Mondays might not be your favorite day of the week, but the good news is that we’re all in this together ladies and gentlemen. As purveyors of prime Grade A web content, the SolidSmack crew has done some of the heavy-lifting to make sure you get your Mondays started on the right track. Welcome to The Monday List. Every Monday, we link you up with some of the most insightful, informative, and socially-relevant stories to keep tabbed, bookmarked, reading listed, pocketed, or what have you to get your week started on the right foot. Be sure to check in each week for a new crop of freshly sprouted words curated straight…

Those wood parts won’t smooth themselves! But how often do you spend wrestling a piece of sandpaper around weird edges—only to be left with a half-crooked and totally botched result? There’s a remedy for that — and we can’t recommend it enough. The Preppin’ Weapon sanding block is a workshop necessity that lets users load sandpaper and adjust tension quickly and easily. And while just one Preppin’ Weapon sanding block will go a long way in your process, arming yourself with a four-pack for four different levels of grit will take it to another level—no need to stop and reload! For power users, the Preppin’ Weapon also lets you stack…

Peaks tipped in the trees of a juniper freeze rose out ahead of us. Nine times out of ten you wouldn’t see, wouldn’t hear, the wood spider’s howl but, on a night like this, your chance was better than others, when in your bait pouch, you carried these links. ShuoLin Liu – EVA units and other armor-clad characters with a style that’s both blocky and refreshing. Funny Monsters – I love hand drawn monsters. So does Robert Romanowicz apparently. His illustration style is marvelous as is the sketchy style of these new creatures. Milk Truck Garden – Now, this landscape project looks like a bit o’ fun, ya know, if…

Don your favorite bathrobe, cream that coffee and get comfortable with this week’s SolidSmack Weekend Reader. The Weekend Reader features a handful of the most interesting articles featured on the ‘Smack over the past week ranging from tips and tricks to inspirational designs, processes, and more. So lay back, relax and take a load off while reading the top stories on SolidSmack this past week. Oh and uh…don’t forget to shed some much-needed sunlight on your face, too. Watch a Bladesmith Turn an Old Drillbit Into a Karambit Knife Deadly objects crafted by and from molten metal are nothing new here on Solidsmack, but it isn’t every day you see…

When it comes to product design books, it’s not always easy to eliminate glamorized portfolios from those that get down to the real nitty-gritty of product design. And when it comes to those actually worth reading, Don Norman will never do you wrong. As a strong (and very early) advocate for user-centered design, Norman is a pioneer in UX and UI design principles that exist in many of the products we use today. In his book, The Design of Everyday Things, Norman dives deeper into not just why…but how smart design is changing the landscape all around us—and what you can do to give your designs a competitive edge. If…

Researchers from MIT have developed a new technique to enable highly detailed, multi-material 3D prints from 3D scanners. “By using voxel-printing methods, superfluous preparation overhead and loss in detail can be prevented. This approach enables one to directly translate volumetric property gradients to 3D printable material gradients. Hence, if preservation of the given data representation is of importance, including volumetric color, transparency, or continuous material property transitions, our method presents a valuable alternative to current practices.” 3D prints have long been produced with models generated from 3D scanners, but in almost all cases these prints are a representation of the outer surface of the scanned object only – and then…