Shush! Iron Man was a way better film than we ever expected, good enough in fact to be added to the rather selective DVD collection. Nay sayers be banished.

Perhaps though the coolest aspect to the film was the motion graphics at the end. Designed by a chap by the name of Danny Yount, they are really quite superb. Lucky for you, you can see them [here] if you have not already. Nice to see them not lost to the ‘back of a film’ forever.

We all know, yes we ALL know, that Japanese Magna and Anime has been infested with walking machines, ‘mecha’, for decades. One has had to ponder the reality, or even practicality, of these ideas over more conventional and much cheaper tracked and wheeled options that exist today, no mater how cool they look. But in a case where fact follows fiction, check this out:

“Red and Jonny are 2 Married Artists who live happily ever after in Caledonia, Ontario Canada.

We were married September 16th 2006.
and it was awesome!!!

While on our Honeymoon, we bought our first Stormtrooper Helmet. and we’ve been taking it with us ever since.
So in a way… these Young Stormtroopers in Love photo’s are really a chronicle of our marriage.”

[Fantastically strange, wonderful and funny]

‘Culture x Design x Style’

We pull inspiration from all over the shop. It drives us as designers, to be creative, to keep us ticking. The web is so full of blogs and sites that are great, it’s hard to think where to start. But at the top left of our browsers, we have a folder called ‘Daily Roamings’, and that’s where the really special sites we find go. Why? Because they are sites that we decide are worth looking at every time we fire up in the mornings because they usually have something that gives us that extra spark for the day.

‘Hell For Leather’ is one such site. No, nothing to do with S&M, but everything to do with stuff that goes fast, particularly stuff on two wheels. We love it, enough to actually tell you about it.

[Go check it out]

This is one of these things that we found quite some time ago and then it vanished… or we lost track of it. Well, it’s cropped up again.

Aviary is, or seems to be, the web app solution to Adobe. It looks interesting and indeed very capable and considering the costs involved in keeping up with Adobe software, it does indeed have a lure. How good is it compared to the big A? Don’t now yet, but one would think that if you are going to do something like this, you’d do it really right.

We’re keeping an eye one Aviary, for all the right reasons.

Welcome to Lab-Gear 2008. It took a little longer to get back online this as there was some significant work behind the scenes to get the new cart system running. We think the wait was worth it though, our friends at CWS have done a brilliant job providing what is the fastest and friendliest cart system we have ever used.

The relaunch also signifies the return of Lab-Gear back to Australian shores. Scott of Lab-Gear UK, who’s been running things for the past few years, is still on board as the man and contact point for the UK and EU, but the main distribution point will once again be in Australia. Doing this allows us to produce new designs and restock faster than if we had to ship it over to the UK and distribute from Manchester, as well as being more flexible in the way we run things; and that to us is very important.

Over the next 3-4 months we will be working on a new and comprehensive line of kit, as well as continuing to offer GTO kit, as it comes, to our mailing list subscribers.

We at Lab-Gear are all excited about what this year has in store, we hope that our loyal customers out there will be too.

Cheers,

The Lab-Gear crew.

If you missed it last year, Refill 7 has a wonderful set of images from all decks from it’s exhibition at the MTV Gallery in Sydney on Flickr now.

And what was Refill 7? Refill magazine, asked a select group of artists around the world to design art for 50 skate decks. The art was then laser etched into the decks to produce beautiful, fine and often intricate pieces.

[check the Flickr set here]

Nuts!

…. yes, this is serious.

[via all sorts of places but the source is here]

“Charles F. Brannock only invented one thing in his life, and this was it. The son of a Syracuse, New York, shoe magnate, Brannock became interested in improving the primitive wooden measuring sticks that he saw around his father’s store. He patented his first prototype in 1926, based on models he had made from Erector Set parts. As the Park-Brannock Shoe Store became legendary for fitting feet with absolute accuracy, the demand for the device grew, and in 1927 Brannock opened a factory to mass produce it. The Brannock Device Co., Inc., is still in business today. Refreshingly, it still only makes this one thing. They have sold over a million, a remarkable number when one considers that each of them lasts up to 15 years, when the numbers wear off.”

[Read more of this interesting article by Michael Bierut at Design observer]

At long last, a tablet notebook Mac…. but not from Mac!

Axiotron takes a Mac Duocore Macbook and slaps it with touchscreen and new case to end up with a ‘Axiotron Modbook’.

Yes, we think it’s too cool for school and def. want one.

[see the love]