I am already freaked out enough at the thought of hitting a deer with my car, but this…
Via alittlehouseintheclouds via brilliantarrogance via who knows where.

Old Chum is one of my favorite blogs. The photographs are always surprising. I mean, look at these!! What’s even better is that the imagery is compelling enough to engender a curiosity about things for which I knew almost nothing, but now want to know more. Ah, the beauty of the interwebs.

Sometimes I wonder how we get any work done at all. I have been searching sporadically for some early patent drawings of vacuum tubes (something to do with a tattoo for my spouse) and am on high alert for the beauty and elegance of those drawings. And then Flavorwire has the nerve to post a story about Stiknord, the tumblr blog curated by the Kolding School of Design in Denmark. The site celebrates a Northern aesthetic. And they do it really really well. Anyway, one thing led to another and, before I knew it, here I was. This 1958 patent drawing is for the earlier iteration of Lego toys that I grew up with…and loved. Except for when the flat plates got stuck together. Then I hated them. As a footnote, one of my early freelance gigs was to design a full Lego stadium and all its details (right down to the hot dog vendor and the hot dogs) for the Major League Baseball licensing division. And imagine this, it was during a pre-computer era. Eeek.

As an industrial designer, one of those skills in which one should have achieved a certain amount of fluency is the ability to create a three-dimensional object out of a series of two-dimensional shapes…and vice versa. This is something I have yet to master. So, is it any wonder that my attention is fixed on these drawings of disassembled objects? Just from looking at them, I can guess at what their final shapes are. But in order to be sure, I’d have to cut and fold. Of course, from Agence Eureka.

Agence Eureka has such an amazing and extensive collection of ephemera that I could probably post something from their archive every day for the next year and still have plenty to spare. Scrabble anyone?