Posts Tagged ‘inspiration’

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Inspiration | A look back at our “Flower Lace” necklace

Monday, October 25th, 2010

I’m working on a custom ‘skin’ design for our phone, since a black phone on a black desk is often hard to find without having to call said phone. I thought it’d be fun to do the same pattern that we use for our Flower Lace necklaces, since it’s one of my favorites of everything we’ve ever designed:

In looking through my working files for this design, I came across this bookmarked blog posting by Oh Joy! with the original inspiration for the pattern:

Oh Joy! had blogged about NY Fashion Week in September 2007 and the Lela Rose‘s Spring 2008 collection.  It’s been 3 years, and I still love that dress and our engraved wood necklace that was inspired by it.

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Inspiration | Streets Clock by Fluid Form

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

Obviously, we have an affinity for things that are laser-cut (all of our engraved wood designs are made with our laser-cutter).

So color us impressed when we came across Fluid Forms‘ Streets Clock.  While the laser-cut design is impressive in itself, what really pushed it over the edge for us, was being able to make a personalized clock on-the-fly using the street map of the city of your choice.

I made a clock of our hometown of Ottawa, ON with the hands centered on Parliament Hill:

Or you can check out this neat little gallery below:

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Inspiration | A couple of cool images

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

We draw inspiration for not our modern jewelry in a number of ways, such as seeing what other creatives are doing. Since both of us have a design-background, we regularly use tools like Adobe Illustrator of Photoshop in our ‘ideation’ phase when we come up with new products.

When we saw this “Real-World” photoshop image, we knew we had to share.  There’s a Flickr set of how they put this image of the Photoshop interface using real-life objects:

(via BoingBoing.  See the full-size image here).

We also love illustration, which is part of the reason why we started up our Metal for Monsters line — it gave us an excuse to collaborate with some really talented illustrators.  The second image that crossed our paths recently is a great illustration by Patrick Moberg:

(via Drawn! See Patrick Moberg’s blog here).

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Posted in Art and Illustration, Inspirations, Photography | 2 Comments »

Inspiration | More virtual shopping spreads

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

When we did our “virtual shopping” mood boards a few weeks ago, we actually did a couple more than what were posted.

So without further ado, here they are:

Hangin\' out with the guys

I’ll admit I forgot to add in the captions this time around but, you can get full shopping details on the polyvore version of the spread (click on each of the images).  (As before, with Eric’s “guy” shopping, everything can be found in one store: Bluefly.com, and he paired it with the a solid Blend Creations “Dragon” stainless steel pendant).

Hot evening out

I love a really good LBD (little black dress) — probably too much since many of my “nice” dresses tend to be black.  I also really like wearing red accessories with them and I think there’s something quite “classic’ about it.  The Blend Creations red bamboo pendant and earrings have quite the shock of red and perfect for the LBD :)

Finally, the last one makes me wish that it would stay summer just a little bit longer:

Summer breeze casual

It’s a watermelon-inspired colour palette with our “Pink plum blossoms” necklace and earrings paired with a bright pink jersey dress and the tailored bag.  (I have a thing for structured purses it seems).

Happy shopping :)

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Inspiration | The guy’s take on virtual window shopping

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Funky modern guy's jewelry

In the continuation of a theme, I’ve decided to do my version of Vivian’s post yesterday, where she showed our “flowerish” engraved jewelry matched with a summer outfit.

For the guy’s outfit, we’ve got a “smart casual” look. Starting from the top-left corner and going clockwise, the outfit is made up of:

Yes, I realize that everything in the outfit comes from the same store, but it’s true to the guy way of shopping: Get in, buy everything you could possibly need and get the heck out.

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Inspiration | Virtual window shopping

Monday, July 21st, 2008

I would have said Windows® shopping, but our PC has decided not to connect to the internet so we’re almost exclusively Mac-surfing now.

I’ve been wanting to do a little shopping, but it seems whenever we have the free time to go shopping, it’s usually past closing time at the mall.  Instead, it’s virtual shopping for me and the added benefit is that there’s an overwhelming selection, and I can always pretend that everything would fit me perfectly. :)

I created a little inspiration board with the outfit I found for a fictitious dress-up lunch with the girls:
Summer fashion inspiration

In case you’re interested in the details, clockwise from the top-left corner:

Now, I created this little inspiration piece in Illustrator, but if you’re ever in the mood to pull together your own inspiration boards, you can whittle away some time playing with Polyvore, where I was able to pull together the same outfit, complete with clickable links, in a fraction of the time.

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Inspiration | From Teeny to Tiny

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Being designers, we like to try to keep up with what is going on in different areas of design; in what ways the envelope is being pushed. One of the most exciting developments is always when things are designed to be functional and really really small.  Cue the Tumbleweed tiny house company where the houses are well… teeny and tiny… as described.

Since we last posted about the Tumbleweed tiny house company, they’ve completely revamped their site and they will be adding a whole slew of new tiny houses (can’t wait!). Their biggest house now stands at a majestic 774 sq ft. Their smallest at a proud 65 sq ft.

Seen below is the Harbinger at 297 sq ft (not including the loft).

Jay Shafer, the founder, has done amazing things with very little space. The floor plans continue to be my favorite to peruse. It’s great to see such a small space used so efficiently. Bigger builders should take a serious look at his body of work to see the improvements that they could bring to their oversized 2500 sq ft behemoths — at least by comparison.


I can just imagine Mr. Shafer working on his tiny drafting table drawing up these tiny plans. Note how big the arc of the door appears on such a small floor plate.

The only thing missing is seeing one of his houses done up in a more contemporary style. Not that it needs to be all glass and stainless, but something a “tiny” less country, and dare I say, a “tiny” bit more rock’n'roll.

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Inspiration | These boots were made for walkin’

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Whenever possible, we like to exercise our design-brains outside of our own jewelry designs.  

Doc Martens is having a fun little design contest (that happens to be some very clever marketing, btw) where you can design your own set of boots. You can design either the 8-hole or the 14-hole boot and they’ll be picking two winners. One will be decided by the popular vote, and the other will be decided by their panel.

I thought it’d be fun to do a quick design with the 14-hole boot and when I checked the status of my boot I’d already had one vote — a “Hate it!”. Haha. Well, it’s not for everyone, though neither are most of the pretty outlandish boot designs on the Doc Martens design site.

Doc Martens boot design

If you feel like giving my boot design the “Love”, go visit the Flowerish boot design page and vote.

You can also go there and design your own boot — if you plan on using their templates, a word of warning, they have Photoshop and Illustrator templates, but only in the latest, CS3 version :P.

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Inspiration | Drooling over a backsplash

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

I don’t mean literally, since I’m not sure that that’s physically possible. Gravity would make it really difficult anyway.

We’re considering updating our kitchen from its oh-so-chic late 1980′s look. Its functionality is horrendous too– some of the precious little counterspace there is is rendered useless by microwave that looms less than a foot above, and then there’s a horrendously tiny fake double-sink where one sink is bar-sized, which wouldn’t be so bad except that we don’t have a dishwasher so a real sink is a necessity, but I digress.

I wanted to talk about this:

Pretty blue glass tiles

This is the backsplash that I’ve been drooling over. Interstyle (a Canadian company) makes these beautiful forget-me-not blue 1″x 8″ glass tiles. I like them because they’re not your typical 1″ x 1″ tile and I think that the nice horizontal lines would help to visually expand our tiny kitchen. There’s a nice retro-modern feel to them too.

I have no idea how much they are yet, because I haven’t yet gone to a retailer that carries them. I imagine they’re not the most economical choice of backsplash, but it is oh so pretty.

Beyond it’s implications in our own home, I think the shiny and matte textural contrast, the cerulean hue and that retro yet modern look make me think about possible inlay designs for our jewelry.  Hmmm.

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Inspiration | Cuboro marble runs

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

I found the cuboro blocks a while back and I lost the link along the way. It took me minutes! (which I think is long for google-searching) to find it again, and I think I had to luck in on a search for “wooden cubes ball run“. 

In any event, I thought about the cuburo blocks again because Eric and I were talking about really cool toys that a) don’t require batteries, b) have long-lasting play-value and c) actually seem fun enough for us to play with. Our own son might be a little young for this yet, but doesn’t it look fun?:

Cuboro marble run starter kit

Larger Cuboro set

The blocks are all made with FSC accredited beech wood that is left untreated.

Of course, such a toy doesn’t come with a chintzy Wal-Mart price-tag.
You can buy these wooden marble run blocks online at Inquisitive Kid, and a starter kit is $149, and a larger set is $199. Yeah. A bit pricey to just go out and buy on a whim, but one can dream for future birthdays right? (For a child, I mean.. yeah…)

Happy family with cuboro

I guess if the actual toy is too expensive, we could always just get him the cool books about building different runs ($27.50).
cuboro books

While Cuboro doesn’t really have a direct link to our own modern jewelry designs, it’s always inspiring for us to see what products are out there, using simple, natural materials.

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