arts

A perfect doorknob for loners

If you live alone, it's not long before you start giving your furniture nicknames. Cleon, my armchair, is a great conversationalist.

That said, I've never really gotten to know my door all that well. It keeps to itself. I don't even know its name.

All that can change with this door handle. Amsterdam-based designer Naomi Thellier de Poncheville's Hand-le, exhibited at the London Design Festival, would let you shake your door's hand to open it...or at least grab its hand and twist it. Doors need persuasion too, sometimes.

[Via Notcot.org]

Strayform offers platform to get you paid for your creative work

Once a month media creators from the San Francisco area gather together for the Bay Area Media Makers Meetup. Each meeting is a new opportunity to meet a wide variety of creative people, and occasionally someone comes to the meetup with a truly inspirational idea. Wednesday night's meetup was one of those nights. Brandt Cannici has a new start-up called Strayform that promises to offer creatives a new way to establish economic sustainability for their projects.

… Read more

Bioshock keeps on giving: Free artbook ready for download now

If you weren't lucky enough to swipe a premature copy of Bioshock from a retailer who broke the street date--I'm looking at you, Toys R Us--then you'll just have to settle for this incredibly detailed free artbook that 2K Games has on their site. Hopefully this, coupled with the recent demo, will prevent your descent into insanity while waiting for the August 21 release date.

The 67-page book entitled Breaking the Mold, gives you an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the game, along with tons of concept art and commentary from the creators … Read more

Desktoptopia is a cure for the common desktop background

For about the longest time, the background on my Mac had been fairly dull--a Manhattan cityscape plucked from the selection at DesktopNexus. I want my desktop patterns to look good, but I'm not one to put a whole lot of thinking power into it; there are better ways to waste energy.

This morning, however, I switched when I read about Desktoptopia, a new Mac-only downloadable app that lets you easily discover aesthetically pleasing "designer desktop" backgrounds created by innovative digital artists (no generic landscapes here) and switch them up either automatically or manually with a very simple … Read more

Gas guzzler? This Hummer's a gum-guzzler

Even if they involve Optimus Prime, we're sick of geeky cakes.

The convergence of the automotive and confectionary industries reached a fever pitch quite some time ago, in that South Park episode where Satan demands to have a "Ferrari cake" at his Halloween party, after all. But that doesn't mean there's no room left for innovation in the field of tooth-rottingly-sweet edible homages to technology.

We are, for example, totally loving this masterpiece by artist Heidi Hesse. has created a wire frame shaped like a Humvee (the military vehicle that inspired our wonderful, beloved Hummer) … Read more

Buy a painting, fund a craving

Of all the ideas you wish you had, this one's probably way up there.

The idea behind Wants for Sale is simple, but that's what makes it absolute genius. New York artists Christine and Justin simply paint pictures of the things they want. Then, they sell those paintings for exactly the same price as what those objects cost.

The artists' tech "wants" include a Guitar Hero controller (the painting costs $64.98), an iPhone ($649.17), and, uh, chicken wings ($12.70).

Via e-mail, you can even submit the stuff that you want. If Christine and … Read more

In L.A., an audience for machinima

It's been a hectic week, but we didn't want that to deter us from recounting this cool event: Last Friday night Crave joined a standing-room-only crowd of geeks, artists, and filmmakers at Los Angeles' Machine Project art space for an overview and screening of machinima films. A compound of machine and cinema, machinima describes the art of making films out of video games. Bypassing both labor-intensive hand-drawn animation and computer-intensive digital animation, machinima artists instead use game engines as cheap animation tools, combining video sequences created within the game with original dialogue and soundtracks. The result is far … Read more

iStockphoto to raise prices in August

iStockphoto, the Getty Images "microstock" subsidiary that sells low-cost imagery and video, will announce Monday plans to raise prices and therefore photographer revenue next month along with a number of promotional activities.

The company sells credits that give customers rights to use contributors' photos in materials such as advertisements, Web sites or brochures. The higher the resolution, the more credits an image costs, and the credit cost will increase from $1.20 to $1.30 on August 19, said iStockphoto Executive Vice President Kelly Thompson. (Credits are cheaper in bulk.)

Because photographers get a proportion of the credit … Read more

BigStockPhoto revamps search

BigStockPhoto.com, one of a host of "microstock" companies that sells images to advertisers and others who need stock photography, has overhauled its search engine in an attempt to improve performance and usefulness.

The new search tools are faster and can filter images based on parameters such as vertical or horizontal orientation to narrow down searches more quickly, the Davis, Calif.-based company said Wednesday. It also offers the ability to show similar searches to more easily find new but related choices.

"This is...the first of many steps we're taking to dramatically improve BigStockPhoto's … Read more