Sometimes you just need to be reminded. The FromKeetra website doesn’t give much information away, but I love the idea of the blanket with “Everything Will Be OK” on it. A great sentiment to awake to in the morning.

View the Everything Will Be OK Blanket.

Stamp your approval on things! Gilles emailed me to tell me about his new venture, Ambassador, which creates stamps and sofa cushions with personalised graphical motifs — although, throughout the english language version of the site, I suspect the word ‘motifs’ has been mispelt as ‘motives’. Either I’m not getting some kind of post-modern play on words, or I simply don’t know the plural of motif, or they’ve got a website with some dodgy spelling going on.

Regardless of the spelling issue, the stamps are very cool. I love the idea of randomly stamping things with my personal seal of approval like somebody of importance and influence.

Get your own stamp at Ambassador Stamps.

More great shelving ideas. OkapiStudio are a multidisciplinary studio with offices in Bucharest and San Francisco who have created, what I think is, a great shelf concept.

When we play in-house with our talent sometimes we come up with amazing things. This is a classic example of research for functionality while trying to use a cost effective solution for spacing issues. Be it used for home or office purposes, the modular office storage equipment is a flexible and smartly designed solution that adapts to space requirements. Built from plastic polymers, it comes in lightweight customizable modules that can be used accordingly to everyone’s needs. The shelf concept provides a fresh and modern approach to similar common wood based products on the market, with it’s perfect shapes that mold around the objects and the possibility for redesign on the fly to match any setting you might have in mind.

See more industrial design by OkapiStudio.

P.S. Oops, almost forgot. Thanks to Aaron for telling me about this one.

A new moving image super-group. Wyld Stallyons create moving image work for the music, broadcast and advertising industries. Made up of such well-known figures as Chris Hewitt (better know as Dstrukt), illustrator Richard May and co-founder of Pixelsurgeon, Jason Arber, Wyld Stallyons have already knocked out some great motion graphics work for the likes of MTV.

Check out the amazing title sequences they created for MTV.

More great stuff from Qubus Design. I’ve mentioned them a few times, but I just love everything that Qubus Design create. It’s the way they blend a traditional object with a modern quirky aesthetic that blows me away.

Take Ornament & Crime by Maxim Velčovský. It’s a kind of traditional bust ornament, decorated with an onion pattern favored by the middle class dinner set, but it sneaks in a kind of social-political agenda by featuring Lenin and the firs Czechoslovakian “working class” president Klement Gotwald. Items are taken out of their normal context and given new life. To be completely honest, the political statement isn’t apparently clear to me, I just think it looks cool, and thats all I care about. Shallow, I know, but if something is cool, everything else is secondary.

See more from Qubus Design.

I’m scared of hairdressers. Seriously. Going to a hairdresser is on par with going to the dentist for me. I think it’s something to do with a midget-hairdresser called Brian cutting my ear during a haircut when I saw younger. Although, maybe if all hairdressing salons were as cool as Pimps And Pinups, I wouldn’t be so freaked out while getting my hair cut.

Pimps And Pinups has its heart in the cutting-edge and fashionable East End of Spitalfields, London. The black-walled space is decorated with 1950’s Hollywood style, dazzling backstage dressing room mirrors, surrounded by lights and ultra luxurious barber chairs shipped in from Japan. The unique appearance has attracted the fashion elite and is rapidly becoming a hot shooting location as well as standing as a fully functional hairdressing salon.

Check out the interior in these photos (photo,photo, photo, photo).

So if you fancy getting your hair cut in style, looks like Pimps And Pinups is the place to go.

Books and Bricks. I’ve been trying to find a place to put my books in my office, but all the shelving systems I’ve seen on the market are either rubbish, or too expensive. Then I stumbled upon Paul Kogelnig’s and Gabriel Heusser’s ‘Brickshelf’ at Pervisioni.

Brickshelf is based on the simplest kind of bookshelf: brick, shelf, brick, shelf, etc…the transformation of the shape of the bricks into the shape of abstracted books makes the bookshelf to become a beautiful and friendly object, without complicating it.
As the “books” are produced by extrusion, the same production run like bricks, they are available in different heights.

It’s a simple idea, that looks great. So all I need now is few planks of wood and some bricks, and I’ve got a piece of modern design for a bookself!

Every man needs a shed. Every man needs a place to store his manly things, and a shed is the usual manly storage place. But if you live in top floor flat, and you don’t have a garden, your chances of having a shed are pretty slim. However, there is a solution. You can get an indoor Shed by Studio Gorm.

See more work by Studio Gorm.

I love good ideas. Switch by Jack Godfrey Wood is definitely a great idea.

The ‘House-off’ Switch is a switch that allows a user to turn off all non-essential electronic items in their home from a central switch. Push the button to turn your house on when you get home; push it again to turn it off when you leave. Aiming to make the ‘green’ way the most convenient way, the ‘House-off’ Switch was part of a larger project to encourage ‘green’ action among the environmentally disinfranchised.

Whenever we leave our home for any length of time, just before we leave, my girlfriend will have a manic filp-out over whether all the electrics are turned off or not. She obsesses over the fact that a single plug left on will burn our house down whilst we’re away. So the Switch would solve that issue, as well as having an energy-saving benefit.

See more work by Jack Godfrey Wood.

Form follows function. Stephen Reed has definitely made the function of his Ceramic Mug dictate its form. Based on engineering heat-sinks, the mug allow the holder to comfortably handle the mug, regardless of the hot temperature of it’s liquid contents, by the use of outer ribs. Not only is it a clever design, it’s also quite beautiful.

See more work by Stephen Reed.