Leave it to a lamp to lather the locally manufactured back of custom design and show us how efficient some products could be. Chris Chalmers, founder of Fabripod, is the San Francisco maker/creator behind the very cool Chrysalis project, a project with the idea of helping designers create custom products. Chris, taking the essence of that project, has created his own beautiful product and with it, is setting the standard for custom designer products, and perhaps even mass-market products, to come.

This week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist brings an entirely new face-smack of great music to help propel you through those laborious, tedious design tasks for the next few days. This week we’re unloading a handful of some of our favorite tracks from various Wes Anderson films. We’ll start with ‘Making Time’ by The Creation from the movie Rushmore and work our way through the film library before ending up with an Alexandre Desplat song from Moonrise Kingdom.

For those who have had the time to get their feet wet in Autodesk’s Cloud-based CAD platform Fusion 360, you might have been missing a few ingredients from your previous workflow in another CAD package…particularly in the rendering department. On Wednesday October 9th, that problem will be solved after the announcement this morning that Luxion is offering a Keyshot plugin for Fusion 360 that brings the best of Keyshot (ahem…LiveLinking anybody?) to Autodesk’s answer to CAD in the Cloud. At $25 a month per seat, the low cost-of-entry for Fusion 360 makes it an extremely alluring option for both novices and pros alike—and this new offering just might be the…

Here at SolidSmack, we do our very best to keep you on the forefront of the 3D printing world…but occasionally, it’s nice to simply sit-back and ogle something pretty! In terms of aesthetics, “pretty” might be one way to describe The Product’s Soundmachines, but stimulating, might be an even better word to encapsulate the Berlin-based company’s nifty brainchild.

Locked inside the tumultuous tummy of the stuffed teddy toto, we evaluated the situation. A) we had plenty of grade-a foam B) we had some leftover honey and a half-melted stick of pig fat C) we had with us the explosive power of nine carbonate hamster sacks–in a word, these links. Michael Kus – Superbly detailed illustrative work with deep colors and shadows in character, creature, ship, vehicle and spacecraft design. A Capella Rhapsody – It’s Bohemian Gravity, done surprisingly well by Tim Blais as a supplement to his Master’s Thesis on parity-violating three-dimensional gravity. Roadtrip Radar – Whether it be day trip or road trip this, this right here,…

This week EngineerVsDesigner sat down with the young founder of a new tool company that has redesigned the traditional shovel as we know it, Mr. Stephen Walden! We’ll talk to Stephen about how he got the idea for his product, how he developed it as a non-designer/engineer, and how he is going about leading his crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. Rock.