It’s always fascinating when creative parallels emerge within unrelated markets.  Vitra, a leading furniture concept store recently unveiled it’s Vegetal chair by suspending several black and white styles in their Meat Packing District windows.  No more than two miles south, Burberry’s signature plaid has taken a similar route, by tossing it’s famous pattern in it’s Soho location window. This youthful touch looks like the work of Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s newish Creative Director.  Merging plaid elegance with organic fast food, Sis. Deli + Café, a chain of restaurants in Helsinki, Finland, has proven that consumption and convenience can be effectively translated without bombarding the customer with incessant messaging.

Tee Today, Gone Tomorrow is the motto for Tee Fury, the web’s latest solution for limited-edition, countdown t-shirts. Every midnight, a shirt goes for sale and once it sells out, or after 24 hours- whichever comes first, the tee is gone and no longer a commodity sold on the site.  This business structure appears to tap the human psyche’s need to win, particularly in the department of sales and exclusivity.  Today’s feature, entitled Plaidinum, by Dann Matthews, was forwarded along by Adam Hahn and is an interesting marriage of texture and film iconography.  For the Star Wars buffs out there, buy yours today, as Tee Today will move along, come May 13th…

I was recently alerted to Stripe Generator while perusing facebook updates this morning.  Noah Brier, a friend and fellow blogger, posted this stripe-making website to his list of running favorites.  Though I immediately laughed at the idea of designers needing assistance in pairing lines together, my dismissal was quickly silenced by the seemless usability of the toolset.  Spacing, color, background and direction can all be manipulated, similar to iPhoto’s editing capabilities.  Once I played around a bit and made a few patterns, I clicked through to Tartan Maker, an equally impressive site for designers not privy to Pointcarré.

Snow gear has become so fashion forward that a trip to the slopes can be just as interesting for the people-watching as it is for the thrill-seeking.  Over the past few years, companies such as Burton and 686 have tapped young talent to bring graphic masterpieces to winter outerwear.  While fashion brands typically refer to global trends for inspiration, both of these companies have succeeded at risk-taking within trend categories for several seasons now- one of the many traits they share with their customer base.  “It’s fun to wear crazier colors when you’re on the slopes- you can border on obnoxious and get away with it,” says Kim Devall, a snowboarder from New York.  The above jackets by Burton and 686 exemplify a growing trend that fuses neons with photography.  Below are a few [...]