onfocus

My Dad has a collection of small table radios from the 30's through the 50's. The radios are great examples of early industrial design, and the new medium of plastic made far-out shapes possible. The designers of these things really had fun within the fairly simple constraints of: a speaker, a way to tune, and some tubes. It's fun studying his collection, and one night while I was visiting over the holidays I took a bunch of pictures of the dials. The dials don't show the wacky body designs, but they do show the varied display approaches to basically the same information. Once into the 50's (through today), design was pretty much standardized across brands, cutting-edge designers moved on to other objects, and you didn't get the variety that you had in radio's early days.


more >>

I was playing around with the settings on my digital camera and took them in black and white.