New lighting project at 80%

The medium is PPE plastic from a 5 gallon bucket, monofilament nylon line, and quarter inch steel rod. The intent is to create a floating light that engages the visual and audio senses. If brushed or moved by the wind the steel rods ring like chimes.

Lately

Being that I'm going to KU school of design I now have unprecedented access to projects I could only strive for before. So as of late I've been working a lot on various projects. Designing sun glasses for corvette and jaguar as well as research for kicker audio. Not to mention designing a lighting project. Sleep has very quickly become a lost friend. I will post pictures as soon as I can.

A few practical projects

                                                  This is a mock up of a grunge band poster.
                                                     

                                     Here above and below is an example of a book dust cover 

                                          This is a desktop ornament that I designed in SolidWorks
                                       and printed using a Makerbot for a client with nautical tastes.
                                        
                                          Below is one of thirty spears I made for a group of hunters
                                     looking for a better way to finish a wild boar at the end of a hunt

startburst light and a letter opener what do you think?

Sample of some work from the last few months

Hallmark

Hallmark as much of its main productions centralized geographically in Lawrence Kansas. Here the cards arrive already printed by a third party and are cut and decorated. Shearing presses cut the cards out of the 3 foot by 4 foot sheets they arrive in on and per design are either directly folded or sent to have surface treatments performed on them. A couple of the treatments are flitter and flock, flitter or as we might call it glitter uses ink that is jet sprayed onto the card to hold the glitter in place when it is water fall poured onto the card. After this it goes through a oven to back it dry then onto the folding machines. Flock is a process that applies a finished substance that feels like felt to the card. It goes through the same sort of process as flitter but instead of just a water fall pour Hallmark also makes use of a static field to get it to stand on end and feel more like felt. These are just two surface treats that are used. There are several others such holograms and plasticizing. After the surface treatments are applied the cards are send through a folding machine that looks like its running at the speed of sound when its on. the cards zoom through starting flat and going through a series of arms and rollers that fold the card around flat. Some cards through are too complex for this and still require hand folding. With the advent of robotics and the technological revolution Hallmark as seen a significant drop on their demand so they have had to diversify; moving into many fields such as packing materials and wrapping paper. 

Marti Gra made in China

Marti Gra made in China is a documentary about where the beads thrown at the annual Marti Gra festival in New Orleans come from and who makes them. The workers in China work eat and live in more or less a prison looking compound in mainland China. Though to them this is better than the alternative, which is no work, as westerners we see their working conditions and pay to be very bad in comparison to our own. The workers to 12 to 14 hour days with a 30 to one hour lunch that they are encouraged to work through. They have impossible quotas to meet on a daily basis that determines their pay and are not allowed to talk while they work. To us as westerners this is a unimaginable circumstance to work in and in fact we pay easily $1-$5 for the beads they made which is as much as a months earnings for them. To add to this we just throw the beads away. In the documentary neither the American or the Chinese knew for sure what the documentary was about besides the beads. But when told the American public disliked the beads a bit and didn't feel as free wheeling with them as they did before. But when the Chinese workers were told what was done with the beads and how they were used they were over come with giggles and disbelief. Stepping back from the film which showed the contrast between the owners living conditions and the workers, we see a very sharp contrast in the owner and the workers, but is it so much different from America? Here the CEO's make tens and hundreds of millions of dollars while the floor guy makes just mabey $40,000. In china the CEO makes a couple million Yen and his workers may make a couple thousand. After watching the film I don't think we can compare these two societies like this because they are so different. To me its a bit like asking why won't the cat fetch the stick.