Cooking for Geeks.

One of the joys of being an industrial design consultancy is sometimes you have no idea what you are going to be working on. Sometimes it's a straightforward project like the mechanical engineering of a headset, other times it's a blue sky project about something that might come out in 5 to 10 years. Other times it's a project in a closely related field that isn't strictly yours. This time it was graphic design. We all use the same basic programs, we just usually use them differently.

Jeff Potter (I've known him for 9 years) came up to me last year asking for help making some charts for a project he was working on. 60 charts and multiple variations later (and one whole year of Jeff's time at 70-80 hours a week) Jeff's book Cooking for Geeks was released by O'Reilly. It is currently holding at around #350 on Amazon's sales rank of all books sold and Jeff has been interviewed in print/web, audio, and video by everyone between the BBC World News to the Today show.

It was fun to help Jeff out on his project working on everything from charts and graphs to building a lego ice cream maker. I enjoyed being a guinea pig on the recipes as well.

Go check out his website for the book: http://www.cookingforgeeks.com

Here are some examples of the charts:

Maker Faire 5/23/10 Report

(Finally . . . DO/CO's Maker Faire 2010 update! )

My wife, some friends, and myself attended Maker Faire 2010 and had a really great time. We checked out a fun and literally electrifying musical Tesla coil performance by ArcAttack of Austin, TX.



I purchased a really cool belt and U-Lock holder from Fabric Horse that will allow me to carry my Kryptonite lock sans-backpack. Carrie, owner of Fabric Horse, was super-cool and showed-off all the wares that she brought out to Maker Faire all the way from my old stomping grounds of Philadelphia, PA.

Out in the open spaces of the San Mateo County Event Center, we found some completely sweet human-powered and alt-power vehicles created by Fun Bicycle Unicorn Club, a hot rod Little Flyer Wagon, and Giant Cardboard Robots. There was something to simultaneously stimulate everyone's imaginations and/or inner nerd. We'll definitely be back next year!

-Clint

DO/CO Portfolio Updates

Some clients just made their projects public and we just completed the design of some internal projects. Thanks to those happy events, we made some nice additions to our internal portfolio.

You can check out the work that we did for Clean Bottle and Nearlife via the links below.

http://bit.ly/auDipm

http://bit.ly/bZGxE2

Also, our latest addition to our Mechanique lighting line is up. You can view it here: http://bit.ly/ctpj18

Thanks to these and other projects, things are getting exciting around the office. It looks like coffee will be our fuel for the next few months. :)

-Clint