#HTE

Venezuelan DJ and music producer Arca has collaborated with luxury retailer Ssense and leather company Fleet Ilya to design a $6,450 pair of leather BDSM headphones. Really. The headphones are integrated into a leather cage headpiece with studded details. It features suede-covered ear pads, a built-in remote, and adjustable collar. Unfortunately, they’re not wireless, so you will have to plug your BDSM headphones into a music source.

According to the product page, the headphones are being sold “exclusively as an art object, and is provided as is without any guarantees or warranty.” In other words, if you’re spending this much on an art piece, don’t expect to get any refunds if the leather starts to wear out. Worryingly, the disclaimer…

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#HTE

Venezuelan DJ and music producer Arca has collaborated with luxury retailer Ssense and leather company Fleet Ilya to design a $6,450 pair of leather BDSM headphones. Really. The headphones are integrated into a leather cage headpiece with studded details. It features suede-covered ear pads, a built-in remote, and adjustable collar. Unfortunately, they’re not wireless, so you will have to plug your BDSM headphones into a music source.

According to the product page, the headphones are being sold “exclusively as an art object, and is provided as is without any guarantees or warranty.” In other words, if you’re spending this much on an art piece, don’t expect to get any refunds if the leather starts to wear out. Worryingly, the disclaimer…

Continue reading…

#HTE

Google recently overhauled Gmail with a fresh revamp and new functions. Now the company is following on from that and rolling out an update to how Google Drive will look on the web. There’s no change in the way you use Drive; the redesign just involves color changes and where icons and buttons are placed. Google says it made visual tweaks to Drive to align with its latest Material Design principles, which were already on show in the new Gmail. “We built this new interface to create a responsive and efficient experience for Drive users, and to feel cohesive with other G Suite products,” the company wrote in a blog post.

The changes include small adjustments to where icons are laid out: the settings wheel and help center button are now…

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#HTE

Best Buy has redesigned its iconic logo. It sets the company’s newly updated wordmark free from the giant yellow tag it’s been confined in for the past few decades and reduces the tag to a more subtle logo in the corner instead (via AdAge).

According to Best Buy, the rebranding is “designed to highlight our culture, our expertise and our talented employees,” which seems like a lot to convey with just a slightly taller font and less of a dutch tilt. But who I am to judge the company’s “evolution toward the future”?

A more cynical-minded person might take the stance that Best Buy is finally becoming cognizant of the fact that brick-and-mortar retail is…

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#HTE

Best Buy has redesigned its iconic logo. It sets the company’s newly updated wordmark free from the giant yellow tag it’s been confined in for the past few decades and reduces the tag to a more subtle logo in the corner instead (via AdAge).

According to Best Buy, the rebranding is “designed to highlight our culture, our expertise and our talented employees,” which seems like a lot to convey with just a slightly taller font and less of a dutch tilt. But who I am to judge the company’s “evolution toward the future”?

A more cynical-minded person might take the stance that Best Buy is finally becoming cognizant of the fact that brick-and-mortar retail is…

Continue reading…

#HTE

With Android P, Google is taking an ambitious approach to its user interface design with two new concepts it’s introducing to developers today: “Actions” and “Slices.” Described in detail onstage at the company’s I/O developer conference keynote this morning, Actions and Slices are ways for third-party app features and even visual design to permeate parts of the Android OS, most notably in search and within Google Assistant.

Actions are like shortcuts or recipes, similar to the action terminology Google created for Assistant (or an Alexa Skill created by Amazon), that let a user quickly access a deeper function of an app with the touch of a button or a voice command. Some examples here could be calling a Lyft ride home or reordering…

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#HTE

With Android P, Google is taking an ambitious approach to its user interface design with two new concepts it’s introducing to developers today: “Actions” and “Slices.” Described in detail onstage at the company’s I/O developer conference keynote this morning, Actions and Slices are ways for third-party app features and even visual design to permeate parts of the Android OS, most notably in search and within Google Assistant.

Actions are like shortcuts or recipes, similar to the action terminology Google created for Assistant (or an Alexa Skill created by Amazon), that let a user quickly access a deeper function of an app with the touch of a button or a voice command. Some examples here could be calling a Lyft ride home or reordering…

Continue reading…

#HTE

Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth, the design duo behind the republished MTA, NASA, and EPA standards manuals, are back with a new book: Emoji, a collection of the original 176 emoji characters.

The original emoji were designed by Shigetaka Kurita for Japanese telecommunications company DoCoMo in 1999 to use on pages in Japan. Those small, pixelated 12-by-12 grid images only bear a passing resemblance to today’s far more detailed emoji, but there’s a clear line that can be drawn between Kurita’s early work and the thousands of emoji characters on our phones. Kurita has been involved in the project; Reed and Smyth flew out to Tokyo to interview him for additional context on the original designs, and he’ll also be contributing an introduction…

Continue reading…

#HTE

Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth, the design duo behind the republished MTA, NASA, and EPA standards manuals, are back with a new book: Emoji, a collection of the original 176 emoji characters.

The original emoji were designed by Shigetaka Kurita for Japanese telecommunications company DoCoMo in 1999 to use on pages in Japan. Those small, pixelated 12-by-12 grid images only bear a passing resemblance to today’s far more detailed emoji, but there’s a clear line that can be drawn between Kurita’s early work and the thousands of emoji characters on our phones. Kurita has been involved in the project; Reed and Smyth flew out to Tokyo to interview him for additional context on the original designs, and he’ll also be contributing an introduction…

Continue reading…

#HTE

For as wild as concept cars tend to be, they can also be pretty similar. They all boast beefy specifications, extreme designs, and — these days — lots of the same futuristic features. They tend to fall into three camps: flashy luxury or sports cars with lots of bells and whistles, more utilitarian concepts built to embrace our seemingly inevitable autonomous future, or a mish-mosh of both. That’s what’s refreshing about this wild new one from DS, which is a division of the PSA Group in France. It’s called the DS X E-Tense, and it looks like something straight out of Speed Racer.

That’s mostly because of the odd seat layout and the almost complete absence of an interior, which makes the DS X E-Tense look like a mid-21st-century version…

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