Negativity burst: poetic interrupted with tree man disease

Having a dining table with a section for plants must be nice. Nice like haiku poems. But I find this table design more disturbing than it is nice for one reason: rough trunks/branches of the tree used as table legs remind me of tree-man disease.

Even if I didn't know about the tree-man disease, I would still think that the table is over-designed. Sharing a meal time with plants is a good idea but this design screams artificial green. Those table legs are results of a taste which is very similar to the taste that puts artificial flowers in living room. Artificial flowers are very attractive, clean but very depressing.
I think the problem with this design could be solved if the table could decide what it is. Is it a non-living object or a creepy alien which sadly has tree-man disease?

O Tannenbaum!

Surprisingly, this post is not about glasses; it is the story of a wooden box.

For Marko Paşa gift package, my mission was to find a very simple wooden box... So on internet there were very promising offers but for wholesale. No one wanted to make only 3 boxes of course and they suggested mdf (Medium Density Fiberboard;enlightenment) boxes that wood painters use for non-wholesale. Mdf boxes are good in size, variety however they have this dishonest color and character. They are basically used for painting over, actually now I feel kind of sympathy for mdf since they remind me of goalkeepers waiting for an attack made by them. It would be nice to show a mdf without hiding it with paint but I am off the topic right now, mdf boxes are not alive and although it is sad that they will never be exhibited without painting over, it is a school project and I need actual wood,not the medium density.

In search of a simple wooden box which is not mdf, I went to Çemberlitaş to see a carpenter. I said to the guy there that my uncle suggested this place as it was the case. The owner of the carpenter's shop did not remember my uncle and this caused a discomfort in him I guess. (why am I having this Jane Austen language?!) So he offered me a cup of fine tea with milk while the clocks were showing 5, kidding, but he actually ordered regular tea in incebelli and said the price. I immediately left the place while the clocks were showing 5.05...It was expensive. So I called my mom (I'm 22) and a friend to see what can be done. Mom said come back home and the friend gave his father's number. Coşkun Amca was ready to make the simple wooden box. It was good luck but I wanted to step by to Tahtakale since it was on my way. However sad mdf's were all over the place.A guy suggested Şarkhan. Şarkhan had everything except my simple wooden box. This place was like a center for Derya Baykals and they had overdecorated overcoloured over everything. So on my way back home which was including a second pass from Tahtakale to the port, something super happened. The answer was right in front of my face and it was already on my blog.

This place was called as the gate for time-travel in my previous post about Tahtakale. A carpenter with a very narrow entrance made my wish come true. They had the very simple wooden box which is not mdf and for good price I guess. We shook hands while my warm tears were wetting the narrow entrance of this magical carpenter.

Although the final of the story is that I found the box, what one can infer from the story is countless. (ibretlik bir hikaye)

First, being VACD student is like living in the huge gap between Derya Baykalling and mass production. Simple wooden boxes are available for the ones who can order 100 and for the hobby establishers, mdf's are waiting to be painted over with sailboats. (sorry hobby owners, it was an over-generalisation)

Second, as a Sabanci University student, I learned that Tannenbaum (pinetree) is not only a Christmas Carroll lyric but it is the material of my box. What this means, we live in such a theoretic and spurious environment in campus that Tahtakale again showed the realities of needs and production. As a design student I decided to have more teas with carpenters in incebelli rather than only admiring scandinavian behance parades.

typographic glasses

I think designers like accessories very much. I see an increasing number in retro-glasses, cool and simple watches, beautiful leather bags and such things around me. I even have a cousin who is studying arts and wearing glasses without the actual glass. What is the thing that enables us to those little ornaments nowadays more and more? Is it our need for solidity in a very digital field? I call them ornaments because glasses are used more for decorative purposes than their function or wristwatches are somewhat like table calendars(hello teacher!) for many of us; more for beauty, less for function.

Following products are brilliant for many reasons. They are very elegant, they fill a very obvious gap in design field because typography lovers were out of typographic T-Shirts. (Ok we get it, you love typography) And my cousin may take the glass out of windows, I believe.

And I reveal the real reason why I made this post. Sorry but it was my idea; Marko Pasa logo contains glasses which is made of letters for a Freudian look... (or a Jungian; you'll not be forgotten) My glasses' font is Collaborate Thin. And I will try to make the actual glasses too for company's gift package which is getting more and more suicidal by the end of the break.

http://type.gs/

package design

I didn't understand very much the function of the balancing blocks. Also what is the chart for? It says:

SVBSCRIPTION is a luxury service for men that delivers a thoughtfully curated collection of objects to subscribers’ doorsteps. Based on a new theme each quarter, SVBSCRIPTION packages include items geared towards individuals who have an appreciation for design, culture and quality. For their V3 parcel they explored the notion of leisure, encouraging subscribers to take full advantage of their time off the clock with objects to entertain and inspire. Designed to emphasize states of leisure in both daytime and evening.

Ok, but how do they work? Apart from that, I liked the simplicity of the wooden box, the blue ink stamp logo, the material with geometric pattern and the balancing blocks. They are all very pleasing to eye.

I am also thinking a set of wooden blocks for Marko Paşa gift with the idea of 'we complete the missing wooden blocks/sticks' (eksik tahtaları tamamlarız)

selective perception

I'm just happy that I'm not doing Murat's project in Turkey(moustache land). But he can be happy too, for not living in 1980-90's.

混乱*

My visit to Tahtakale was a surreal experience with huge plush animal toys, illegal tobacco benches, vigorously dancing Santas, real meat smells, some shops which can be dated around 1960's. My eyes got so tired at some point from this over-exposed, exaggerated world with such different, sometimes weird components. You may hear that your heart beats but it was like I was in my heart or I had to eat my heart. (Ok, sorry) After I got used to the situation, my senses got so sharp that afterwards, when I got out of the labyrinthic market, I felt somehow desaturated with less vibrant colors with less action and with less components to see. Now, I may be exaggerating of course but this is the result of Tahtakale, the world of overness. (Tahtakaleye giren bir tahta vermeden çıkamaz, Sorry again!)

It is now quite hard to resolve a such a degree complexity. Think of it in this way, you read the word complexity letter by letter to word make a sense. What if the word complexity is in Chinese? (By the way I'm still looking for a Chinese reader: remember my post on  22th of October; Minor Crises)  Could you resolve the word without knowing the language which is in this case, Chinese?

Tahtakale is a place where the word is not only written in Chinese but also in other languages and perhaps this over composition is for now, over-over too difficult to break into letters;pieces.

I definetely need to make more visits to Tahtakale. I liked the place a lot.

a true name for a shop, reminded me of 'etme bulma dünyası' or 'kurtlar sofrası'

a gateway for timetravelling

sorry for the crappy photos, I took them with iphone because I didn't want to be the tourist-looking guy in this intimate place. 

*confusion in Chinese.

a phase

I don't want to make a comment about the video regarding the typography or style but here are some words for the content:

I felt somewhat relaxed after seeing this, I think most of us, vcd students, consider the taste we have as at least "above the average." I know that many of us are not satisfied with the work we've done, after seeing so many good pieces. A few of us think that it is something temporal, therefore I dedicate this (can I dedicate something even though the work doesn't belong to me?) video to my classmates who have constant insecurity for their work-including myself.