Balenciaga Destroyed Crewneck Sweater

Get yours here! Cheap!

Posted By: Paul - Fri Apr 29, 2022 - Comments (3)
Category: Antisocial Activities, Design and Designers, Excess, Overkill, Hyperbole and Too Much Is Not Enough, Fashion, Frauds, Cons and Scams, More Money Than Brains

Amazon’s Hitler Mustache Logo, and other logo design disasters

BBC News reports that Amazon recently changed its shopping-app logo, in response to complaints that it reminded people of Hitler's mustache. The new logo (below right) is supposed to better represent a piece of parcel tape, which was the original intent, rather than a dictator's mustache.



This reminds me of the topic of logo design disasters, which I once write a short blurb about for another site. That site no longer exists, so I figured I might as well post the blurb here (below, in extended).

More in extended >>

Posted By: Alex - Fri Mar 05, 2021 - Comments (5)
Category: Business, Design and Designers

American Look

Your head will be spinning with Midcentury Modern designs by the end of this film. A Utopia that never was.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Feb 03, 2021 - Comments (1)
Category: Business, Design and Designers, Recreation, Interior Decorating, 1950s, Cars, Yesterday’s Tomorrows

Eurobad ‘74

Eurobad '74 was some kind of 1974 European interior design exhibition. It showcased rooms such as a kitchen-stable combo, a kitchen-garage combo, and a bathroom seemingly designed by M.C. Escher.

More at vintage.es.

Posted By: Alex - Fri Sep 11, 2020 - Comments (8)
Category: Design and Designers, 1970s

Midcentury Modern Clocks by Portescap

The current company seems to have gotten out of the clock business, alas.

Posted By: Paul - Sat Aug 10, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Design and Designers, Technology, 1960s

The GE Blue Max Radio

Posted By: Paul - Thu Aug 01, 2019 - Comments (3)
Category: Design and Designers, Inventions, Technology, 1960s

Sears unveils new logo

Sears recently spent what is certainly a large amount of money to redesign its logo. When it unveiled the results last week, it explained:



However, a lot of people have commented that the new logo looks an awful lot like the logo of Airbnb.



The irony here is that when Airbnb unveiled its logo, back in 2014, it was also controversial. People complained, first, that it looked too much like testicles, and also noted its similarity to existing logos, such as these:



This isn't the first time a company has spent a lot of money to redesign a logo, only to come up with something similar to an existing one. When NBC TV unveiled a new logo in 1975, after spending almost $1 million for a redesign, the result turned out to be almost identical to the existing logo of the Nebraska Educational Television Network.

Posted By: Alex - Sun May 12, 2019 - Comments (5)
Category: Business, Design and Designers

The Marionettes of Donald Cordry

The green fairy is one of four marionettes used by Donald Cordry in his production of "The Three Wishes" that played in Minneapolis between 1930-1934. "The Three Wishes" was first written as a play for puppets by German writer Fronz von Pocci around 1900 and continues to be a popular play performed in many versions. Hand carved from wood, the fairy has an ethereal green painted face with joined eyebrows, black lips, large eyes with some hint of Asiatic features. She wears a clear blue glass pagoda head ornament in her golden hair , and she is wearing a long blue-green velvet dress, with beige tights,and rhinestone shoes with leather heels. Her wings are made of plastic. These charming carved and painted marionettes are great examples of Cordry's decorative sense of design and craftsmanship. The angel is operated with an airplane holder and eight strings.

The Three Wishes was first written as a play for puppets by German writer Fronz von Pocci around 1900. Donald Cordry (1907-1978) was a well known and highly respected American artist, craftsmen and puppeteer of the 1920s and 30s. He was gifted with a great decorative sense and his craftsmanship was extraordinary. Born in Minnesota, Cordry attended the Minneapolis School of Art from 1924-1929 and after graduation he went to work for the Board of Education. While his main job was to lecture and teach classes, Cordry took used the opportunity to create and perform his own marionette show with both hand puppets and marionettes. From late 1930 to early 1931 Cordry joined the Rufus Rose Company, owned by Rupert and Margo Rose that played the school and college circuit on the East coast. In the summer of 1931 he traveled to Mexico where he developed a life long interest and dedication to the arts and landscape of Mexico. An avid collector of ethnographic material for over 40 years, Cordry amassed a large collection of indigenous Mexican arts and crafts which he meticulously documented and researched. His passion also included Native American cultures, and in the mid 1930s he worked at the Heye Museum of Indian Art in New York City where he cataloged and researched objects for the museum. (The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History owns a large collection of Mexican masks donated by the Cordry family in the early 1980s.) After returning to Minneapolis in late 1931, Cordry started creating his own puppets. He formed his own company and performed shows until 1934.

The Dolly Sisters and the Three Wishes were popular with young and old audiences alike. In June of 1934, Cordry moved to New York and worked with Tony Sarg, a well known and established puppeteer in his own right, and taught classes at Sarg's Summer School. Cordry made a number of puppets for Sarg and toured with his company from 1934-1936. By 1937 poor health forced him to give up puppetry and he moved to Mexico. He did however, continue his field research on indigenous peoples and later on published two books - Mexican Indian Costumes (1968) and Mexican Masks (c1980). "The Three WIshes" was Cordry's final production before he moved to Mexico with his wife. The puppets and sets from this production were shipped in crates to Mexico and remained there almost fifty years. In 1982, his widow Dorothy Mann Cordry donated this collections to the Smithsonian which included not only the marionettes, but props made to scale and a fully operational puppet stage.

Posted By: Paul - Mon Oct 15, 2018 - Comments (5)
Category: Art, Design and Designers, Puppets and Automatons, 1930s

The Hoffmann

Wikipedia page.

Posted By: Paul - Sat Dec 23, 2017 - Comments (2)
Category: Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Design and Designers, 1950s, Cars

Mystery Illustration 34

This wordless packaging was designed in 1968 to hold a very common consumer item. What was inside?

The answer is here.

And after the jump.

More in extended >>

Posted By: Paul - Mon Dec 05, 2016 - Comments (3)
Category: Design and Designers, Graphics, Products, 1960s