Collecting News Briefs

Coolest vintage phones and other "coolest" topics

coolest vintage phones:

"So we’ve trawled ebay for the coolest examples of retro phones we can find."

Somewhat related articles

Retro Advertising from Belgium + More Belgian stories

BELGIAN RETRO ADVERTISING

Star Wars collectibles - Gallery of British Star Wars print advertisements + Female storm troopers?

Gallery of British Print Advertisements:

"Collected in this gallery are numerous print advertisements for British Star Wars products"

Related articles

Furniture design | Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design + more design "truisms"

Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design:

"As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design."

Related articles

Review of architectural construction toys - building blocks + Mies V D Rohe Lego blocks

architectural construction toys:

"Over the last 150 years or so there have been many types of kit, in many materials and styles, all designed to allow their lucky owners to create castles, houses, churches, railway stations, offices, factories or whatever they could imagine."

Bakelite and Plastic Museum + more Bakelite stories and resources

Bakelite and Plastic Museum

Testing for bakelite (by Lottie van Sloten)

If you are not sure your item is made of bakelite, there are ways to find out. You may find a marking on it, that tells you the item is made of bakelite. You can find a marking like ‘Philite’, ‘Futurit’ and more names that end with ‘it’ or ‘ite’. If you can’t find any markings, you can do one of the following tests.

1. The Rub Test.
This test relies a great deal on the sense of smell. Rub the surface of the object in question with a very clean and dry finger. Rub until you get a friction and feel heat. Then smell the area you rubbed immediately. Bakelite has a chemical smell like formaldehyde and is very sharp.

Industrial #Design: 12 Classic Raymond Loewy Designs (via @daveg)

12 Classic Raymond Loewy Designs

From Art Deco to Mid-Century modern, the US once ruled the world. There is no better example of a quintessentially American product designer than Raymond Loewy.

Collecting sounds for Star Wars - Interview with producer Gary Kurtz + More Star Wars stories

Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz: 'People wanted to live onscreen' | Film | guardian.co.uk:

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)

"While George was still working on the screenplay for the first film, we decided that sound was going to be an important part of Star Wars. So I went down to the USC cinema department, where George and I went to film school, and asked the head of sound if he had any finishing students who were particularly creative.

He gave me Ben Burtt, who became our sound designer. Ben worked for over a year collecting noises from all kinds of unusual sources, and we'd meet to listen and chat about them. By the time we finished shooting he had an enormous collection of sounds, which we used for everything from R2-D2's bleeps to the laser effect created when the space ships fire at each other."