I gave in the day after xmas and finally went over to the Red Monkey store/workshop in West Hollywood, played with all their beautiful leather goods, and ordered one of their camera straps (i wrote about them before and featured them in the photography gift guide!)… what i didn’t know was how sweet the packaging was, with the strap in bubble pack, with sticker and warranty, in a black matte plastic chinese take out container with the logo pressed into it! Also the store itself is pretty sweet as well, if you’re anxious, jump ahead to the store pics here, with guitars hanging from the walls, chandeliers, mirrors, motorcycles and more. The quality of their workmanship is really high, and their service and really fast turnaround for custom jobs was quite impressive (they got this one ready for me in half the expected time)… Anyhow, browse the many pics below!

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NOTCOT Note: Here’s another article from Anna Corpron of Sub-Studio!

I love Heiko’s illustrations. To me, his work is about contrasts - black and white with a few dabs of CMYK, seemingly innocent scenes with slightly menacing undertones. Sometimes it’s exactly the opposite - a monster or a volcano emanating hearts. The same graphic symbols appear in Heiko’s work over and over again - pandas, hearts, volcanoes, eel-like skeletons, whistled notes, birds, usually reinterpreted per illustration (eel waves, Medusa-locks, eel peacock feathers). And the bonus? Heiko’s work is very affordable, with prints ranging from $15-$35 (via Thumbtack Press), $1 postcards, and buttons for $3.

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Negativity Refuse Bags would have been the *perfect* New Years gifts! Although merely a Positive* Branding/Campaign Concept… still would be a pretty fun gift, particularly for placing all that baggage emotional and otherwise into before burning at a bonfire? The bag states “Here at Positive, we believe that a physical action can reflect your emotional state. We encourage you to dispose of your pessimism and mental demons in a physical manifestation, to help purge your mind. So throw away that photo of the ex, or that poor performance report, and forget about it.”

Instructions for use:
Place items within bag
Seal
Dispose of bag in nearest trash receptacle
Close Eyes
Take a deep breath
Think Positive thoughts.

IMPORTANT: DO NOT RE-OPEN ONCE SEALED. HIGH RISK OF EMOTIONAL RELAPSE. Contains items of personal significance.

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Wow. Yay for emails with new products that blow my mind as i wake up. Just im-ed these images over to Shade Elaine (aka Linhchi our NotCouture/scissor loving editor) and the response is a definite “OMG I WANT IT”. Gogo of Toy-Me just gave me a sneak peek at one of the latest pieces from their upcoming collection, and knowing our thing for scissors (remember our sticker collection?)… is taunting us with this incredible silver scissor cuff bracelet, that can be worn two ways! Incredible that it actually opens, now the real question is: can it actually cut? I think we need two each, one for each wrist! More close ups below! And the full collections will be presented at Pitti Uomo next week.

Here’s the teaser: “Paris designer Thomas Jaillot together with Marco De Michelis will introduce a Silver Scissor that wraps around your wrist and mixes with paper art transformations into silver, Origami earings and a Paper Windmill charm and earing.”

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Click away on the 100 tiny pics to see more! So as you’ve seen from the last two posts, i’m clearly playing with the best New Year’s present ever ~ a new chunk of code to play with that Dan gave me so i can make some crazy automated roundups (versus the ones where we handpick some of our favorites) ~ and this is visualized data even we have never seen before now! ~ for the sake of transparency ~ i haven’t quite figured out how to find the perfect measurement of “popularity” ~ someday it will become some finely tuned algorithm balancing click throughs, votes, reports, time its been up on the site, etc? But for now, these are my test creations ~ and this one is 100 of the most popular posts of NOTCOT.org for 2007!

Also on exciting new features to look forward to in 2008, we’re hoping to find some better ways to let you make use of the “votes/nice/delicious” buttons across the sites… would you be interested if we let you save the ones you liked so its easier to filter the now thousands and thousands of posts? sort them? group them? make your own little collections? We’ve been bouncing lots of ideas around, and now that dan is working with me full time, we’re really hoping to have some fun in the design/development dept for 2008! Happy New Year, and thank you so so sooooo much for supporting the sites!

p.s. b/c i couldn’t help myself below is a super crazy tiny top 1200 ever on .org…

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Click any of the 100 tiny images to find out more! Even though NotCouture has been up for only a few months ~ i can’t believe we only launched it back in aug! As you can see, as a collective, all of us NotCouture readers sure do seem to love our coats, shoes, and bags…

Click any of the 100 tiny images to find out more! In light of 2008 already being upon us, and the first year of TasteSpotting now behind us ~ dan wrote up a new toy for me to create some new roundups playing with popularity of posts! So what were some of the most popular delicious links of 2007? Explore above to find out! Happy 2008!

Q-BA-MAZE - you may have noticed this new designer twist on the old school 3d wooden marble mazes on the gift guide. Well i played with it a bit before then, but only had enough free time on my hands tonight to build more silliness with it and take a few quick pics… I must say there is something calmingly mesmerizing about playing with all the ball bearings ~ and the quality of the pieces are far nicer than i expected just looking at images ~ my only complaint would be that sometimes they dont hold together as well as i’d hope, and in building my silly nearly 5ft tall twisty single helix/staircase tower some of the core center pieces weren’t clicking together and it came tumbling down once… Also, some of the best packaging ever, i love that they managed to put the packaging together so that you can actually flip the box over to reset the balls to roll down the maze in the box! It’s fully functional to play with before it even gets opened! Anyhow, take a look at the huge images below, and to find out more, go watch the videos at Q-BA-MAZE!

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Will Ashford’s Recycled Words do just that… literally. In an obsessive compulsive pattern recognition, pencil doodling, word in words spotting, ‘art’ loving way, he brings out what was already there but not even seen from your every day book pages, and it blows my mind. I love it when i wake up to emails like the one from Ryan with images of Will’s work where i can’t help just sitting here and staring at image after image for a while… and as Ryan said “It’s like he’s made the old study technique of highlighting into an advanced art form… or something.” I concur. Imagine if we reverse highlighted our books to only show the most critical of information! I guess at that point it would look more like art, and as far as info goes you might as well just carry the cliffnotes around? But this would be an incredible daily exercise, the reverse journal basically ~ granted you picked the right book? Anyhow for those of you squinting to read, in that first image the yellow says LOOK FOR the orange says ART the red says AND the purple says IT the teal says WILL APPEAR and the binoculars say THE END. But really, just click through to see more below! My other favorites are there as well!

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So we’ve been through quite a few reusable shopping bags here on NOTCOT, and now when i find new unique ones, i just can’t seem to help myself. Latest interesting simplistic luxury variations come from Porter that was featured on HighSnobiety. Their replacement for the standard plastic bag-The Porter x Club King Shopping Bag in nylon (and it seems to have nylon lining layer as well, looks much like a baggu with flaps to secure things) and there is The Porter Grocery Tote replacing your paper bags, only this one is decked out in leather and cotton! And its as brown as your paper, but with a sky blue interior. Honestly i can’t believe this is the 14th reusable shopping bag post… thanks dan implementing tagging and forcing me to start tagging things i can actually know that now… although of the nearly 2000 notcot.com posts, i’ve only tagged everything from 2007 so far, so 2 years to go when i have free time!

I was just checking out Andy’s site and came across this beautiful silhouette animation all about the a fountain of youth in a bottle and the man who goes through the ages keeping it to himself… only to teach the lesson of “how loving a gift isn’t complete until its shared” as Cory Godbey intended with this piece - Le Cadeau du Temps, view the animation below! And read more at Zune, where they even have wallpapers for computers as well as zunes, icons, etc for your downloading pleasure.

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On upcoming things to look forward to at CES ~ Liquid Image ~ the ultimate underwater third eye cam? A new level of strap-on waterproof wearable tech? But this really would be pretty fun for everything from diving to playing in the pool, bathtub, hot tub, fish tank? And the images aren’t bad with the camera coming in a 3 and 5 megapixel option for pictures and videos! See examples below!

Another option? How about they have strap on bluetooth camera/headset in my mask/regulator? and then my phone can just come with in a drysack? With voice activated “email image to…”? And while we’re at it might as well add a heads up display in the mask? and google maps with gps and instead of traffic it could have current tracking? with a dot for where i am and where my boat is? Ok ok, so maybe getting a bit out of control here, since my favorite part of scuba diving was always that serene relatively tech/internet free peacefulness of the vast unknown under the surface.

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Sometimes the simplest of things combined with some patience render the most beautiful results… and in the case of Daniel Eatok’s Pantone Pen Prints ~ 73 results… and i wish i knew about these back in 2006 ~ because they are not only beautiful but incredibly cheap as well! The bottom layer being 1₤ and working its way up to the top laying being 73₤. Basically, he balanced a set of 288 Pantone Pens on their nibs and let the paper soak it all in over the course of a month. More images below, i can’t stop staring at them, and am dying to run out and set up my own to try! Found this over at Bobby Sattler’s Whole lot of BS.

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It’s been a spam-filled holiday season, why is it that spammers are attacking me with prospects of great fakes to order (who knew even spammers have boxing day sales?) and ways to enlarge and satisfy? But while cleaning through the multitude of flagged emails i’m far behind on, there was some REAL spam. The meaty kind… some fabulously ambitious TOASTVERTISING for the new Book Of Spam… from the guys who brought you the human flip book (remember those hundreds of tshirts that got printed for the animated advert? It was on .org as #6369), but now they toasted an animation frame by frame and by hand into 220 pieces of toast… thats more than there are pages in the Book Of Spam. See some screenshots as well as the advert itself AND the making of! (both are equally awesome and worth checking out for some toasty inspiration)

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Click the images to find out more! NOTCOT.org roundup time! Just some goodies i liked that have shown up recently ~ so click and browse away… there are only 4 more days of 007 left!