Blog a Penguin classic. Related, the notorious Clarkson classic. The whole debased notion of a design classic got one of its regular - and predictable - outings in the press last weekend, with Bayley and Conran's 'Design: Intelligence Made Visible' inspiring yet another round robin of me-and-my-spoon-style name-checking and taste-making involving the usual suspects (such as the Guardian's recent and rather spurious Top 50 UK designers or the BBC's Great British Design Quest from a year or so ago).

These little exercises would be far more challenging if the participants were not allowed to select anything designed in the past decade, thus forcing them to seek out true 'design classics' that have melded gracefully and purposefully with the chaff-rich wheat of the consumer cycle. In other words, what is usually described as 'good design' has a fast-decaying half-life, fading quickly from the public view with only a slim chance of being ressurected as a 'design classic' many years down the line.

Faced with this potentially catastrophic decline in reputation, many designers appear to be creating 'design classics' straight out of the box, objects steeped in references and knowing winks, with cute names and attention-seeking materials. But what goes around, comes around. Just as that thrift-shop staple, the artfully esoteric glob of coloured glass, perhaps in the shape of a fish, has skyrocketed in value in the past five years, so the stringy and bendy chairs of the noughties will ultimately end up being defined as a 'classic' in some way. And the word will lose a little bit more of whatever meaning it might once have had.

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East End Shopfront Shutter Letters, by London graffiti artist Eine. More images and info in Creative Review. Collected at Dave Gorman's neat flickr page / everything, and we mean everything, you ever wanted to know about Nick Cave, who recently celebrated his 50th birthday / Watch the K Foundation burn a million quid (via me-fi (the comments introduced us to this old, but wonderful, rumour, as well as Gimpo's M25 25 Hour Spin, 2006, and the 2007 version, and A Pylon Walk) / metal detecting, a weblog.

Elements of John Carpenter in this cutesy contortionist film from the 50s (at Ben Hammersley's page) / ilike is five. Happy birthday ilike / 9 of the most repulsive buildings on Earth? Criticism is subjective / cupboards covered in the artwork of Guido Crepax at Opus Interiors. Often erotic and cinematic, Crepax's art seems tailor-made for the post-ironic, new pop era (see more information at Moss's online store) / what do I do with this?, your source for surplus building materials / scour the Unclaimed Baggage Center for that long-lost holdall, before it's sold to someone else (via BBC News).

In Every Dream Home A Heartache: The Great Australian Dream and its architecture, an epic post at City of Sound / There is a field, a weblog with a marketing focus / book carvings by Brian Dettmer (via me-fi / upscale RVs from Earthroamer and Sportsmobile / art by Tricia McKellar, via Lost at E Minor / Born in the Basement, on punk, hardcore and garage / architecture in Portugal / Maison Lunatique, a weblog / 26 Different Endings, photographer Mark Power's chronicle of the cartographic fringes of A-Z London.

Famous huts through history and other home-working tips at Shedworking. See also kottke's recent post on The Most Beautiful House in the World, in particular author Witold Rybczynski's description of George Bernard Shaw's workplace / great, if slightly obsessive, stuff, Stephen Fry on his obsession with smart phones. Almost satirically intense / some structures that span borders / office life revisited: 5 minutes to kill yourself.posted by things at 10:23 / 0 comments