Spotted on Christoph Niemann’s Instagram #AbstractSunday: Beach ON/Beach OFF, a strangely inspired sand creation. It echoes our psyche: it’s time for Beach ON and to get a small hunk of summer and rest. We’ll be back just after Labor Day. In the meantime, you’ll find more inspired sand as art material here and here and here and 4,000 illuminating paths…
Read MoreOne of the most delightful Instagrams we know of is Abstract Sunday, an ongoing array of illustrator, author, artist Christoph Niemann‘s stunningly imaginative work. Our favorite theme is his re-envisioning of the most ordinary everyday object — a banana, scissors, a twig —into something totally unexpected, charming, and illuminating, like his wondrous Bouquet of Abandoned Ideas,…
Read MoreWhen the wise, inventive, not-terribly-technological Christoph Niemann tried to create an app, it became pretty “interesting. He documented the process in the New Yorker recently and in doing so, a wonderful distillation of the creative process and struggle: I explored countless (but crucial) dead ends, and it all came down to the most important struggle…
Read MoreOn the Selby’s latest photo story, we fell in love with the vivid color tiled bathrooms at illustrator Christoph Niemann (famous for imaginative his New York Times’ blog) and art historian Lisa Zeitz’s home in Berlin. They make what would be rather ordinary bathrooms dazzling. It takes quite an eye for color to put together tiles in…
Read More….One of Christoph Niemann’s oddly illuminating maps, from his Abstract City blog in the N.Y.Times.
Read MoreWhile we were researching recent pieces about the great Christoph Niemann recently, we came across “I Confess”, his visual confession of all the things he is (or thinks he is), and that WE TOTALLY RELATE TO. It is a great reminder that you can be Out of Style, Out of Touch, Use the Wrong Screws,…
Read MoreDuring a visit to Christoph Niemann’s website recently, we found ourselves smitten with the images of his workspace. They were full of decidedly straight-forward, practical ideas with a sort of deconstructed charm: back-to-back work tables on simple pipe frames, articulating task lights, flat files that serve as additional work surfaces. Niemann wrote us that the…
Read MoreA revelation from last weekend’s New York Times’ Magazine: the great Christophe Niemann doodle made while he was ‘on hold’ forever, waiting for a person to pick up, listening to Clair de Lune. Click to listen while you follow the amazing path Niemann wandered and the many discoveries he made… (Our strategy for being “on…
Read MoreWhen we stumbled on this image by the great Christoph Niemann at #abstractsunday, we thought: OMG, look at that fabulous doorway. What a vision! How can we get ourselves to imagine more expansively? And that got us thinking about the creative vision and where ideas come from.
Read MoreWe’re seeing apples everywhere and FEELING the yearly hunger for warm apple desserts…so we pulled out our most potent recipes…
Read MoreDuring our recent working vacation, we tested out a strategy that yielded the secret to navigating a mountain of work without stress:
Read MoreSo much of what I see on the web are strategies for planning and controlling your life, it was a huge relief to read Kottke’s recent piece about how it can be better NOT to have goals.
Read MoreAs we scroll through design sites, we periodically spot some new gadget for keeping ugly computer wires in check: reels that wind them up, dongles that collect them behind your desk… Perhaps the BEST improvisation we’ve seen is in Christoph Niemann’s workspace. The inspired illustrator/artist/author disguised an ugly black cable by placing a black and white image…
Read MoreIn the wee hours of Monday morning, our server went down, causing the morning’s post to go undelivered and Improvised Life to be offline for most of the day. This was the worst of a number of outages that occurred during the past month. Although it wasn’t our fault (it was a DDoS attack designed to…
Read MoreSince we’re always inventing things in our heads, planning out prototypes, sometimes even making them (without perfect success), German photographer Patrick Strattner‘s prototypes of absurd inventions made us smile. We love his fantasies about ways to make everyday life easier and a bit more enjoyable. There is something curiosly heartening about his hovering grocery shopping assistant with leather hand…
Read MoreDig this picture of the original apple computer, now known as the apple-1, designed and hand-built in 1976 by Steve Wozniak in Steve Job‘s garage. It’s one of a number of “primitive” early computers that Christie’s will auction in ‘First Bytes: Iconic Technology From the Twentieth Century’. It represents the very first step in Apple’s quite amazing history of…
Read MoreSpeak of the devil! Christoph Niemann created this brilliant cover for the new New Yorker’s Innovator’s Issue. At the New Yorker blog, Niemann has again illustrated his process , which AGAIN involves nixxing an idea, only to have it come back at him in a completely unexpected way. We GET and love that the brilliant…
Read MoreThis week’s New Yorker, with heart-breaking cover by Christoph Niemann also has illuminating (and heartbreaking) coverage about Japan.
Read MoreIn this animated clip Christophe Niemann illustrated from Terry Gross’ last interview with Maurice Sendak a year before he passed away, the author of Where the Wild Things Are, shares some very tender wisdom…
Read MoreOur minimalist self generally thinks classic white toilet paper is just about a perfect design. If you want to make it more graphical, stack it sideways to make a rhythm of its black dot/holes/sides (below) or forge a unique holder, like Alexander Calder‘s…
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