In this category I’m telling you something about products I like. In this posts I want to introduce you to Kikkerland.
Kikkerland makes fun colourful gadgets and home accessories. I like Kikkerland because their gadgets look great but are also useful. Lots of gadgets from other makers are fun but nothing more than that. Kikkerland creates cool things that actually come to use like a cushions that look like logs , a pencil sharper that looks like a vintage camera, a solar powered radio, kaleidoscope coasters and a funny family of wind up toys.

Awika

Blok Power Strip

Solar powered radio

Kaleido coasters

Log head rest

USB cabels

Camera pencil sharpener

Tea for two

Flip clock

One of the artists that inspire me the most is graphic designer and photographer Storm Thorgerson. Storm makes images for album covers in a surrealistic way. What I like about his style is that the ideas are very original and you have to look at a photo a little bit longer too see all the small references and the idea behind it. In the introduction of the book “Taken by Storm” Storm says “We like to think of ourselves as translators. The main objective is to translate an audio event, the music, into a visual event, the cover design. Our hope is to represent visually the music in its many diverse aspects and as faithfully as we can, although not always in a very straightforward manner. We invariably listen to the music in question, read and re-read the lyrics and talk in depth to the musicians about their work”.

In my own music photography I also this philosophy. A lot of bands are very happy when they finally release their first album. They put a lot of time, effort and money in the process of getting good quality recordings but a lot of them forget that the album also has a cover that has to be of good quality as well. A lot of bands just use a photo of themselves (mostly an old one that is of low quality) or a design that’s similar to the design of another band they like. But especially nowadays , when the music industry is changing a lot, not just the music but also the cover of the album should stand out to become successful as a band. I like to work together with a band to create more than just another generic band photo and dive deeper into the music to get an original image that fits the band.

In his work Storm Thorgerson uses all kinds of objects to translate his ideas and what I most like about that is that he tries to do as much as possible for real. “Doing it for real is our avowed philosophy – rather the computer in the head than the one on the desk” Storm says. So he doesn’t use photoshop to put a giant pig between four towers, he really lets somebody make a giant pig and put it between the towers. (funny detail: the wind was too strong and the pig broke lose and they even had to interrupt the the plain flights into Heathrow for a while until the pig was caught).

I really like that philosophy because it is the same thing I like to achieve in my photography. I also combine music and photography and also try to find an original idea and translate that in a somewhat surreal setting. The only thing I unfortunately don’t have already is a budget to create objects myself. Sometimes I have this wonderful idea in my head but I don’t have the means or money to translate it into a photo. So I have to think in more affordable and simpler ways to communicate my ideas in a photo but still keep it interesting and surprising. But who knows, maybe in the future I can start some bigger projects. But besides that, creating interesting photos with limited resources is also challenging and something that makes me think in creative ways.

In this post are some of my favourite works made my Storm. If you like it, have a look on his website for more: stormthorgerson.com/ And if you really like it buy one of his books to get a better view at the photos and read all the stories about how they were made. I’ve got “Taken by Storm” and “Mind over Matter – the images of pink floyd” on my bookshelve but they’re not available on his website any more. But the new book “The Raging Storm” should be just as good.

All different sorts of inspiration found on pinterest

Colour zoned workspace.

Diy idea: painting porcelain mugs

by Zander Olsen

Light Up by The Upcycle Family (great name)

Chip teacup! ♥

I love this colourful bedroom

Silence/Shapes by Filippo Minelli

Flowers. Still can’t wait for spring but unfortunately it’s still cold and rainy outside..

Together with a friend of mine, Laurette Levi, I’m working on a project to get the Uit Je Bak festival more sustainable. The Uit Je Bak festival is an inspiring festival with music, theatre, art and more. We searched the internet and pinterest for ideas regarding this theme and found some really inspirational stuff:

Seating area made of pallets

Mason jar chandelier

Recycle empty paint cans to make an artwork.

Merchandise packaging that can be transformed into something else

Lampshade made of can tabs

Newspaper seat

Flyers stamped on recycled paper

A black-light disco or artwork based on fluorescent bacteria instead of chemicals.

An old suitcase transformed into a bar

Egg carton lights

Take a book and leave on behind trading post

Sometimes you stumble upon really great bands and start to wonder why you never found their music before. Today I was digitalising my cd collection and add them to my digital collection when I stumbled upon The Golden Filter. They caught my eye because of their albumcover for the album Voluspa which is a photo of a person covered with a red cloth in the middle of an abandoned landscape. I started listening to it and it’s a really great album! I can’t really remember where I found it, probably on Last.fm in a list of recommended artists because it does sound a bit like some other bands I love, like iamamiwhoami and Zeigeist. I looked them up on the internet and found out that one of their latest records is an audiovisual project. I really like it when visual artists collaborate with bands to create something that’s somewhere in the middle of a movie and a videoclip. The film Syndromes is a about a young girl which seems to have some sort of talent to heal people. You see her struggle with the power to heal but also feeling sick because of all the ill people she has to visit.

Go to www.thegoldenfilter.com to see the film.

I also found that besides an interesting film the band also has some interesting photos, including the Voluspa album cover:

I want to start some new categories on my blog I want to write about every week or month. One of them is the product category where I want to show product brands I like. This week I want to show the products of the Danish brand Hay. I like Hay for their colourful but simple designs. They use simple geometric forms and patterns. The other thing I like about them is how their photography matches their products. In their photos they cleverly use colour, shapes and composition to display their products. The combination of their photography and products is what makes their brand stand out.