Craft & Design

From traditional crafts to modern crafts, we’re covering news and interesting projects to educate you and keep you inspired. Design trends and pop culture related projects are here to inspire.

DIY Photography on the cheap

DIY Photography on the cheap

04July Nate01$77, not bad – Who this is for: You: owner of a small design company, a seat-of-your-pants freelancer, or perhaps an under-appreciated intern in the marketing staff of a big corporation. You wish to improve what you can offer photographically for your projects, you might only own a mid-range consumer digital camera. Read on, this article is intended as a helpful starting point. Link.

HOW TO Make Your Own  Microphone Pop-Filter

HOW TO Make Your Own $6 Microphone Pop-Filter

Popfilter1This article will show you how to make your own microphone pop-filter. A pop-filter is a small screen that goes between a microphone and your mouth to prevent sharp popping sounds (known as plosives) like “P” and “B” words from overloading the mic level and distorting. Commercially available pop-filters are expensive and can often cost 20 dollars or more. The pop-filter you can build here will cost less than $6 dollars. Link.

Build a Better Music Interface: Railfans (as in Trains)

Build a Better Music Interface: Railfans (as in Trains)

Traincab Railfans are building life-size, full-scale railroad cabs that look and function like the real thing, then projecting scenery onto their wall. And for music, you can hack their USB controller to turn it into a music / video / VJ controller, using either the Windows SDK (for hard coding) or a Mac app called junXion (for simple MIDI, useful with Max/MSP/Jitter, audio and VJ apps etc.) Aside from the train controller interface, you could use their I/O box to build any controller you wanted. There are other I/O boxes that use USB, but theirs has an unusual number of ins and outs, saving you basic stamp programming. And it’s also comparatively cheap. They also make bunches of custom controllers, keyboards, everything… Link.

The CD Lamp

The CD Lamp

37487164 Ad270F8924 Neat lamp a MAKE Flickr pool member made – the base and top are poplar, while the dowels are oak. I used very small dowels to hold the base together (you can barely see them as spots near the bottommost CD). The bottom two layers of the base are hollow, and there’s a piece of round plexiglass to hold everything in. The light is a standard cold cathode tube used for case modding. This thing is freakin’ heavy, since there’s over 200 CDs. Link.

The midiGun

The midiGun

B6Tvdw The midiGun is a MIDI controller in a gun. Not a real gun, but one covered in slightly camp flouro green plastic, lots of knobs and switches, a crossfader on the bottom of the barrel, a laser sight and lots more, detailed on this chart. It’s designed using a Doepfer pocket electronics module to control DJ software. [via] Link.