Fancy Facade

 Kiefer Technic is an Austrian manufacturer of stainless steel cabinets and wall panels for hospitals and labs and all things sanitary. Their showroom in Bad Gleichenberg, designed by Ernst Giselbrecht + Partner, boasts a dynamic facade. This facade moves and changes throughout the day allowing or blocking light into different areas for different purposes.
The sunscreen is simply aluminum panels controlled by motorized shutter devices.
They claim individual offices have their own controls for the panel outside their window but it seems there is also some overriding programming that also controls them.
Check out this video that shows the movement and different looks of the facade.

All Things Pixel

Feeling a little square after a long, hard week of working for the man? Set those square pixels free as we explore pixelized creations.
This Pixel Lamp by Istavan Kulinyi is a mobile lamp with a grid of pixels that can be rotated from black to white to orange to create different shapes, looks and feels.

Polish students at a technology university created this show using the lights in their dorm building. I can't vouch for Polish tastes as this shows spends quite a bit of time re-enacting the Matrix complete with gun fights and only a few seconds of Michael Jackson, but it is interesting anyway.

Cdroig (hover over the left side of Entrar and click to get into the company page), a company out of Valencia, created Pixels XL as a wall decoration that can be personalized and constantly changed. They are actually magnetic tiles and require that you apply a coat of ferric paint (contains iron).

Danielle Aubert published a book full of art created in Excel. It took 16 months of formatting cell by cell to create enough pieces for a full book. Excel lovers rejoice. Something to break the monotony of all those numbers!

Because Every Designer Should Have Access to One

A bit more affordable than the scanners on the market before, this handy device will scan the color of anything and give you the equivalent NCS color for it. The NCS Colour Scan 2.0 will not only give you the Natural Color System formula for whatever you scan, you can zoom in with crosshairs on the screen when looking at a multi-color pattern to isolate colors, you can tag it with a recorded voice tag, and it will even give you similar and complementing colors to create a color palette for you. As you can tell by that pesky "u" in Colour that this scanner comes from Europe, where maybe they use this NCS system more readily. So for us Americans who like color and are more familiar with Pantone, there is a Pantone version called Capsure that looks exactly the same. It doesn't mention that it will coordinate your colors for you but it does come with a protective pouch, thank goodness.
An exciting side note, did you know you could get a Pantone Visa. You just need to figure out what color best defines you as a person - 15-4825 or 18-4039. Hmm, I don't know. Some days I just feel like a 16-1452, you know?