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Clean, simple and elegant were the first words which came to mind when I saw the identity for the Art & Architecture of the Saint-Luc Institutes in Brussels.

The consistent use of typography, the amount of white space and the small details are a big inspiration for all minimalistic minded people. You can download a digital version of magazine #11 for some more inspiration.

The identity for this Bi-annual magazine is designed by the French graphic designer Carine Collin who lives and works in Brussels. She has a good portfolio and her website is also a clean piece of art. I think I am in love!

Stairs can speak louder than words about a house‘s style intentions. Something like a grand staircase of marble steps in monumental homes. I am thinking about the exhaustion people feel going down those stairs.

Modern stairs are less about circulation. They are more about occupying minimal space and becoming abstract objects. Architect Jacopo Mascheroni, designed the loft in Como’s staircase as a great opportunity to make circulation free floating. A feeling of weightlessness with a skin and bone structure of open treads covered in maple wood.

The loft in Como, Italy is an old monastery put to new use: a dream minimalist loft. Maple hardwood floors with custom floor planks; a video projector that plays images on the kitchen wall, hidden cabinets, open spaces, pure white; did I mention everything was custom designed?

I oohed and aaahed at the Jacopo Mascheroni project. It comes pretty close to a dream I can aspire to, when I finally get discovered.

Marco.org - Overdoing the interface metaphor
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Functionally, it’s almost a calculator. But it’s also almost a spreadsheet and almost a list pad. By not constraining its design to that of a common physical object, it’s able to be and do much more than anything in the physical world ever could.

Marco raises some good arguments against the idea that mimicking real world objects in UI design is not always the right answer. In fact, it can also lead to replicating all of the problems inherent in the device you are attempting to replicate.

That said, he is also pretty honest about what this really is – another chance to highlight Soulver. Soulver is a fantastic app I have mentioned only in passing before that is basically a smart scratchpad for doing calculations in near natural language.

Both points are sound ones though and another excellent piece of insight from Marco. The world would be a much better place if all of us put the amount of thought into the things we produce that he does.

At Yummygum, we embrace a minimal mind set not only in our online corporate visual identity but also in our office. We’ve tried to create a minimal workspace, using the Bluelounge CableBox, a lot of whitespace and a clean and clutter free desk.

(Submitted by Yummygum)

Holy moly! This shot is just the beginning. Click the link and see the whole set. Beautiful stuff.

Speaking of things I have linked to before… I can’t believe I have not fully endorsed Clipstart before. But first, a rant…

One of my goals of this site is to profess my belief that the built in applications on the Mac (and I am including both iLife and iWork in that category) can fulfill most people’s needs without any additional software. Mail is a really great email program. TextEdit is a really decent basic word processor. iPhoto is great for organizing photos and doing basic corrections… iPhoto… Let’s talk about iPhoto…

It sucks monkey nuts at organizing video. I’m not talking about movies or TV shows – I’m talking all of the video us parent types like to shoot of our two year olds with those Flip Cameras we got for Fathers Day. Or the footage of the hockey leagues our kids play that we shot with our pocket digital camera. You know, those random, personal video snippets. iPhoto tries really hard. It will import that stuff into your iPhoto library just fine and then it will, well, try to treat it like a photo. Double-click the thing and, does it open it and play it right there? No. It launches Quicktime. Quicktime for Hades sake! And don’t even get me started on how bad iMovie is at such things.

Clipstart fills this massive void and does so by doing one thing really well – organizing your personal video and making it easy to tag, find and share it. It automagically sorts everything by year, makes navigating and tagging your videos as keyboard friendly as possible, and can upload your stuff to Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo or Twitter. It even has some basic editing capability so you can delete the fact that your thumb was covering the lens for the first minute you were rolling. Watch the video to get a sense of how wonderful in it’s simplicity this all is.

I really can’t say enough good things about it or how badly needed this app was before it existed. If you have a lot of home movies, buy this. Seriously.