Formula Werks teamed up with Loyal Locals for a new series of Build Your Own city-themed clothes. Whether you’re representing Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, the Bay Area or beyond, you can wear your home teams on a fully customizable T-shirt. You choose from a spectrum of sizes, fits, shirt colors and text colors. Formula Werks does the rest. The artist-driven streetwear company was founded in 2003 and draws from skateboarding, tattooing, low-brow art, design and graffiti cultures, with a healthy dose of humor. They make soft shirts, cut right with in-your-face sloganeering. Don’t follow sports? They’ve also got your shoe fetish and toy fetish covered.

Travel guides typically provide information on places and things, but what about people? If you’re entering into a foreign culture, shouldn’t you have a couple clues about its denizens? Here’s where the 51 Japanese Characters project comes in handy. While an exchange student in Japan, German visual communication design student Peter Machat “tried to shed some light on the areas of Japanese society that are often perceived as being mysterious and closed.”

51 Japanese Characters showcases typical archetypes and cultural phenomena of Japanese society. It comes in the form of a handsome set of postcards in customizable display boxes. Each card shows one of the 51 characters on the front and an accompanying explanation (in English, German and Japanese) on the back. The first edition is limited to 500 sets, produced in the offset printing studio of Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. 51 Japanese Characters is both playful (turning the character-loving Japanese society itself into characters) and an easy way for a gaijin to learn how to avoid crowded subway trains when heading to Tokyo. You can order the postcards for about $24 (+ shipping) or a poster featuring all of the characters for about $13 (+ shipping) here.

We realize that there are so many amazing things out there and only so much time to get to it all. To help speed the process along a group of artists, writers and thinkers have started The School of Life as an opportunity to catch up on some of the more fulfilling aspects.

What makes this school different than other alma matters? For starters artist Charlotte Mann designed the classroom. In fact, everyone involved with the School of Life is a notable figure in their respective fields, including a few former curators of the Tate Modern. The School is located in the arty district Bloomsbury in London and houses a bookstore with the “right” books and artwork for sale. Instead of your Earth sciences and dead poets, courses cover five major areas of life: Love, Politics, Work, Family and Play. And to complete the higher eduction experience, they serve up meals, take you on group vacations and even inspire with a few sermons. The courses run £195. If the tuition is too steep, check out their blog for some nice freebies.

Ada Pinkston at Current TV just sent over a video they just posted featuring their Brazilian host Rico (no last name) of the Globe Patrol show getting reacquainted with Sao Paulo after being away for a decade. You know we’ve always got the best coming from Brazil covered, but watching what’s going down will give you a different angle of how I see this awesome city. Rico jumps around town to the Munny exhibit at toy store/ art gallery Plastik, goes to venue Studio SP to catch up with long-lost friends and interviews the Brazilian Larry Flynt, aka the sleazy Oscar Maroni, who was arrested last year for running a brothel. More fun with Brazil here.

While us ‘Mericans have the luxury of perfectly mowed fields and a plethora of generic gear at our disposal, most of the world does soccer… or fútbol… or futbito, differently. It’s a beloved and gritty sport, the foundation of which lays in the townships of Africa and in the dirt surfaces of Spain and Brazil. As so many of us have been, while traveling to these hallowed international ‘fields,’ Travis Winn – the founder of Calle (pronounced KAI-yay) – was inspired by the passion, talent, and ultimately, the style he saw being displayed by 12 year old street soccer players in Spain. Confidently and creatively, he thought, they tirelessly played 5 v. 5 on fenced-in concrete courts and in the callejones (a.k.a. alleys).

The difference between most of us and Travis is that Travis went one step further and saw a business opportunity in all of this. Calle was born out of international streets, and has come to fruition through the idea of bridging the gap between the mostly hideous soccer apparel/gear that we’re used to, and a more fashion-forward, to-the-roots-of-the-game aesthetic. There’s a market for a brand like this, no question about that. My hope is that Calle doesn’t try to become ‘the Quicksilver’ of the soccer industry overnight, but rather focuses on conveying through its apparel and other products the authentic look, feel, and style from which the brand was born.

Their Primero street soccer ball is, in my book, the icon of the brand– low bounce, soft touch, and not afraid of getting dirty… canvas sack included.

We came across Nori Morimoto’s light sculptures and were floored by their beauty and simplicity. Beyond their raw aesthetic value, Nori's creation of wood sculptures from sustainable sources adds a couple extra gold stars to his name. It is nice to see some progressive design getting back to its roots– literally. Now if he could only strike a deal with IKEA to get these out of the wild and into my living room!

Via Inhabitat

As a child growing up one would associate the term “dork” as a defamatory slur against one with a quirky, less than popular, sense of taste. Nowadays that quirk has turned into an endearing quality attached to those with unique and admirable affinity towards certain aspects of culture. It’s that endearing quality that has been harnessed by the folks at Dork Magazine, a daily online magazine dedicated to the subjects of art, habitat, and people. The site, founded by James Oyedijo and Taj Reid, offers up it’s one of a kind viewpoint on everything from music to travel to events that anyone who might proudly hail themselves a modern day dork would be glad to partake. The publication “strives to inspire its readers by reporting on the people, places and things that embody an impassioned lifestyle.” It’s not about what the beautiful people are doing…it’s about finding what real people are doing and what inspires those people. If you’re among those who consider yourself a leader or even soldier in the Dork revolution…you should definitely take a look at their site. Maybe you’ll get lucky and be proclaimed dork of the week. Indeed, a new dork dawn has come…maybe it’s time you let your freak flag fly.

Visitors to this year’s London Design Week will be able to make some interesting connections when they find themselves searching for answers. Not only will they find support and information through live-video phone chats with Hulger’s Indian Call Centre operatives in Bangalore, but they might find themselves engaged in some uncommon helpline conversation. Produced in collaboration with Applied Fiction, the “call centre executives,” who have undergone a program of “cultural sensitization,” are trained to recognize regional British dialects and even are up to date on the latest cultural references. What this means is: If you call up one of these super-operatives to ask a question about Design Week, you might as well go ahead and ask about the local weather or your fantasy football stats. This interesting combination of visuals and common ground may just make you feel like there’s a real person on the other line, giving new perspective to the generally helpless characteristics of “helplines.” If anyone happens to experience this first-hand, drop us a line and tell us about it; this sounds like an interesting experiment in communication!

Format, the ahead of the curve magazine out of Toronto, just dropped issue #12 of their online urban art/fashion focused publication. In celebration of Women’s History Month, Format Mag has honed in on some amazing women artists and designers, both emerging and established, that are truly thriving in the heavily male-dominated area of urban culture. Issue #12 features several proper interviews with well known ladies (like Claw Money and Joslyn Rose Lyons), and soon-to-be well known ladies (like EGR, a Toronto street artist). I love the subscription-less concept behind Format Mag; how rad to be able to access this quality of content without having to pay the five to twenty bucks (dang imports) that I normally shell out for culture magazines?

While we surely never hesitate to fill you in on our favorite t-shirts, it isn’t everyday that we write about Turkish brands. Reha Erdogan is the designer behind the B Turk label, and both the designs themselves and the story behind the designs are worth your attention. Each design has independent cultural significance, and seeks to enhance Turkish values, symbols, and visual objects to today’s aesthetic values. To that end, the overall aesthetic of the line is a “reflection of the cosmopolitan culture that has survived through thousands of years, inheriting a multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-lingual structure.” The fashion movement is merely the first prong of the B Turk movement; they want to apply the same design aesthetic to an array of other areas of design in the future.

Time Magazine has a nice article about the bubbling sneaker culture around the world– a culture that has helped propel the slow-growth athletic-shoe biz’ to more than a $15 billion industry today. If you’re still trying to grasp the whole sneaker culture concept, give this article a read. This bit was a little over the top for me though: Thomas, 21, reflected on how much getting the shoes meant to him. “Shoes run my life,” he said. “Without shoes, I don’t exist.” Ah, how dedicated.

The Phoenix has a pretty great article about the growth of sneaker culture, and a unique look into a few serious sneaker collectors lives and background– not to mention the explosion of the culture into the mainstream. I found Rob Heppler’s ’sneaker schooling’ in jail fascinating, and he deserves a special shout out for his podcast Weekly Drop. If you haven’t been tuning into it lately, check it out. This article is for everyone– whether you don’t quite understand the sneaker phenomena, or you’re a veteran with 100 pair collection.