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Also known to it's owners as 'The Sweetheart of the Road', the Type Truck is a fully converted Chevy Step Van which tours North America as a fully functioning letterpress print shop. Kyle Durrie was a letterpress printer from Portland, Oregon and was inspired by his love of print and travel to combine the two and create the Type Truck - a tour featuring workshops, demos and spreading the word about traditional print. The tour began in June this year, locations are mapped here. Let's hope that one day it'll make it as far as the UK!!
Japanese Lego artist Sachiko Akinaga has created a new sculpture of the New York Times 'T' for the cover of their winter travel issue of the publication. The sculpture measures 6ft square and was constructed in 11 days of shifts which lasted up to 16 hours - no pain no gain! It features some wonderful details such as a lawn with figures exercising, dancing, relaxing and playing music, and terrace on the top of the building with a swimming pool and a band playing. See more pics on designboom
The internet is jam packed with the views, feelings, beliefs and ethics of others which is often fantastic but sometimes saddening and a bit pessimistic. We all often need a little pick me up which is how The Nicest Place on the Internet began. 'We'd like to turn the sad into happy and the happy into a celebration,' comments the site's creator. The site shows webcam footage of people from around the world contributing cyber hugs, full screen. You can record your own and submit it to the site too. I'm not sure about you, but it certainly seems like a more hygienic hug if anything!
Portugal's leading beer brand have brewed a new product; Sagres Preta Chocolate. To launch the new brew and promote the product, Sagres worked with Grand Union Portugal to create an online campaign. In answer to the brief and challenge set, the agency created a website created entirely from chocolate, collaborating with the best Maitre Chocolatier in Portugal, Mr. Victor Nunes (artistic director of Obidos International Chocolate Festival). Visit the site here or see the making of here. Ermm... anyone feel like some chocolate?!
Brooklyn-based Katie O'Beirne has started a new blog which documents the photographs people take with a disposable camera which she leaves in key locations around New York. The cameras are attached to park benches with twine and an instruction guide so that visitors can take pictures of themselves or of others. Take a look at the published shots here.
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, has always been one of the busiest shopping days of the year in the states and often offers and price cuts have enticed British shoppers in the UK too. The day has always been significant to shoppers in the US as it marks the first day of Christmas shopping, running up to the 24th Dec - which is the busiest day.
According to an article on AdWeek, Retail Historian Robert Spector believes that Black Friday is 'overrated' and is beginning to 'gray' as other buying incentives, such as Cyber Monday, are offered. '...Nobody paid attention to the "official" start of holiday shopping until 1939 when President Roosevelt, responding to the concerns of worried retailers, moved Thanksgiving up a week to add an extra seven days to what had been a 24-day season. The all-important Friday would not get its "Black" prefix until 1966 when (the story goes) the Philadelphia Police Department coined the term to describe the traffic jams downtown that resulted from people stampeding to the sales many stores were offering.... Because of the tight profit margins in retail, many brands historically operated in the red until holiday traffic brought the revenue surge necessary to switch to black ink in the old accounting ledgers.'
Retailers eagerly await the event this year which falls on the 25th November (Cyber Mon is 28th), anticipating a drop in sales, not helped by the new age of internet shopping.
Engineer and inventor, Martin Myerscough, founded Greenbottle after a trip to the dump when he realised that the many plastic bottles there had just a 14 day life-cycle but might spend 200 years in landfill. Beginning with a paper milk carton which was picked up by Asda in the West Country, Myerscouch then developed a wine bottle which featured a foil bladder with a paper exterior. The paper bottle weighs just 50g in comparison to the 500g glass alternative and has just 10% of the carbon footprint.
Myerscough argues that recycling is becoming very habitual and that its effectiveness is questionable; 'We're net importers of wine bottles and it's not worth shipping the glass back so it ends up here as road aggregate'. Although the paper bottle works well and can reproduce at the same size and shape as the glass bottle there is still much development that can take place with the product, for example, making it more appealing aesthetically and making it easy to recycle.
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