design - page 5

Love Hultén has created a beautiful replica of the original 128k Macintosh made almost entirely out of American walnut. Known for his craftsmanship in building replicas and concepts of gaming consoles among other gadgets, Hultén has taken that love and applied it to one of Apple’s most beloved products to date. He calls it the Golden Apple.

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We know Jony Ive can design computers large and small. So why not the space where the devices are sold?

The world caught a glimpse of a new Ive-designed Apple Store in Brussels this week and the common theme seems to be: wood.

Since your Apple Watch must be tethered to your iPhone, they might as well match.

So Swiss designer Samuel Zeller has used his personal photography to make wallpaper to match both watch and phone, and it is available Wednesday with the launch of Apple Watch OS 2.

Imagine pointing your lens at something and the camera not letting you take the picture because what you are looking at has been photographed too many times.

Copenhagen designer and artist Phillipp Schmitt has developed the Camera Restricta, a device that first tracks its own location and searches online for photos that have been geotagged for the area within the camera’s range.

If you’re trying to attract viewers, readers, or users, you’d better present a user experience that looks and feels great. We’ve found a bundle of tools and resources that can bring you closer to the user experience you want, for whatever you’re willing to pay. From graphics and textures to image masking software and website templates, give your projects an upgrade with this pay-what-you-want bundle at Cult of Mac Deals.  

Jang Woo-Seok loves coffee and kisses. But it’s only coffee he gets on a daily basis – that is until he designed a cup lid that provides both.

The designer from South Korea has taken the common coffee cup lid and gave it puckering lips for B2B, a chain of coffee shops in his home country.

Apple’s Marc Newson is one of the best designers in the industry. His plane-inspired Lockheed Lounge chair was reflective, smooth and looked incredibly uncomfortable. And we’re still enjoying the look and feel of our Apple Watches, even if the other night a drunk girl at a bar made fun of me for wearing mine in public. And that was hurtful.

But Newson isn’t just about shiny devices and even shinier chairs. He’s recently teamed up with luxury accessory designer Montblanc to create the Montblanc M, a classic fountain pen that looks like it came from the future.

It’s an open secret that Apple is poised to take on the auto industry with its rumored electric car project, and according to Apple design guru Marc Newson, the automotive industry is stalled.

In a new interview, the Apple designer touches on a number of topics, ranging from his love of fountain pens to his current design pet peeve: boring cars.

Apple updated its Apple Store app for iPhone and iPad today to include support for something it probably should have supported a long time ago: gift cards. If you have an Apple Store gift card – or multiple gift cards – you can now successfully apply them to an order within the app.

The brand-new beta of iOS 9 brings an entirely new set of wallpapers, some welcome improvements to Apple Music and more new treasures. These are some of the most exciting changes yet to Apple’s upcoming mobile operating system (the previous beta brought back Home Sharing and delivered lots of tiny design tweaks).

Let’s run through all the changes in iOS 9 beta 5, which was made available to developers today.

We aren’t going to find out what the next iPhone looks like until Apple shows us (probably in September), but that isn’t stopping designers from dreaming up some concepts.

Here’s a pretty bold one that imagines the next Apple smartphone as a mix between a Samsung Galaxy Edge and a Club Cracker. You can check it out in the video below.

iOS 9 beta 4 is out for developers two weeks after beta 3’s release as expected. It’s time for the usual roundup of new goodies in the latest beta and beta 4 doesn’t shy away from the tradition. It’s not nearly as big of a release as last time with Apple Music and Apple News both making their debut, but beta 4 still brings some nice improvements and tweaked features. Let’s get right into it.

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Opening a new Apple product for the first time is pretty close to a holy experience. Part of that is because Apple spends so much time perfecting product packaging so it’s simple, elegant and secure without compromising on intuitiveness.

However, it’s a mistake to think Apple is the only company that pours thought and care into something as basic as a box. In light of the recent rumor that Apple will be working with third-party accessory makers to co-design packaging for their products in Apple retail stores, it’s clear many other companies care as well. It’s about being eye-catching without straying from uniformity, it’s about being simple yet still adorned.

With this spirit in mind, take a look at some of the other electronic companies out there getting extremely creative with their product packaging. The goal for these seems to be making the boxes as gorgeous as the products themselves – and they succeed.

Apple seeded iOS 9 beta 2 to developers today and while there aren’t any groundbreaking new features or drastic improvements, the company did manage to add a bunch of little changes and tweaks across the OS.

Most of the improvements are small design changes, but there are a couple really useful additions too, like adding Handoff to the app switcher, search improvements are more.

Take a look at everything that’s new in iOS 9 beta 2:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Apple 52 patents today, including a notable patent for a new hearing aid technology that would make the iPhone an even better device for the hearing impaired.

Samsung is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to cut more money off the $930 million Apple won in a patent lawsuit. The company is arguing that the appeals court’s earlier ruling is still unfair, even after successfully convincing the panel to chop off $382 million already.

Most creative and designer types travel around with two things perpetually tucked under their arms: their portfolios, and their MacBooks. Vienna-based fashion designer Eva Zar decided to consolidate the two: her portfolio is a MacBook, at least in appearance.

With an innovative architectural style that brought elegant living to the masses, real estate developer Joseph Eichler left an indelible mark on California in the 1960s.

His beautifully simple blueprints also had an undeniable impact on Apple’s co-founders — although Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs took very different lessons from his work. Remarkably, Eichler’s design philosophy continues to shape Apple’s products, inside and out, to this day.

“I was very lucky to grow up in an Eichler,” Wozniak told Cult of Mac, referring to his family’s four-bedroom home in Sunnyvale, California. “It greatly influenced my liking of simplicity and open style. I like it whenever I see those attributes in any architecture.”

Braun’s lauded designer, Dieter Rams, has long been cited as an inspiration behind Apple’s classic design. Nearly everything Rams touched, from calculators tape recorders, radios, and even infrared emitters, have inspired Apple’s products, and according to Dieter himself, it’s a huge compliment.

In a recent interview with Fast Company, the prolific designer said if he had to do it all over again, he “would not want to be a designer.” However, if he were forced to take out his sketchpad and design a computer, it’d probably look just like Apple’s.

If you’ve ever walked into a flagship Apple Store unconvinced of the magic of Cupertino’s products, a wondrous curvy, glass staircase might have softened your psyche.

Apple’s retail outlets are almost as well known for award-winning architecture and eye-catching staircases as for the MacBooks, iPads and iPhones on sale. But Apple Stores aren’t the only places to make vertical trips seem like a magical journey.

Designer, artist and feminist Molly McLeod has an iPhone problem. It’s one we probably all share: We spend too much time staring at it. Imagine how much worse it’s going to get when we replace our neurotic iPhone obsession with an Apple Watch.

McLeod created four delightfully playful designs that we could use to remind us (with a healthy dose of irony) to stop staring at our tiny screens for a moment.

“I find myself habitually looking at my phone when I’m commuting or idly waiting for something,” she writes on her website, “so I thought I would make my phone give me this gentle reminder. There are always other interesting things to look at if you look up!”

No Apple fan is oblivious to the huge amount of science, technique, expertise and care that Apple puts into every product. Apple doesn’t design its products the way it does because it has to, but because it is compelled on a profoundly spiritual level to do so.

For the Apple Watch, Apple has taken that care to the next level. And if you want to see just how much artistry, skill, craft and passion has gone into creating the latest revolutionary Apple product, there’s no better way to spend the weekend than reading about the behind-the-scenes manufacturing process of the Apple Watch.

When you’ve designed some of the most successful consumer electronics in modern history, where else can you look but up?

One of the many interesting tidbits in The New Yorker’s 17,000-word profile of Jony Ive surrounds his fascination with the Apollo space program and, yes, designing spacesuits. It doesn’t sound like the spacesuit itself was what inspired Apple’s top designer as much as the process that went into it.

Ive mentions he’s been watching the old Discovery channel series Moon Machine about the challenges facing the Apollo program. NASA designers had no idea what goals they even needed to meet for the suit, but built up to the final design with invention after invention until they got it right.

An anecdote from The New Yorker’s time in Ive’s hallowed design studio (emphasis added):