Bits & bobs — #30

Speaker grill porn

The other day I was playing around with some graphics and I got way too deep in the rabbit hole of speaker grill (or "grille") designs. I'm talking about these holes in front of speakers and in particular the hardware ones. They can be simple line cuts or circular drills arranged in a square, diagonal, circular grids, or on curvy lines. Either way I got totally obsessed with these patterns and some of them are so cool I want to cry. It's amazing how many variations exist, the best ones clearly inspired by Dieter Rams' Braun designs from the 60s and 70s.

speaker-grill.com is the only site I found dedicated for these patterns only. MaxiResTecp.

Some of these designs particularly stood the test of time and being reused over and over again, from the 60s to today products. Here are a couple of them.

Lines

Square grid

Diagonal grid

Circular grid

What makes this one visually very appealing is that it has these straight lines of holes across the pattern 60° apart, and the pizza-slice-like dot shapes in between.

To achieve this simply start with a single hole in the center then distribute 6 holes on the first concentric circle, then 12 on the 2nd and so on. This makes sure to have a hole on each 60° of the circle and fills in the rest with linearly increasing number of holes. You can do this for infinity with various spacings.

However this dude, Dieter Rams knows how to break rules. In his 1962 design, the Braun T41 Taschenempfänger he starts with the above algorithm but then on the third circle he goes into increasing the number of holes by only 4, which results losing the diagonal lines altogether. Still looks ultra balanced.

It's quite simple to recreate these circular patterns in e.g. Illustrator or Affinity Designer by calculating the rotation degree and duplicating holes around a guideline circle (here's a tutorial).

However, for experimentation I just found Patternodes, which is a pretty sick tool with a bunch of parameters for creating repeated patterns.

Aside: looking at the numbers 0-99 sorted alphabetically in certain languages, the above start to make even more sense.

Chord machine

Staying with white, black and bright orange, square and circle minimalism: if you're into synths and stuff then you already probably know about Akuto Studio's project, the Chord Machine. It's practically an accordion-style MIDI controller that spits out chords. What makes it stand out is its extremely clean look.

Don't be disappointed by the fact that the images on their site are renders, they had a proto for their Kickstarter campaign and about a month ago they released their first demo video. Things looks very promising.

Oh, and apparently they will make the coolest looking USB-C to MIDI/CV converter ever. Damn!