Trendir's Goof Is My Gain: Pressalit Toilet Seat Art Gallery

above: the seats misrepresented on Trendir as actual products

Someone over at Trendir, one of my favorite interior design sites, was asleep at the wheel..or keyboard, when they wrote their post about what they thought were interesting toilet seats and covers from Pressalit. What they actually did was show you the fun 'created' seats designed for the website (and as postcards you can order ) to explain the features of the Pressalit line (for example, green, luxury, sustainable woods, quiet, etc.)

I only know this because once I saw those images, I thought to myself, there's no way those are actual toilet seats and, upon further inspection, I found I was correct.

Pressalit does carry colored and wood seats as well as one heart shaped wooden seat and one special edition soccer ball/football seat. And they can customize seats with a logo or line art for you as well:



But all those fun looking seats shown on Trendir are not Pressalit's actual products. They do make auto-close seats that function smoothly and quietly as well as contoured seats, but frankly, they're nothing to write home about... or in this case, blog about.

The Pressalit line:

Available colors and finishes:


What is of interest, however, is their 2007 project in which they asked 20 different designers to experiment with their core product - the toilet seat. Now, I'd never have found this if I didn't explore their site based on Trendir's goof up. So thanks to them, you can now be privy to this unusual art project.

The 2007 project “Pressalit Art Gallery” resulted in unusual solutions and interpretations of toilet seats in just as many different and untraditional materials.

The result of the designers interpretations were among others a football seat (which they now sell a variant of), a disco seat designed for Madonna, a floating hot air balloon seat and an actual turtle seat.

Here are the images of various toilet seat covers from the project for you:

designer: Tchai Munch
material: glass


designer: Carpenter Borge Aaby
material: wood


Several different designs were created by designer Nis Ollgaard in the project;
Hair used for Punk, a mohawk on the lid. Heart shaped wood seat and cover:


His tribute to Madonna with the 'disco' seat:


And his hand stitched leather, grass and dirt Football seat:


designer: Jefsper Kofoed Thomsen
materials: balloons and colored removable ribbons


designer: Bess Kristoffersen
materials: aluminum


designer: Babro Aaberg
material: ceramics


designer: Bent Vinkler
material: wickerwork and metal


designers: Nis Ollgaaard and Vagn Iversen
material: turtle as lid


About the designers:


A limited edition book of this art project is available:

for the book above e-mail lbt@presalit.com (book price is 40 euros)

website

Factory
Isagervej 30
Dk-8680 Ry

Despite this one error, Trendir is a terrific and informative site.


Now, if it's wild toilets you want to see, check out these colored, chromed and Swarovski studded toilets here!

Design For Swine: Artsy Fun Fashionable Face Masks For Sale

There have been lots of fun 'photoshopped' phony designer protective face masks on the web as a result of the world's fixation on this potential pandemic. But, someone has actually created and is selling some truly fun ones.

Designer/Art Director Irina Blok has designed a fun series of 9 fashionable protective face masks given the present state of swine-flu panic.

You can click on the images to enlarge.

Leopard print, pill-popping and zipper:

Beard, duct tape and piggy:

Oink, skull and lips:


One little factoid: She originally had included a cute 'Domo' mask (shown below) but Domo asked her to remove it suggesting that it was 'damaging their brand'.



She will produce a very limited edition of these in about 4 weeks (according to her site) and they will cost about $10 (plus $3 S&H). E-mail her here to get your name on the list.


Big Bonus: Proceeds will be donated to Children International to help Mexico fight the swine flu epidemic.


Irina Blok's website

What To Do With Old Biz Cards? Creative Self-Promotion At Cards of Change

So, you were laid off. You're certainly not alone. In the advertising industry alone, over 32,656 people have lost their jobs according to BNET's Ad Agency Layoff Counter.

Sure, they all rushed onto linked in, requesting references from friends, co-workers and superiors. They've joined every free online job site, are frequently checking job postings, updating their online portfolios, working all available online networks and frantically googling possible new job options. All of these things are the painful necessity of the newly unemployed.

Is there anything positive about losing your job? Well, Cards Of Change has come up with a fun user generated way to connect the recently unemployed (hopefully to the employed with power to hire). A creative way to self-promote, the site encourages those who've recently lost their jobs to upload old business cards altered to indicate their present status with a positive spin.

I simply had to join in the fun and add my own (shown below). Although it's been over 4 years now, that was my last actual staff job (and the reason I was in Detroit), and since becoming a freelancer, I was able to start this blog amongst other things that have all contributed to a more enjoyable life.



Some are creative, some are hopeful, some are inspirational, some are humorous and some are simply informative. But all are better then using old cards to stabilize a rocky table. Take a look at a few examples:










Adweek describes the venture as "Tom Van Daele, a former creative director at TBWA\Chiat\Day, heads up Unknownlab, an "ideas company" launched by recently laid-off TBWA\C\D employees. One of the lab's projects is Cards of Change, an "upbeat online database" dedicated to collecting business cards and stories of industry folks who have been shown the door. The idea is to take your old business card and scratch out the contact info, replacing it with a new e-mail address along with a story of positive change."

Tom's own card is shown below:


On the site, their 'about' section reads as follows:

There's more talent out on the streets than ever before. Brilliant people looking to reshape their country, build their career and perhaps even grow your business.

Cardsofchange is a place where the glass is always half-full. A destination where all the bad news of the day takes a back seat to stories of individual success.

Our mission is to collect as many business cards and stories of positive change of people who have recently been laid off and connect them with new opportunities from potential employers, business partners and people who make the effort to look on the bright side of life.

Will it do anything other than provide good photo fodder for tweeps and FB users? Maybe not, but I can't think of a much better use for those old business cards.



Check them out, or better yet, if you've got one to share,upload it here.

A Great View. When The Shade is Down. Surface View Blinds.

Surface View is a company that started out creating and selling bespoke (custom) wall murals, but that didn't interest me nearly as much as when they added their digitally printed window shades. With a vast online library of imagery -1000 images- you can choose from several collections and find the perfect match for any mood or style. For any room or architectural genre. Whether you like vintage maps, maritime ephemera, etchings, religious art, portraits, florals, textiles, patterns, classic art and sculpture, pop art, photography, nature, astrology, history, comics, foods, landscapes or citiscapes (just to name a few), they've got it. They will also create custom shades from your own art or photos upon request and at an additional cost, of course.

The collections include the following:


It's great when companies consider the user experience on their site and nothing is more engaging and gratifying that the you-can-see-what-it-will-look-like-instantly feature. As you can tell, I really enjoyed 'playing' with their roomsets which enable you to choose from a series of various rooms and try different any of the available images on the large 'blank' blind. You can do this with their wall murals and prints as well.



For your infotainment, I chose a few examples from some of the collections that I felt were appropriate to that particular sample room, so you could get an idea of the numerous options.

Meeting:



Working:



Eating:


Living:



Sleeping:



Playing:


Entrance:



You can also choose between making the line art image a pattern or a single image in their ephemera category, as well as tint it with a color, like the 2 examples of the beetle shown below:




details:



Surface View also offers many specialist services, go to the site to learn more.

Interesting Facts, Figures, and Tidbits About Mothers And Motherhood

Here are a bunch of interesting statistics about Mothers and Mother's Day for you from the US Census Bureau:

The first Mother’s Day observance was a church service in 1908 requested by Anna Jarvis, of Philadelphia, to honor her deceased mother. Jarvis, at an early age, had heard her mother express hope that a day to commemorate all mothers would be established. Her mother had also expressed the sentiment that there were many days dedicated to men but none to mothers. Two years after her mother’s death, Jarvis and friends began a letter-writing campaign to declare a national Mother’s Day observance to honor mothers. In 1914, Congress passed legislation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

82.5 million
the estimated number of mothers of all ages in the United States. (From unpublished Survey of Income and Program Participation data.)

68%
Percentage of women in Mississippi, ages 15 to 44, who are mothers. This is among the highest rates among states. The national average is 56 percent.

82%
Percentage of women 40 to 44 years old who are mothers. In 1976, 90 percent of women in that age group were mothers.

New Moms

4.0 million
Number of women who have babies each year. Of this number, about 425,000 are teens ages 15 to 19, and more than 100,000 are age 40 or over.

25.1
Average age of women when they give birth for the first time [PDF] — a record high. The average age has risen nearly four years since 1970.

40%
Percentage of births that are the mother’s first [PDF]. Another 32 percent are the second-born; 17 percent, third; and 11 percent, fourth or more.

35,000
Number of births in 2002 [PDF] attended by physicians, midwives or others that do not occur in hospitals.

Remembering Mom

above flowers designed and photographed by Sean Alvarez

23,094
Number of florists nationwide in 2002. The florists’ 119,117 employees will be especially busy preparing, selling and delivering floral arrangements for Mother’s Day.

The flowers bought for mom probably were grown in California or Colombia. Among the 36 surveyed states, California was the leading provider of cut flowers in 2003, accounting for more than two-thirds of the domestic production ($306 million out of $425 million) in those states. Meanwhile, the value of U.S. imports of cut flowers and fresh flower buds in 2004 from Colombia, the leading foreign supplier to the United States, was more than $385 million.

$5 billion
Revenue of greeting-card publishers nationwide in 2002. The 15,859 employees of the 119 greeting-card publishing companies are especially busy creating Mother’s Day greeting cards.

152 million
Number of Mother’s Day cards expected to be given this year in the United States, making Mother’s Day the third-largest card-sending occasion.
(Source: Hallmark research)

1-in-32
The odds of a woman delivering twins. Her odds of having triplets or other multiple births was approximately 1-in-540.


Single Moms

10 million
The number of single mothers living with children under 18 years old, up from 3 million in 1970.

Expectant Mothers

August
The most popular month in which to have a baby, with 359,000 births taking place that month in 2002. July, with 358,000, was just a shade behind.

Tuesday
The most popular day of the week in which to have a baby, with an average of almost 13,000 births taking place on Tuesdays during 2002.

How Many Children

2
Average number of children that women today can expect to have in their lifetime.

3
Average number of children that women in Utah and Alaska can expect to have in their lifetime. These two states top the nation in average number of births per woman.

Only about 10 percent of women today end their childbearing years with four or more children- that compares with 36 percent in 1976.

Working Moms


55%
Among mothers with infant children in 2002, the percentage in the labor force, down from a record 59 percent in 1998. This marks the first significant decline in this rate since the Census Bureau began calculating this measure in 1976. In that year, 31 percent of mothers with infants were in the labor force.

63%
Among college-educated women with infant children, the percentage in the labor force.

Among mothers between ages 15 and 44 who do not have infants, 72 percent are in the labor force.

More than 687,000
Number of child day-care centers across the country in 2002. These include nearly 69,000 centers employing close to 750,000 workers and another 618,000 self-employed persons or other companies without paid employees. Many mothers turn to these centers to help juggle motherhood and career.

About 2 million
Among more than 10 million preschoolers, the number who are cared for in a day-care center during the bulk of their mother’s working hours.

Individual source links for each statement herein may be accessed on the Internet at
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/004109.html>.