This week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist brings an entirely new playlist of face-melting great music to help propel you through those laborious, tedious design tasks for the next few days. So whether you find yourself inking markers until they’re dry, grinding material through a bandsaw or flying through a CAD model, consider these tracks as a tool for your process. This week we’ll start things off with the classic “Tick of the Clock” from the Chromatics and work our way through a solid mix of tracks from Aphex Twin, The Knife, M83, Sinkane and others before wrapping up with a remix of “Good Evening Mrs. Magpie” from Radiohead. As always…

When it comes to seamlessly blending the pleasures of film fanatics who have a fascination with how the forged weapons from their favorite movies are made, the Man at Arms crew always delivers. The Man at Arms team, which consists of expert blacksmiths and craftsmen with a penchant for keeping things interesting, have been regularly releasing a new process video on YouTube every other Monday based on the requests that come in from their community of over 3.2 million subscribers. To date, the team has used their tried and true process of sourcing reference imagery from actual frames from a television shows and films to design and fabricate various weapons…

As a young block builder, you loved LEGO and would fly through the kits before quickly moving beyond build tutorials to creating your own unique creations using items from around the house. You loved puzzle games and toys with mechanisms like Mouse Trap and Transfomers. Maybe your parents started to let you take apart broken appliances. Sometimes you were able to fix the appliances, and sometimes, well, it was broken in the first place. Then high school. You found you had an aptitude for math and science. You took geometry and physics and loved the real world applications. Then you joined the FIRST robotics team and realized that this is…

For the seemingly endless flow of crowdfunding stories that come pouring through turnstile on monthly basis, it’s always nice to hear about a successful Kickstarter campaign that not only managed to get a product off the ground, but also resulted in the establishment of a sustainable business with multiple employees. Among others, Palette is one of those feel-good stories. Founded in 2013 by product designer Calvin Chu, Palette is a modular computer control interface platform that consists of snap-together sliders, dials and buttons that are similar to the controls found on a DJ’s mixing board for manipulating tracks. When different components are used to build a personalized system using Palette,…

Don your favorite bath robe, cream that coffee and get comfortable with this weekend’s SolidSmack Weekend Reader. This week we saw everything from how Autodesk is planning on reinventing the near future of design education to how scanning and MoCap technology could change 3D design and more … So lay back, relax and take a load off while reading the top ten stories on SolidSmack this past week. Oh and uh…don’t forget to shed some much-needed sunlight on your face, too.

The stage went black. More screams were the least of what we wanted to hear, but that’s what happens in the dark, just before thousands of people start throwing snowcones and muffin pans at each other. Fortunately, we had a secret weapon, wrapped tightly in a bubblegum wrapper, ready to be deployed with these links. Brian Miller – Illustration of subjects and scenes with a vintage appeal and plenty of color and texture. Maywa Denki – Let’s get this party started. Wikisinger – How do acoustics affect sound? Listen as the same song is sung in 15 different places. And of course, there’s the Wikidrummer. HitFilm – Incredible video editing…