Man Made DIY

The super fun Font Game has become my first choice for time passing during those waiting-in-line sessions. Here's a similar challenge - TypeWar. It only gives you two typefaces as options, but a mere single character to inform your… read more

Somewhere in the last few weeks, making fun of hipsters became more prolific than the irony-clad, mustache filled trend itself. Which was sorta funny for a bit, but at what point does the cultural response become even more pathetic than the ridiculousness of the subculture it mocks?

So, with that in mind, we at ManMade promise that this very post will be the latest hipster mocking piece we do. 

Well, unless its very,… read more

When I first saw this picture, I thought, "great...somebody put a gummy brain in a shoot glass and poured some blood-colored syrup on top." But I kept reading, and you should too! 'Cause the results are actually way… read more

At ManMade, we will always support the DIY efforts that allow folks to live out the things they love. Especially when it involves outer space. 

We were super excited when Robert Harrison took still photos with a digital point and shoot attached to a giant weather balloon, and think this latest effort by photographer Luke Geissbuhler is simply amazing. 

"Geissbuhler spent eight months fine-tuning a miniature spacecraft that could withstand the extreme conditions of the edge of space. He also had to get approval from the US Federal Aviation Administration.

In order to be able to retrieve the footage, the device would have to survive extreme weather conditions, sub-zero temperatures and a… read more

Recently, Terry Gross interviewed James Franco about playing Allen Ginsberg, and asked the actor how he went about changing his look to assume the character of the poet. "The glasses," was Franco's simple answer.

It's often shocking how much a single item or characteristic can identify a character. And illustrators to James Alexander Mathers and Andrew Lau have totally captured the notion in Dress the Part, a collection of movie posters reduced to the identifying pieces of the characters… read more

I have a terrible time keeping track of instructional documents and handbooks on my computer. They don't go in the "documents" folder, cause that's where the documents I create go, right? Do I organize them by content, or by form? Plus, how am I ever gonna remember to actually open them and read after downloading?

So, I'm loving these desktop backgrounds that put the info right out there. It's already hard enough to find good looking wallpapers, but one's that help you make good looking stuff yourself? Why, yes I will,… read more

There's no doubt that baked goods underwent a revolution in the first decade of the Twenty-First century. The 1980s and 90s gave us fashionable restaurant pastries with intricate sugar sculptures and artistic chocolate towers. But the last ten years saw a return to roots; the kind of baked goods your grandma would make, except executed much, much better.

The humble cupcake, saved from crusty dryness by whole new approaches, was certainly the darling of the aughts, but from the looks of things, the cookie is taking over.

Just look at these trendsetting sweets from Japan's… read more

Photographer and former chef Jonathan Blaustein visited a certain, very famous fast food chain during the recent economic downturn. "'On one menu they had a cheeseburger for a dollar,' he said. What caught his eye, though, was another menu, which featured a double cheeseburger for the same price. That additional piece of meat, and the extra slice of cheese, somehow didn’t change the price."

And so began The Value of a Dollar, his 2008 series of photographs of food bought for a single $1.00 bill.

You know that spindle-y, cotton-y, faux spider web material they sell in the plastic bags?

I hate that stuff. First, it's gross and creepy; as in, not a cool, eerie Halloween way, but in a octogenarian's chin hair kinda way. And, it's nearly always misused to create a melty cotton ball look that looks nothing like an actual spider web.

But, this process it pretty intriguing. A special balloon-strengthening product called HI-FLOAT is allowed to dry inside an inflated then deflated ballon, and upon re-inflation, produces a string-y, bizarre, somewhat similar to an spider web looking thing, which, when combined with a few plastic creepy crawlers, looks… read more

For contemporary crafters, the old script-y, serif-y cross stitch alphabets simply won't do. So, Tamara Maynes has created the Helvetica Cross Stitch kit, an A-to-Z cross stitch design chart that allows you to incorporate the Swiss school classic and the world's most popular typeface into your handmade… read more