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ink (1)Open Secrets: Photographs of Japan (1)
One Car Per Family (6)
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OBSERVED
Don't forget to check out the Design Observer store: The go-to place to get your t-shirts, DoubleTake magazines and books from our editors. [JSC]Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in LA, Charlotte, Seattle, Tokyo, NYC, Houston, Madison, Detroit, SF and Boston. Companies hiring include Bon Appetit Magazine, Christie's, Williams-Sonoma, Lacoste, Hewlett Packard, Roz Goldfarb, UNICEF and Houdini. Post your job today. [JSC]
Design writer (and valued Change Observer contributor) Bradford McKee has been named editor-in-chief of Landscape Architecture magazine. [JL]
On the trials of being a design juror comparing apples and oranges (or social housing and folding electrical plugs). (Thanks to Brad McKee.) [JL]
Green Patriot Posters is accepting poster design submissions to be included in an upcoming book that brings together the strongest contemporary graphic design promoting sustainability and the fight against climate change. Deadline is March 27th. Submit here. [JL]
British student Min-Kyu Choi's radical redesign of the humble three-pin plug has won the top prize in the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year Awards. [MB]
"The Solo Traveler lid is a substitute for a mother’s breast – what we might call nature’s original travel lid." Steve Heller on the Freudian subtext of takeout coffee. [MB]
Der Scutt, architect of Trump Tower and master of the reclad, dies at 75. [MB]
The coolest interior design studio website we've ever seen. (Thanks to Kristina DiMatteo.) [JL]
For an interactive periodic table — and in celebration of 2011 being the International Year of Chemistry — the Chemical Heritage Foundation is looking for students to create short documentary-style videos about individual elements. (Thanks to Carol Schwartz.) [JH]
Karen Horton scores big at the Chelsea Flea Market. Her find? Saul Bass matchbook covers for Hunt-Wesson. More here. [JSC]
Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in Atlanta, DC, Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, London, Chicago, SF, Nashville and Cincinnati. Companies hiring include Digital Scientists, Atlantic Media Company, Almighty, 3M, Hot Studio, WNET.ORG, 5th & Ocean and Boltnet Inc. Post your job today. [JSC]
Applications are now being accepted for Sahre, Victore, Wilker 2010. [MB]
Based on my talk about clients at Creative Mornings, Hal Siegel posts A Client Bill of Rights. [MB]
The Yale University Library's Arts of the Book Collection includes a mostly uncatalogued collection of nearly one million bookplates. Slide shows here and here. (Thanks to Andrea Montfried.) [MB]
Lovely, gifted design writer Sarah Verdone dies after a long struggle with cancer. Our heartfelt condolences to her husband, Tucker Viemeister, and daughters, Josephine and Louisa. [JL]
Arial: it's a little bit bullshit! [MB]
Attendees at this year's Design Indaba conference in Cape Town were treated to crowd-pleasing video mashups like this one: stunning. (Thanks to Malcolm Drenttel.) [JH]
On May 13th, 1946, Jon Gnagy became the first performer on the first show broadcast on the Empire State Building's newly-installed television antenna. Remembering "Learn to Draw with Jon Gnagy," the world's first television art teacher. [MB]
It's the Dreaded Killer Jellyfish of Graphic Design Favors: now available as a poster! [MB]
David Pearson, the man behind the legendary Penguin Great Ideas series, designs beautiful handmade covers for the books of Cormac McCarthy. (Via AceJet.) [MB]
From his Abstract City blog, a collection of maps invented by the always amazing Christoph Niemann. [MB]
Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in Cambridge, NYC, Nashville, SF, Chicago, Cincinnati, DC, Atlanta and London. Companies hiring include Kaplan Test Prep, Clementine Paper, Bryant Park Corporation, Lowe's, Samsung, Alien Skin Software and Digitas. Post your job today. [JSC]
Greg Kindall's gallery of book trade labels. Exquisite. [JH]
Honest movie posters. (Via Kottke.) [MB]
When Herbert Matter got the job to design a new logo for the New Haven Railroad he literally went through hundreds of sketches before arriving at the final logo. [MB]
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Places
Open Secrets: Photographs of Japan
By Alan ThomasEarlier this week we featured Robert Taylor's review of Fumihiko Maki's Nurturing Dreams and Shigeru Ban's latest monograph. Here we present a portfolio of photographs by Alan Thomas, of images of Japanese cities. These photographs, says Thomas, "take the measure of Japan’s spaces where they are most easily overlooked: the vernacular architecture of its backstreets, the layered density of neighborhoods, the ephemeral effects of constant building and rebuilding."
READ MORE | COMMENTS (1)
Observatory
Peter Bilak & Satya Rajpurohit: Interview on Typography
By Dirk WachowiakGerman typographer Dirk Wachowiak recently caught up with the Czech-born Peter Bilak and Indian designer Satya Rajpurohit to discuss both their recent collaboration — the Hindi version of Bilak’s Fedra.
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Observatory
The Lines That Divide
By Andy ChenCan't "art" and "design" approaches coexist simultaneously in our practice? Why are we so eager to create a cut-and-dry dichotomy between the two? These questions lie at the center of the debate as the selection process continues for a new Head of Department for the Communication Art & Design course at London's Royal College of Art.
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Places
Words and Pictures
By Robert TaylorArchitects Fumihiko Maki and Shigeru Ban have each recently published books. Maki's Nurturing Dreams is an essay collection by a stellar member of the postwar generation that played a central role not only in rebuilding Japan but also in defining contemporary Japanese architecture. Ban's 1985–2007 is a mid-career monograph by an influential practitioner in the generation that followed. In his review, Boston-based architect Robert Taylor notes that the books represent different traditions of architectural bookmaking, and each, he says, merits our attention.
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By Eric BakerChange Observer
Kopernik
By Kaomi GoetzA new website follows the increasingly familiar model of funding socially progressive design and technology projects a few dollars at a time.
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Observatory
Becoming a Designer in the Age of Aquarius
By Steven Heller What’s the point of reviewing a design book that is over 40 years old, long out of print and tied to the style and technology of 1968? Well, S. Neil Fujita’s Aim for a Job in Graphic Design / Art (Richards Rosen Press, New York) is a fount of professional intelligence for an emerging field. It is also a slice of lost graphic design history worth reprising.
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Places
Critical Beats
By Nancy LevinsonAlexandra Lange began her recent Observatory essay, "Why Nicolai Ouroussoff is Not Good Enough," with a provocative allusion to the possibility that the job of architecture critic "might be doomed," and that the current critic for the New York Times might be "the last architecture critic." Lange then concentrates on Ouroussoff's sensibility and approach, arguing eloquently that he is "making a poor case for keeping the breed." She doesn't really delve into whether the field has a future. So here we'd like to take up this thorny topic, and to suggest that architecture criticism, at least as practiced by our paper of record, is doomed, that in fact it's been losing force for years — and for reasons that have to do not just with the quality of the critical players but also with the rules of the critical game.
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Observatory
Death’s Bloom
By Adam Harrison Levy From 1913 to 1971 five thousand one hundred and twenty one mentally ill patients were cremated on the grounds of the Oregon State Hospital. Their remains were sealed in copper canisters. In 2000 they were removed from their institutional crypt, placed on plain pine shelves in a storeroom, and were left virtually forgotten until David Maisel heard of their existence and photographed them.
READ MORE | COMMENTS (15)
Other Recent Posts
CHANGE OBSERVER: One Car Per Family
CHANGE OBSERVER: Tinder Boxes
OBSERVER MEDIA: Aspen Design Summit: Film
PLACES: Designed Landscapes
PLACES: Thomas Schumacher Symposium
CHANGE OBSERVER: The Butterfly People
OBSERVATORY: Today, 03.06.10
PLACES: The Architect as Urbanist: Part 2
PLACES: The Architect as Urbanist: Part 1
PLACES: This Place is a Message
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS
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The Lines That Divide
Kaomi Goetz
Kopernik
Robert Taylor
Words and Pictures
ADS VIA THE DECK
DESIGN OBSERVER JOBS
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The Future Metropolitan Landscape2007
Editors Page
Caring for Places: Memory, Vision and Metropolis
Section 1: Wasted and Reclaimed Landscapes - Designing New Landscapes for the Metropolis
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Audio: Design Matters Archive
Vaughan OliverVaughan Oliver is a graphic designer, artist and author.
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Observatory Archive
Books + Store: Books Received
ecoDesign: The SourcebookAlastair Fuad-Luke
Reinventing the Automobile
William J. Mitchell, Christopher E. Borroni-Bird & Lawrence D. Burns
Rework
Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hasson
In Pursuit of Elegance
Matthew E. May
Innovation X
Adam Richardson
Integral Lars Müller
Lars Müller
I LEGO N.Y.
Christoph Niemann
The Oxford Companion to the Book
Michael F. Suarez & H. R. Woudhuysen
The Good Men Project
T. Matlack, J. Houghton & L. Bean
What Would Google Do?
Jeff Jarvis
More Books Received >>
Recommended Books
Snapshot Chronicles
Barbara Levine & Stephanie Snyder
With a powerful design by Martin Venezky, Levine's collection of found photo albums frames a rich, collective narrative of times, technologies and lives long gone. Recommended reading for anyone interested in personal narrative, vernacular photography, and visual memory. [JH]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Barbara Levine & Stephanie Snyder
With a powerful design by Martin Venezky, Levine's collection of found photo albums frames a rich, collective narrative of times, technologies and lives long gone. Recommended reading for anyone interested in personal narrative, vernacular photography, and visual memory. [JH]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Trouble In Paradise: Examining Discord Between Nature and Society
Julie Sasse
More than 50 artists participated in a Tucson Museum of Art exhibit that explored our apparently bottomless capacity to ravage the planet. The range of media — from color-saturated photographs of uranium tailings to cartoon-like paintings of drowning polar bears — is impressive, as is the artists’ struggle to resist the temptation to make disaster look beautiful. [NL]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Julie Sasse
More than 50 artists participated in a Tucson Museum of Art exhibit that explored our apparently bottomless capacity to ravage the planet. The range of media — from color-saturated photographs of uranium tailings to cartoon-like paintings of drowning polar bears — is impressive, as is the artists’ struggle to resist the temptation to make disaster look beautiful. [NL]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Overpainted Photographs
Gerhard Richter
I know it's unfashionable to say but these images are heartbreakingly beautiful. Anyone interested in visual communication should at least have a look. Richter has found a rare and original hybrid between mechanical reproduction (photographs) and subjective expression (painting). In addition, Siri Hustvedt’s catalogue essay is a gem. [AHL]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
Gerhard Richter
I know it's unfashionable to say but these images are heartbreakingly beautiful. Anyone interested in visual communication should at least have a look. Richter has found a rare and original hybrid between mechanical reproduction (photographs) and subjective expression (painting). In addition, Siri Hustvedt’s catalogue essay is a gem. [AHL]
Buy This Book >>
More Recommended Books >>
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