Gift Idea #1: Robot Kit

It's 91 days until Christmas! :)  This robot kit is appealing to kids 4-8 years old. It is simply made of scavenged metal parts such as: Nuts, bolts, springs, latches, mint tins, fuses, casters, camera parts, speaker parts, light switches, faucet parts - basically anything cool and magnetic.  You then add some varied sized cans and MANY of those large fat magnets and let their imagination take it from there.  If you do make these this year, email me some pictures and I'll post them!

Some caveats and advice:  

1) Keep the magnets away from little ones, and because (no matter what the kids think) you don't have eyes in the back of your head, don't risk using the so-called "super magnets".  If children swallow those it can cause serious injury and even death. Use the big fat normal ones that look like liquorice lozenges. 

2) Make sure cans and parts have no sharp edges.

3) Not everything that glitters is magnetic!  You can glue magnets onto the non-magnetic items to make them work, or you can just let the kids discover for themselves what's magnetic and whats not (it'd be good for them!)

Believe it or not - Not Magnetic!

4) If you can, sit down and make a few robots yourself before you give this as a gift - it gives you a good idea what works, what doesn't, and how you can tweak your kit to make it function better.  One of the fun things about this gift, though, is soon everyone will be discovering parts to add to the kit wherever they go - bits and bobs from the gravel alley, treasures from recycling, and broken household items all of a sudden become really special - especially meat thermometer gauges!

5) Use Droid Robot font to make a cute label for your kit.

Type O

I love words, letters and numbers. I love books. I love typewriters, type, and typography. And so does pretty much everyone else in the world. I know I am totally not unique in this regard. But the upside of being one of the unwashed masses is that there's a market for what I like, so people with talent keep creating it!


Zebra Eye by, White Hand-type by, Inject Knowledge Question Mark by, Insomnia by
When M for Amazing was little his dad would play an old radio play for him about a shipwreck loaded with rats that crashed onto a lone lighthouse in a storm. The rats are cunning and surround the lighthouse gnawing and exploring, trying to find the way in. The Lighthouse Keeper goes mad and in one scene throws his body against the glass window then falls back to view all the rats pressed against the glass in an effort to get to him. "Look!" he screams, "My portrait in RATS!"

This is Stacy Benson's self-portrait not in rats, but in words. So cool.


I think the following piece, besides being such a perfect visual representation of this type of conversation, also absolutely rings true in content. We've all been there, done this.

I think these next two are excellent examples of consumer friendly typography in ads - Madison Avenue Smart. The Titanic poster isn't done justice unless you click on it and look at it full size.


{Why Did The Titanic Sink? via}

And this bit is called Point of View, for obvious reasons. . . Leave it to the Brits.

Via far better bloggers than I

Word

I've been trying to add a dynamic tag cloud generator to this blog - not a static one-time-shot, but one that would continually renew the image as new posts were added. I guess my html expertise of four days isn't enough to accomplish that yet. But it's been fun playing with all the different widgets and gadgets. The results remind me of Magnetic Poetry but more sophisticated. I'm thinking a lovely piece of art could be made by inputting a favorite poem or an old love letter. Or maybe an individualized gift for someone by entering words from their life history? Or sweet baby words to hang in a nursery. I can tell I'll definitely be playing with Wordle a lot more in the future; give it a try!

(poem image via the awesome Hank Conner}