Fredericks & Mae Offers Classic Games With a Design Twist

By Ann Binlot June 7, 2014

fredericks mae offers classic games design twist amp — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Don’t you think games would be more fun to play if they looked good? That’s what Jolie Mae Signorile and Gabriel Fredericks Cohen thought after they met over a love of for materials. Think feathers, thread, gold and paper. In 2008 that love of materials made them come up with the idea of Fredericks & Mae, a collaborative design practice that offers “a series of objects for the home, garden and sky.”

The pair basically took games —dominoes, darts, and backgammon to name a few — that we’ve all played, and put their own special design twist on things, so now they can be used not just as entertainment, but as decorative objects within the home. The pair go all over the world to search for materials to embellish their objects with. “We get our materials from all over — kite paper from India, feathers from bird sanctuaries in Queens and California, wooden shapes from Ohio, and horse hair from Mongolia, just to name a few,” they recently said in Apartment Therapy.

Recommended Videos

If you’re looking for something especially season appropriate, take a look at their Endless Summer collection, which offers games like beach tennis with the company emblem, a bull’s eye, olive branches and stars painted on, or flag dominoes — which is, you guessed it, a set of dominoes with flags from countries like Spain and Japan on them, or the travel checkers for a day at the beach with a square design painted in the negative space. Or if you’re feeling particularly competitive, check out their War Games, which has the coolest dartboard and darts that we’ve seen in our lives. The board doubles as a cool object to hang on your wall and the darts are decorated with with feathers and different shades of colorful thread that they’ve wrapped around them.

Father’s Day is coming up, so might we suggest something from Fredericks & Mae? We bet he’d be pretty excited to get something from them.

For more information, visit fredericksandmae.myshopify.com.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Ann Binlot is a New York-based freelance writer who contributes to publications like The Economist, Wallpaper*, Monocle…

Culture

NYT Connections hints and answers for October 11, 2024

From the people that bring you the crossword and Spelling Bee, Connections is the latest NYT Games sensation that has the internet abuzz. Although the game is still word-based, Connections is fundamentally different than many of the other games released by NYT Games and can be uniquely frustrating as a result. It tests your ability to group words together into coherent categories and presents a different challenge every time you play it. And, like Wordle and so many other NYT Games, you can share your results with friends and compare them as soon as you're done.

Connections is still in a sort of testing phase at the moment, but given the game's success to date, it seems clear that the game could have the kind of legs that make it a long-running success that people integrate into their everyday lives. Like Wordle, and unlike the crossword, it's a relatively quick game, which means that playing it doesn't have to eat up your entire day. That's part of the reason so many people have gotten devoted to it and why you may be seeing more Connections results in group chats and on your social media feeds than you were a few weeks ago.
How to play Connections
The premise of Connections is relatively straightforward. The game gives you 16 words that are totally unsorted, and your job is to sort those words into four categories of four. A group of words may be combined because they're all associated with another word or thing, like "car parts" for example, or because they have something else in common, like "ends with x." The categories can be almost anything, and the smart folks behind Connections work extra hard to make sure it's hard to file things away neatly into categories. There's plenty of ambiguity, which is why you get four wrong guesses before you lose the game.

Culture

Want to spook yourself? Check out some of the best horror movies ever made

From The Thing to Get Out, these are some of the most riveting horror movies ever made

The Shining

A great horror movie is often something distinct from most of the genre's offerings. Few genres have been more historically reliable at the box office, and that's in part because a pretty good horror movie is all audiences need to get their thrills.

The movies on this list, though, stand out above others from the genre. The very best horror movies leave you unsettled not just while you're watching them, but also for weeks afterward. They remind you of how horrifying the world around you can be, even as they also offer delights that can make them endlessly rewatchable. Without further ado, these are the best horror movies ever made:

Culture

Prime Big Deal Days Samsung The Frame Deals 2024: Still available

Samsung's The Frame on a wall surrounded by paintings and docarations

Update 10/11/24: If you were planning to buy Samsung's The Frame TV during Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days but you weren't able to, you're in luck because most of the discounts that were offered during the shopping event are still online. If the specific size that you want is still on sale, you better hurry with your purchase as we're not sure how much time is remaining before these prices return to normal.

Some Prime Day deals are still available after the close of Prime Big Deal Days, including some spectacular Prime Day TV deals. For this page, we've focused specifically on Samsung The Frame TV deals that you can still shop.