The book features a few more Dansk pieces inside and has a ton of information on how to make just about anything on a lathe. There’s a few dozen projects as well – none as cool as a Dansk pepper mill, but good stuff.  There’s a lot of photos of wood and metal turned pieces inside as well, including works by Bojessen, Krenit, JHQ, and several others. The 2nd photo is a diagram I thought was very cool, showing the profile of many bowl and tray design projects.

They are very nice visually and a lot of fun. Check em out.

Buy on eBay

Growing up in Milwaukee, my cousin had a huge collection of beer cans, so there’s a strong element of nostalgia for me here. Very nice book, published by Chronicle.

Get it: Beer: A Genuine Collection of Cans on Amazon

Ever crack open a can of Chief Oshkosh of Wisconsin, or sample Pabst’s Big Cat Malt Liquor? Remember the original St. Pauli Girl, Tennent’s bevy of lager lovelies, or Olde Frothingslosh (“the pale stale ale with the foam on the bottom”)? Presented alphabetically by brand, the nearly 500 cans collected here come from thirty countries and range from the iconic to the obscure to the downright bizarre. From long-forgotten brews to classic brands that have changed their look but never gone out of style, Beer offers a peek into the last century of beer culture, exploring what we drank, how we drank it, and why we picked it off the shelf. While it may not be as refreshing as a frosty cold can of Bud, cracking open this book is certain to stimulate beer lovers and design fans alike.

The first group of photos are from three neighborhoods that were primarily designed by Alexander Wexler. The last few were at my grandfather’s house. He, like most people in Rancho Mirage it seems, lives on a golf course. The last photo is from the best Jewish Deli in the desert, Shermans. Enjoy!

Somehow Target has managed to laser in on multiple areas of interest for me and came up with a killer combination.

First of all, I like good, consistent design.  I really like the packaging for these products.  They all feature copious white space, the arrow with the knocked out logo, a clean lock up of bold and thin sans serif typography, plus simple, bold cut-out photography.  The quatity is clearly spelled out in a box with rounded corners in the lower right hand corner, and the details consistently laid out along the bottom.  I think they did a great job with the packaging on these.  The only potential issue is with the pharmaceutical products.  The generic Benedryl anti-itch cream tube looks a lot like the Hydrocortisone  anti-itch cream.  Depending on how bad the itch is, I could see getting them confused.

Second of all, they have jacked directly into my collector gene.  The idea of having a shelf full of matching products is compelling to me.  The visual clutter of different boxes and packages fades away with the colorful-arrows-on-white look of these. Collect them all and your drawers and shelves will look great!  There are over 800 products in the line – spanning more than 40 categories – including household, healthcare, beauty, baby, and personal care.  What a great look for a modern home. I mean, look at the collection of products on the left and on the right in the target banner below.  On the left you have a random collection of logos – some good, many terrible.  They are designed to stand out on the shelf, but often look terrible in the home. With up&up, you get a consistent, clean look. It’s fun to see how many of the common things you buy everyday could benefit from this treatment.

Just to be clear, I’d be perfectly happy in other aspects of my life buying all of my products from one company.  I’d get my clothes from Patagonia, power tools from Bosch, cars from VW, and – of course – dinnerware from Dansk.  Things can’t really work out that way in practicality, but the idea that you have a collection of items all envisioned by the same mind – or at least brand – is a compelling one.

The last of the trilogy of awesomeness for up&up is the high quality and low prices. I can’t pass up a bargain but hate poor quality. Besides the look, the banner above emphasizes you could save up to $27 with that shopping basket.  I don’t know if all of their products are the quality equivalent of the brand name, but the ones I have used are quite good and they have not let me down in either general quality or product design (where it matters, like for a toothbrush).  They also match the “premium” level of brand name products. Their paper towels match the quality of the better brands, not the cheap thin ones that fall apart instantly.

No matter how much cheaper they are, I’d buy these products anyways.  They are easy on the eyes, and you don’t feel like you are buying into the American consumer myth of brand – when generic is just as good or better. It feels more pure, more consistent, and focuses more on what the products are, not what their brand represents.

Generic product design come a long way.  I remember when generic products came out in the 70s and store shelves were full of plan labels “beer”, “peas”, “rice”.  I thought they were cool back then but they felt cheap – and they were indeed low quality.  I didn’t know why I liked them (being a kid), but looking back I think the simplicity and consistency of the package appealed to me.  The movie “Repo Man” painted a bleak future of generic products, but it seems that up&up has turned that around.

Now we’re at a point where many of the products that everyone uses everyday are commodities, all the same, and only differentiated by marketing. In cases where the “user experience” is vastly different between products (like cell phones or cameras or shoes) I say by all means choose the best of the best even if you have to pay a little more.  But when Advil is the same as generic ibuprofen, it’s time to simplify and decide what is really important, and see how these things fit into your life.

My collection started in the mid-to-late 90s when I was living in New York City, making very little, and getting interested in mid-century design.  There were a ton of cool stores in NYC and flea markets every weekend and I was able to get quite a collection going.  eBay was gaining steam, and Austin Powers coming out made the martini totally shagadelic again.  I got a few Eames chairs, a small bar with retro fish on it, and a bunch of cocktail shakers.

Since the shakers have been in a box for a few years, and my Dansk collection is taking up my current storage, it’s time to sell most of them off on eBay.

See the cocktail shakers on eBay here >

Don’t worry, I’m keeping a few for myself in case I get thirsty…

Here’s a few photos.

Pantone is famous for defining colors for designers and anyone else who needs colors accurately defined.  They have a pretty cool line of accessories, and now they have pepper mills.  Quite cool, and a great gift for your designer friends.

You can get them on Amazon. Pantone Pepper Mill

That’s why I was so excited when I discovered the JanSport Heritage series of packs.  They are reissues of the very earliest packs the company made – way before my time but very cool.

You can find some of them on Amazon.  Here’s an orange one.  And here’s the Japanese flag one.

Anyone know what retailers are carrying these?

I came into possession of some IKEA Frosta stools that had been used in a contract (work) situation and saved from the garbage heap.  All of these stools had been destroyed in one way or another – usually one of the legs broke, or the screws got stripped out of their holes, making them useless.  They were also totally scratched up, dirty, and had other damage.  It was a perfect opportunity to fix them up, refinish, and overall refurbish them – and maybe make them better than they were before.

Now, the Frosta stool is not a totally original design.  It is a knock-off of Alvar Aalto’s E60 stool, which is still in production by Artek.  I don’t begrudge IKEA for knocking off this stool, they are not only ones to do so.  They are, however, the only ones to do so for the ridiculously low price of $12.99.  In order to do this, they have had to make some serious compromises in construction compared to the original.  While nice stools, they are not made to hold up to the abuses of a workplace. First of all, the tops are much thinner, made of un-edged, and un-laminated plywood.  This makes it harder to screw in the legs and the top much more susceptible to damage than the originals.  The legs on the IKEA piece are bent plywood, only about 3/4″ inches thick.  The Aalto legs are thicker and wider, and they feature a very unique leg construction developed by Aalto in the 30s.  They are made out of of solid wood, which is sawed open at the end to create grooves.  Thin pieces of birch veneer are put in the grooves with glue, enabling the wood to bend, forming a full thickness, 90-degree angle with the help of steam and heat.  Also, since the legs are wider, there is room for three screws for each leg, as opposed to IKEA’s two screws.

So, a little about the messed up stools I found myself with.  In order to make them useful I had to cure a few major issues.  (1) The tops were too messed up to look good, (2) The bottoms & screw holes were somewhat destroyed, and (3) the legs were – while not destroyed – very dirty.

What I ended up doing to solve the first two problems was to buy a nice piece of colorful Wilsonart laminate on eBay and using that as a new pristine seat surface.  Since I was covering up one entire side of the stool, I decided to cover up the wrecked up bottom with the laminate and use the ugly but still somewhat smooth tops as the new bottoms.  This is what I did:

– First, I filled in the old screw holes with wood filler to make the surface flat enough to accept the laminate.
– Then I sanding down everything.  This was very time consuming, but left me with with clean wood to work with.
– It was then time to drill new holes for the legs.  I did so with a drill press and made sure they were off axis from the original holes for as much strength as possible.
– Then I put a honey maple stain to bring out the grain and finished everything (except the “old” bottoms and edges of the seats) with polyurethane finish.
– Next, I used contact cement to attach the laminate to the wood seats.  I followed the directions on the can and kept myself ventilated.
– Since the edges of the seats were already rounded off, I needed to create an even greater radius on the edge of the laminate to blend into the seat edge.  I did this with a round-over router bit, which trimmed and rounded off at the same time.
– A little more sanding and finish on the edges was needed after the routing.
– Then I screwed in the legs with high quality wood screws, and they were done.

They now look better now than when new and I feel good about saving some wood from the landfill.  I had a total of eight ruined stools which provided enough pieces to make six good ones.  They still aren’t nearly as nice as the Artek originals, but they are useful, and they look nice when stacked.