National Geographic Recreates The Flying House From ‘Up’

The folks over at National Geographic have doen the unimaginable, or at least, possible in real life. For a new show called How Hard Can It Be? they’ve made a real life, flying house, just like the one in the movie Up.

Yesterday morning, March 5 at dawn, National Geographic Channel and a team of scientists, engineers, and two world-class balloon pilots successfully launched a 16′ X 16′ house 18′ tall with 300 8′ colored weather balloons from a private airfield east of Los Angeles, and set a new world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted. The entire experimental aircraft was more than 10 stories high, reached an altitude of over 10,000 feet, and flew for approximately one hour.

This is so phenomenal, I really can’t believe it. What I want to know is how they safely landed it! Did they shoot the balloons slowly until eventually it landed. I guess the only way to know is to watch the show. You can see a bunch more photos over on My Modern Met.

Bobby

Albert Roqué Puts A Colorful Spin On Bike Branding

Albert Roqué is a Barcelona based designer with a nice looking portfolio of student work. He recently finished school at Elisava and plans to move to London next month. My favorite project of his was this branding exercise for Garcia & Sons, a hotel for urban cyclists. I think he did a great job combining minimal type with super bold colors inspired by the Rainbow Jersey a jersey worn by the reigning world champion in a bicycle racing discipline. Such a great idea for branding a hotel, especially with those that are familiar with cycling. I feel like the insides of the envelopes are particularly nice. I also like his use of Gill Sans Shadowed, it feels very light weight and for some reason feels quite fitting, like the shadow of a bicyclist on the sidewalk.

Bobby

Volkswagen: The Force

This has been floating all over for the past couple days but it was too cute not to post. I think everyone in their life has pretended to be some other character when you were a kid. I know I used to pretend to be Mario, bouncing and jumping off the top of the equipment in the playground. So seeing a kid dressed up as Darth Vader trying to move things with his force powers makes a lot of sense to me.

This ad for Volkswagen definitely connects with me, and that’s what makes it so successful. I feel like it connects to not only people who can identify with the kid dressed up but also as a parent who wants to make their child feel special. Big kudos to the director and the little actor who was able to give a faceless child a ton of emotion and life.

Bobby

Hunter Gatherer Helps The Prius Figure Out Its Plural

Toyota has started a pretty funny ad campaign trying to figure what the plural of the Prius is. Is it Prii? Priuses? Prien? Well, they’ve decided to let the people decide and have made a great video to advertise the campaign. But I give them mega-bonus points for asking Hunter Gatherer to create the stop-motion video for the campaign.

Todd St. John is the guy behind Hunter Gatherer and I’ve been a huge fan of his for I can’t even think of how long and this video reminds me exactly why. He’s taken his signature cut wood blocks to create all the shapes and figures. It was hard putting together the preview images on this post, I wanted to put nearly every frame up there! Todd’s style is so quirky and fun, I know these are kind of generic things to say but when I look at his pieces I can’t help but smile at them.

Found through Jon Setzen

Bobby

My Favorite 2011 Calendars – Atherton Lin & Bike EXIF

I always feel like it’s getting harder and harder to find a good calendar for the new year. I’m usually bombarded by images of cutesy pets or dumb muscle cars or artists who’s work is being abused for a quick buck (M.C. Escher, etc). Thankfully I know some pretty rad people who make some pretty rad calendars that don’t suck. First up is Atherton Lin’s, who some of you might remember. I’ve written about them and their calendars before and they’ve even made a desktop wallpaper for the site. As always their calendar is filled with beautiful watercolored images that are beautiful in their design and are always pleasing to the eye.

On the other end of the spectrum is a new calendar from Bike EXIF, a motorcycle blog that takes bike lust to the next level. I’m not a big motorcycle fan but I love the way that Bike EXIF is presented, with more of an eye toward design.
Chris Hunter, the editor of Bike EXIF, has taken the sometimes awful motorcycle calendar and elevated to a distinguished level. I love the type treatments and the subtle textures as well. Perfect for the moto-bro in your life.

Bobby