Jewel glass mosaics from New Ravenna

New Ravenna Mosaics, whom you may remember from a post a couple of weeks ago, launched a new line of glass mosaics at Coverings in Chicago this year.

Under the guidance of the Mosaic Muse herself, Sara Baldwin, New Ravenna is taking glass tile into places and expressions where its never been before.

I get it that I have a tendency to gush and I've never met a mosaic I didn't love. Well, almost. But these patterns are really something else.

Nobody is pushing the envelope with glass mosaics like this, and I mean nobody.

These designs are thoroughly, classically inspired but at the same time, they are unapologetically new. If you took the decorative mastery of Rome and Byzantium, then ran it through the studios of Louis Comfort Tiffany, and then finally passed it though the box grater of the 21st century you might come up with something close to this. It's gorgeous, all of it.

You can read more about these materials and patterns on Sara Baldwin's blog, and you can see the entire New Ravenna collection on the New Ravenna website.

If indeed there's a heaven, I think its streets would be paved with the likes of this.

Hurry up and register! There's only four days left!

Glorious, Michael Graves for Alessi kettle:

The joys and wonders of All Modern.

You.

Go back to my Monday column and register for my drawing to make all your Postmodern dreams come true. Already registered? Leave another comment and double your chances!

I think glass

If you're tired of the same old same old when it comes to counter materials, think about glass.

The counters photographed here were made by Quebec-based Think Glass. Think Glass makes counter tops, floors, windows, architectural elements and art pieces that are guaranteed to stop people in their tracks.

Look at these beauties. Think Glass uses a proprietary method of fusing glass in their custom-made glass kilns and the result is something you'll not find from another company.

These counters can be made up to three inches thick, they can be back- or under-lit, they come in a wide variety of edges, textures and underlayments.

Think Glass counters can be further customized with the addition of colored glass into the counters themselves.

Glass is non-porous, highly scratch resistant, heat resistant, easy to clean and super hygienic. Did I mention that they're beautiful?

Think Glass counters are available through dealerships across North America and the Caribbean. So if you're looking for something interesting, think glass with Think Glass.

Pssst... you have to play to win

Jump back to my post on Monday and enter for a chance to win this gorgeous, classic Michael Graves kettle from All Modern. Michael Graves is one of the reining kings of architecture and industrial design. If you'd like a retrospective of his life's work, here's the link to his company's website. Wouldn't it be cool to have something for your home that's a product of the same mind that brought to the world the Humana Building, the Denver Public Library, the Dolphin and the Swan hotels and hundreds of other iconic buildings around the world? I think yes. Enter.

A friend like Ben

If Sherwin-Williams' entry into the color-specifier-for-iPhone market left me rather cold yesterday, I was warmed right back up by Benjamin Moore's more usable variation on that theme, ben. Ben's unveiling was delayed by a week or so, but it was worth the wait.

Clearly, Benjamin Moore spent a lot more money on the development and roll-out of ben and I think it was money well-spent. Ben is a very well thought out app and one I'm sure I will use in my day to day life.

Ben suffers from the same camera limitations that Sherwin-Williams' ColorSnap does and ben also failed my take-a-photo-of-a-color-chip test. If you missed my review of ColorSnap yesterday, I took a photo of a Sherwin-Williams color chip and tried to have ColorSnap identify the color correctly. ColorSnap couldn't do it. Well neither can ben, and I think that's a camera shortcoming more than an app shortcoming. I'll be interested to see how these apps fare in a similar test with the better camera coming in the new iPhones. We'll see.

Anyhow, ben takes a little longer to load than ColorSnap does, but it's still pretty fast.

Once it's loaded, it lands on a start screen that allows you to select between taking a photo or retrieving a photo from your phone's archives.

I selected a photo of a brightly-colored floor tile.

Once the photo's selected and imported (a process that takes a few seconds at most), you can zoom or crop the imported photo any way you'd like.

Here's the zoomed in image of the tile pattern.

So now that my photo's zoomed, cropped and active; all I need to do is touch anywhere on the photo and ben matches what ever color I'm touching to one of the 3,000 colors in Benjamin Moore's palette.

When I touch the blue in the lower left quadrant of this photo, ben matches it to Benjamin Moore's 2067-20, Starry Night Blue. Ben's also showing a virtual fan deck along the bottom of the page. If I click on any one of those color blocks, I get a full-screen view of the color with the virtual fan deck still below the main color..

When I tap Starry Night Blue for the second time, I get a true full-screen view with no visual distractions.

If I tap the screen twice, I go back to the photo where I started. Now, I can touch anywhere on my photo and get an instantaneous color match. Here's the blue-gray color below the black bar in the upper right quadrant.

Here's the purple in the lower right quadrant.

The yellow from the upper left quadrant.

And here's the black from the lower right quadrant.

What's most amazing to me is the speed with which this app does this color matching. It's pretty cool and it's pretty spot on when it's looking at an archived photo.

Ben also has an interactive color wheel as a completely separate function as well a store locator that uses the iPhone's onboard GPS. The whole package is pretty slick and packs a real technological punch into a free app. I'm very fond of Sherwin-Williams and I specify colors from their palette more than any other. With that said though, I declare Benjamin Moore's ben the winner of the iPhone app paint specifier battle.

Hats off to both companies for their embrace of new technology and I can't wait to see what's next. Finally, I'll pose the question again: what's a Blackberry?