Category: Miscellaneous
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Follow @BicycleDesign on Instagram
Hello…is this thing on? It’s been quite a while, but some of you may still be subscribed to the old RSS feed (is that still a thing?). If you do somehow find this post, I want to let you know that I just started posting again on the @bicycledesign Instagram account. I plan to…
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Switching gears… find me now at JCT.design
After ten years of blogging at Bicycle Design, it’s time for me to move on. This post may seem a bit like déjà vu to those of you who remember my “final” post from February of last year, but this time I really do need to shift my focus to other projects and goals. I won’t…
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The top 25 posts from 10 years of Bicycle Design
I can hardly believe that it’s been a full decade since I started this blog by posting one of my old marker renderings. Though I started with a few of my own sketches, what really kept me interested in blogging were the design submissions from others that I began to receive in those first few…
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Guidelines for submitting a design
Reader submitted designs and tips are always welcome and encouraged here, but often I do get focused on my own design projects and fall behind on the emails sent to tips@bicycledesign.net. The volume of (often off-topic) messages from companies and PR firms has increased dramatically in recent years, so occasionally really good designs from readers…
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2014- The Year in Review at BicycleDesign.net
It is the end of another year, and you know what that means… it is time for the annual recap of activity here at Bicycle Design. Since the blog was inactive for about half of 2014, it is no surprise that traffic was way down. There were 643,288 pageviews in 2014 according to Google…
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The Derailleur Project 2015 Wall Calendar
A few years ago, I briefly mentioned in a post a website that has since become one of my favorites. Taking its name from the 1967 Cream album, Disraeli Gears chronicles in photographs the history of the rear derailleur, a component that, according to the site, “defines the ‘groupset’ and in turn, defines the bike.”…
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Friday Links
In the past, I would occasionally share a random collection of short links on Fridays. I don’t have much time for a post this afternoon, so it seems like as good a time as any to revive that tradition. Not sure if it will happen every Friday, but expect a quick, unfiltered blast of bike…
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A look back… and ahead
I mentioned in my post yesterday that I made the decision to resume blogging here at Bicycle Design because I really missed it. That is absolutely true, but today I want to delve a little deeper into my reasons for starting the blog, for ending it, and then resuming it again. As I pointed out in…
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Bicycle Design is back
Call me indecisive, but BicycleDesign.net is back. When I made the decision to formally end the blog in February, I was completely overwhelmed with work and other projects. As important as the site was to me, I simply felt like I no longer had the time to maintain it at the level that I thought…
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It’s been a great ride
It is hard to pinpoint the exact reason that I started this blog in 2005. I could say that it was to showcase the work of industrial designers in the bicycle industry, or to give students a place to share their bike related ideas and concepts, or maybe the idea was just to generate discussion…
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Two innovative approaches to bicycle manufacturing
Velo-Design is an excellent blog by French designer Johann Paquelier. If you didn’t already guess it from the name, the topics that he covers are very similar to those found here…basically anything related to bikes, design, and innovation. In a recent post, Johann featured frames by Jaun Muzzi that are made from recycled plastic water…
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Hipster fixies in China
I spotted these neon colored fixies hanging in a small bike shop in Dongguan, China yesterday. I have noticed more and more young people riding bikes like these over here (where they are produced of course), and they certainly stand out among the Flying Pigeons and other dusty black workhorse bikes and trikes that are…
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“Design Behind the Bike” videos from The Open University
I mentioned The Open University’s “Design Behind the Bike” videos on Twitter last week, but the five part series is quite interesting and really deserves a post of it’s own. You can watch the first video in the series, History, in the frame above. Links to the other videos can be found here: Aesthetics (2/5)…
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Taking a break from the blog
If you are reading this, you probably know that Interbike is underway in Las Vegas this week. I started to write a post about it today, but I ran out of steam as soon I got started. That lack of motivation to post has been plaguing me for a while now (it is certainly not…
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Tips for having your design featured here
I have been amazed and delighted to see the traffic to Bicycle Design increase over the years…especially in the last year or so. The fact that more and more people are reading is great, but with only a few hours each week to spend on this blog, it has become much more difficult for me…
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Google Currents and other ways to connect with Bicycle Design
Many of you may already subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed. If you usually read Bicycle Design from a computer or large tablet, a feed reader is probably the best way to be alerted when new content is available. Increasingly though, many of you are visiting the blog from smaller mobile devices. I don’t know…
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A birthday tribute to JK Starley
In keeping with the theme of my post from earlier this week, I want to mention another old design that has influenced the bicycle we know today. Actually though, to say that John Kemp Starley’s mid 1880’s Rover safety bike merely influenced all of those that came after it would be a gross understatement. Unlike…
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Graeme Obree’s first test run in “the Beastie”
A few months ago, I mentioned Graeme Obree’s plan to attempt the human-powered land speed record in a machine of his own design. In September, his prone position HPV was not ready for the World Human Powered Speed Challenge at Battle Mountain, Nevada as originally planned, but Obree has continued work on the design with…