taking a creative break right now

Tomoko Sawada (1977-) from Kobe is a photographer who lives and works in Japan.  She first came to wider public attention playing a host of characters and identities in her self portraits ID 400.  Sawada produced her images using photo machines a technique reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s photo-booth portraits from the 1960s, Sawada used a public photo booth to create an “army of me,” - but not me.  This involved weeks of changing her physical appearance as well as her dress.  She managed to produce over 400 different identities.

“The facial characteristics and expressions are so varied and elastic in these candid shots that they become in of themselves a subtle study of physiognomy”.

200 most successful websites pinned down on the Tokyo Metro Map, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.

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The year 2008 marks the 10th Anniversary of the iMac, the computer that changed everything at Apple, hailing a new design era spearheaded by design genius Jonathan Ive. What most people don’t know is that there’s another man whose products are at the heart of Ive’s design philosophy, an influence that permeates every single product at Apple, from hardware to user-interface design. That man is Dieter Rams, and his old designs for Braun during the ’50s and ’60s hold all the clues not only for past and present Apple products, but their future as well.

When you look at the Braun products by Dieter Rams—many of them at New York’s MoMA—and compare them to Ive’s work at Apple, you can clearly see the similarities in their philosophies way beyond the sparse use of color, the selection of materials and how the products are shaped around the function with no artificial design, keeping the design “honest.”

This passion for “simplicity” and “honest design” that is always declared by Ive whenever he’s interviewed or appears in a promo video, is at the core of Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design helps us to understand a product.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is durable.
• Good design is consequent to the last detail.
• Good design is concerned with the environment.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

Read the rest here.