Thursday, July 23, 2009

Ingenious ink calender

This simple but nice idea from designer Oscar Diaz works with the capilair working of ink spreading across paper. This way it collors the days of the month.
Would be suprissing if it is close to accurate.

3 comments:

cybrbeast said...

Very nice idea. In the comments on the site there were also many skeptical people. The artist himself replied:

"Hello, since people seems very curious about how it works, I will explain a bit more in detail;

I was inspired by the the capillary action (which is how water moves through plants and trees), and by looking how some people dip partially sugar cubes on the coffee, and wait for the coffee to rise up to their fingers, before dropping the cube in the cup.

The paper is a very very special paper, which is made so the fibers create regular cells . This means that the ink will pass from one cell to the other on a timely manner. Is an expensive paper, but with incredible properties, all thanks to recent developments on the paper manufacturing process.

I put double numbers (apart from the first one) so the surface to fill up is pretty much the same. The ink doesn’t dry because has been modified. There is many types of inks and most contains a shellac to make the ink more shinny, but that make it dry faster too.

Each numbers works also as an ink tank, which means that each number is feed by the previous number and not by the ink bottle, and if you remove the bottle, the ink will continue to move forward for a couple of days until it slowly stops.
That is how ink can get to the end.

Hope this answer some of the questions. Thanks for reading."

annom said...

Brilliant!

annom said...

Although I'm still not convinced it's accurate, but maybe accurate enough for the days of one month.