Button spare part edition

I like this cute stool by designergroup Form us with love. The fabric are left over pieces from the making of other furniture, and therefore, every stool is unique. The stool is produced by swedish company Mitab.

This is heaven

Everytime life is hard and things are not going my way, I return to a very special place in my memory. Ljugarn is the place where I spent all my childhood summers and where my grandparents still live. Ljugrn is an old village on the east side of Gotland, with 10 km of sandy beaches, and a fairytale-like nature. My family owns a tiny cabin there, with no running water and an outhouse loo. To me, this is high quality life!



This is my family's little cabin in Ljugarn



The village from above





Rauks

The perfect summerhouse!

I've been dreaming about this place since 2004, when I found it in a swedish interior magazine. It's the summerhouse of Isabelle Halling (Swedish interior stylist and TV host) and it's situated in the Stockholm archipelago. It's only 27 square meters, but since I'm a fan of compact living, this is my ideal summerhouse. I mean, the whole point of having a summerhome I think, is to have a place where you live without all the extra conveniences of a permanent home. A simpler life! I love the colours of this place and I love how close it is to the sea!

Photos from Sköna Hem (7/2004)

Your true colours?

This project, by swedish graphic designer Jenny Marchi, was created as a final exam project at Berghs school of communication in 2008. From the numbers in your civic registration number (in sweden, your date of birth and 4 registration numbers), a unique poster is created out of three basic elements, a square, a triangle and a circle. Everyone has a unique number and therefore, every composition is also unique.
I like the bold colours and simple shapes, Jenny was inspiered by the Memphis group, and I really love the idea.





Pictures from Grafiskt personnummer

Wallpapers

Minakani is a Paris based design consultant/studio, who has done some really nice prints and wallapers. I especially like these two:

 



Photos from Minakani

I wish you the best of luck!

Photo by Etzy seller Sherry Truitt

Copenhagen visual

I used to bike past this bar, on Gothersgade, in central Copenhagen on my way to work every day. I think the colors and the graphics are great, and though it's probably quite old, I find it very contamporary looking! I'm not sure what type of place it is really, probably not the nicest, but I enjoy what it looks like from the outside.



Photo borrowed from Another DK

Cute notebooks!

They made these really cute notebooks over at Sisterbrandt designstudio where I used to work and I was lucky enough to take a few of them with me home. They are made like old-fashioned schoolbooks and perfect for practising handwriting and multiplications. Since I don't feel like going back to school, I will use them differently. One book for every new project I come up with maybe?

OK Computer

I'm still alive! Unfortunately, my computer is not. It fell down from my coffee table two days ago and now half of the screen is black! Now I'm counting money and wondering what to do. The computer is old and it's not worth the money to repair it, so now I'm trying to get a hold of a separate screen I can use until I buy a new one.
That is the bad news.
The good news is that I'm now also a blogging (a blogger without a computer!) for Normann Copenhagen
I'll be back tomorrow with a happier post!

Laundry

I live on the 5th floor without an elevator so everytime I do laundury I carry tons (or so it seems, at least) of clothes up and down the stairs. Good exercise, yes, but I would love to have a small washing machine in my apartment, and above that, a few more of these (below!) in Copenhagen! Copenhagen sure has the architecture where this would work, and I love that you can see from below that people are actually LIVING here! Besides, clothes actually dries outside even in the winter, and instead of putting everything in the dryer, you can do our environement a favor by hanging them outside!



photo by James Duncan Davidson (found through Flickr)

One of the reasons I do what I do

Well, maybe that sounds a bit dramatic but Lotta Kühlhorn was one of my first graphic design idols and I still admire her work! It was her work that, amogst other things of course, made me want to work with books!




Patterns and book cover designs by Lotta Kühlhorn

About the calendar

Alot of people have been e-mailing me, wondering how they pay for the calendar. I've never sold anything over the internet before so it was a bit confusing to start with. But now I've set up a PayPal account to use for the payments. I'm very happy about all the response and the nice comments! Thank you!
If you want order a calendar, the price is 6 euros (shipping is 4.75 within the EU and 6.59 to the rest of the world)
Just send an e-mail to Kollega@kollegaworks.com with your name and your shipping adress!
Have a very nice day!

Best of Gotland!

I spent the christmas holiday with my parents and grandparents on my beloved Gotland and it was, like always in the wintertime, very peaceful and nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Gotland is home for alot of arts and crafts, and quite alot of artists has moved there from the mainland throughout history, claiming there is something special about the light. Nowadays most of them survive on selling crafts made out of traditional gotlandish materials, such as sheeps skin, limestone and ceramics to the tourists who arrives in thousands every summer.
Most of the Gotlandic design is very low key and almost ascetic in it's form and colour but there are a few exceptions from the rule and I would like to share my favourites with you.
Here is my pick of Gotland based design!

Ceramics from Åsa Lindström

I'm not a big fan of the clothes but I really like the fabric prints from Vamlingbolaget

Concrete box and from Tove Adman

It's not my name!

When I was a kid, a few of my lucky friends had name signs like this one on their wall. They were handmade out of glass, and my guessing is that they were purchased during the family holiday (some time in the 1980's), when visiting one of the larger glasswork factories in Småland, Sweden.
Oh, I wish I had been one of these kids and that I had kept it because I would really love to have one now! I found this one for sale on a swedish site, but unfortunately my name is not Maria. Too bad!
If anyone of you knows anything more about these name signs I would be very happy to know more...

Vases and faces

I like this vase by Frank Kerdil for PO!
Most people are familiar with the Rubin vase, the famous set of optical illusions developed around 1915 by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in wich you can either see a vase, or two faces.
This is not the first time the optical illusion has been made into a real 3D object. I found out that in 1977, a vase was made to celebrate the silver jubilee of queen Elisabeth of England. On one side you have the silhouette of Queen Elisabeth, and on the other, the one of Prince Philip. If you follow the contour of the vase, one profile morphes seamlessly into the other. The vase is therefore assymetrical!
You can view a video of this here!

vase2face from PO

"The queens speach" via Grand illusions

An illustration I made a few years ago!