Amanda Forbis’ When the Day Breaks

WE'RE SUPPORTING

UK-based design firm DIY Kyoto has come up with a clever plan to allow homeowners to visibly see how much energy they are using in their home at any given moment. Wattson, a portable and wireless device, hooks up to the main fuse box of any home and a bright display shows how much energy is being used in either in watts or cost over the past 28 days. The program also allows the user to put the information online in a community, where ideas about saving electricity are shared.

WE'RE TRAVELLING TO

A Dutch insurance company recently launched a pretty creative ad campaign that was put on the backs of buses in Amsterdam, making them look like they were actually moving backwards.

WE'RE WEARING

She may have designed for Ralph Lauren, but it’s hard to believe that Brandy Lunsford’s first two collections have been of this calibre. Read more

WE'RE THINKING

The Obama campaign was one of the most visually effective in recent history, brilliantly tapping modern marketing concepts and design to get its message across. The deceptively simple logo they chose stemmed from an amalgamation of a lot of different concepts the Obama designers came up with. Logo Design Love just posted all the different looks that weren’t used.

WE'RE READING

Michael Wolf, a German born American photographer, has lived in Hong Kong since 1995. His work explores the ways city-dwellers in China and Hong Kong shape their surroundings in an ‘organic metropolis’. His series — Architecture of Density — has some breathtaking images of Hong Kong’s apartment buildings.

I spent the formative first six years of my life in Wellington, New Zealand, a beautiful windswept city framed by a magnificent harbour in one direction and a stunning collection of green, rolling hills in the other. It was here, on a return visit many years later and deep amongst the clipped accents and ruddy faces of the weather-beaten locals, that I stumbled upon the vast catalogue of the then Dunedin based record label Flying Nun. And what a roster of acts they housed — The Chills, The Bats, The Clean, Tall Dwarfs, The Verlaines, and my favourite guitar-pop band, Straitjacket Fits. Read more

WE'RE LISTENING TO

New York’s Infinity Window make some tripped-out, droning, psychedelic raagas that would be appropriate scoring films by Kenneth Anger or John Carpenter. Ominous and dark, the duo makes sounds like the rebirth of an ancient god.