In today’s edition of #ThrowAdThrusday we take a look at neatly designed and surprisingly handy gadgets by Fiona O’Leary, a young, London-based designer whose desire is to create and invent products that improve people’s lives with meaningful use of technology. One of them is Spector, a handheld tool that captures typefaces and colours from print material and transfers them to digital screen. The other, MIMO, lets you copy and paste multiple items at once.
O’Leary developed the handy handheld tool as her graduation project at the Royal College of Art, the only entirely postgraduate art and design university in the world, and created a device that allows various print materials to become interactive and that helps to bridge the gap of digital screen designing and the finalised print. A user just presses the button on the device that is connected to the computer via Bluetooth and Spector software takes pictures of needed font or colour with the device’s live feed of the camera and then beams them directly to the computer via an InDesign plugin.
The picture taken by a macro camera is matched to a font database and then changes live text within Adobe InDesign to that exact font, size, leading and kerning. If the device is not near a computer, don’t worry, it can store up to 20 font samples, so you can use them later. O’Leary said that: “When you design for print on screen, it never looks like how it’s going to print. If you’re going to design for print on screen you should start with print.”
The other nifty little tool, MIMO, evaluates the menial task of “copypasting” to a more elaborate experience. It shows you what information is being copied, allows you to copy multiple items at once and is also capable of saving needed information in its own storage space – making it a hard drive full of links, images, files and text.
O’Leary works at social tech start-up Humane Engineering where she helped develop Cove app – a musical journal that lets you make beautiful music loops with different instruments and sounds according to your own mood. You can follow Fiona O’Leary’s Twitter account for more cool designs.
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