brochures from 1967 to 1984, from citrobe.org by Jose Biesbrouck:
“An homepage about the Citroen 2cv and Mehari cars with a lot of pictures of converted ones, a restoration manual, entirely scanned brochures of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, …and much more.”.

Above: Dyane come… (Dyane as…), 1978, italian brochure cover, detail.

“A showcase of different Japanese consumer products from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, mostly, including everything from phones, radios, TV sets, audio sets, cameras to vehicles.”. From Tuk Tuk, by Akira Ota.

Right: Mazda AZ-1 (1992).

“Once parked the Brompton stands on its own leaving both hands free. There are three main parts to fold and it takes just ten to twenty seconds. When folded, a Brompton stays locked together automatically. Vulnerable parts like lights and cable-runs are out of harm’s way, and because the chain and gears are inside there’s no worry about getting grease on your (or your fellow traveller’s) clothes. You can choose any combination of handlebar, gears, colours, weight-saving and other features exactly as you wish, almost without restriction.”.

The Brompton Bike.

Above: Folded Brompton, brochure picture (©Brompton Bicycle Ltd.).

43Folders presents the Hipster PDA:

“…The Hipster PDA is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work.
Let’s make one together:

1. get a bunch of 3″ x 5″ file cards
2. clip them together with a binder clip
3. there is no step 3

From the 43Folders Wiki* :

“There are a number of benefits to a Hipster PDA over a digital PDA:

• Cards can be arbitrarily resequenced, given away, and writing by hand is freeform and unrestricted
• Won’t run out of batteries
• More durable
• Cheaper
• Information doesn’t get lost in there; when something’s no longer relevant, you throw it away

See also D*I*Y, where Douglas Johnston explain how to build, tweak and boost your Hipster.

*This is a 43Folders Wiki content, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5. license.

“In the spring of 2002, I spent about five weeks transient in Tokyo, living in capsule hotels.”.
“Tokyo in particular is built to support people working away from home. A number of capsule hotels around the city, near train stations, absorb men who miss the last train home or just aren’t sober enough to stumble home.”.
Justin Hall tells his experience.

She’s not easy to define. I can say she’s born in 1972 and is a photogenic non-Barbie doll, but this is not enough. This is Blythe, (Gina Garan, Chronicle Books, 2002) is the book that made her famous and, later, a cult icon. See: This is Blythe blythe is go! Blythe the doll

“…Unlike Barbie, Blythe does not have a boyfriend. She also does not advertise her professional life.”.
Above: eleven entry from Show Us Your Customized Girl contest, at thisisblythe.com.

Art. Lebedev Studio “was founded in 1995. At present, it is the largest design company in Russia.”.

“We do industrial design, graphic design, web design and interface engineering.”.

In Mandership, Artemy Lebedev writes about graphic and industrial design, interface engineering, typography, semiotics, and visualization.

From Coding. Part two :

“One of the most successful implementations of audio coding can be heard in the Moscow metro.
A male voice announces stations when the train is headed towards downtown, a female voice when it moves from the center to city outskirts (sort of a mnemonic rule: the boss calling you to work, the wife calling you home).”.

From the top: Optimus mini, world’s first keyboard with color screen; Gond, by Alexander Zhitomirsky.