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07.20.15

Up and Coming

Stephanie Specht, Graphic Designer

People always ask where exactly we find our story subjects, and for the past two years, the most frequent answer has invariably been Instagram. And it’s true, in the case of Belgian-born graphic designer Stephanie Specht, we were fans of her @spechtstudio handle long before we ever knew who was behind it. But our interest was piqued even further in recent months after Specht got the imprimatur from two friends with an impeccable knack for collaborations: Sandeep Salter of McNally Jackson Picture Room, where Specht released an edition earlier this year, and Alex Proba, with whom Specht created this series of plant-inspired posters. 
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07.16.15

Up and Coming

Lottie Hughes, Artist

London-based Lottie Hughes graduated with a Bachelor's degree in fine art only two years ago but she’s already on our radar, thanks to an exceedingly well-kept Tumblr. “My designs were initially a way for me to come up with compositions for my paintings but the more I learned, and the more confident I became with Photoshop, these have now become the main body of my work,” says the 24-year-old designer. Hughes primarily takes inspiration from artists like Camille Walala, Atelier Bingo, Trudy Benson, and Klaus Merkel, as well as from everyday life in London. "My designs are abstract versions of what I see on a day-to-day basis — colors clashing, angles of buildings interlocking, movement and light."
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07.15.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

Yonatan Vinitsky at Rome’s Frutta Gallery

"Loose Ends," an exhibition by Israeli artist Yonatan Vinitsky was on view at Rome's Frutta Gallery from March until May of this year, but it will be a long time before we get these rightly amazing images out of our heads. For his solo show, the young Haifa-born, London-based artist created eight coiled-metal sculptures, which hung suspended from the ceiling, as well as eight wall-based works that represented blown-up reproductions of the kind of backseat storage pockets you find on public transportation.
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07.11.15

Saturday Selects

Week of July 6, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a drool-worthy closet tour, a much-anticipated nail art collaboration, and a colorful update on one of our favorite pieces of furniture, the three-legged stool from Makers & Brothers (above).
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07.10.15

Shopping

Top 5: Beach Towels

A periodic nod to object typologies both obscure and ubiquitous, featuring five of our favorite recent examples. Today, the subject is beach towels, whose increasingly complex graphic patterns offer more ways than ever to stand out on the sand.
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06.27.15

Saturday Selects

Week of June 22, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a bounty of colorful goodies to go along with America's end-of-week joy hangover: euphoria–inducing interiors, retro-futuristic group shows, and lots and lots of colorful Op-Art — plus a deconstructed jungle gym (above)!
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06.25.15

Up and Coming

Justin Hunt Sloane, Artist

It can be hard to pin down exactly what it is Brooklyn-based artist and designer Justin Hunt Sloane actually does. He graduated with a BFA in printmaking and interactive design from Art Center, but while there, he became interested in the school's famed automotive program and began dabbling in classes like rapid prototyping and fabrication technology. Since moving to New York, he's held day jobs as a website designer for Creative Time, or, currently, senior designer at the branding agency Wolff Olins, but in his freelance work and spare time, he makes everything from drawings to etchings to self-published books to album covers to sculptures.
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06.24.15

Up and Coming

Nina Cho, Furniture Designer

“One of the most important ideas in traditional Korean architecture and art is the aesthetic of emptiness — practicing the beauty of the void,” Nina Cho explains to me over the phone from her studio in Detroit, where she recently set up camp after graduating from Cranbrook. “In painting, the unpainted portion is as important as the portion that was painted; it’s about respecting the emptiness as much as the object.” Cho should know; she was born in the States but grew up in Seoul, and as a child she would often visit traditional Korean architecture sites. But little did she know the impact those visits would have on her future career.
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06.17.15

Sighted

Designers Interpret the Classic Tolix A Chair

We aren't quite sure how we missed this project — considering both our affinity for the classic Tolix A chair (we might own seven (!) of them ourselves) and our affection for the designers involved — but in Milan last month, the French company celebrated its 80th anniversary and in doing so invited eight design studios to reinterpret its most famous offering.
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06.12.15

Excerpt: Exhibition

ECAL Takes Over Apartment 50 in Le Corbusier’s Radiant City

Since it was renovated in the early 2000s and restored to its original 1952 condition, Apartment 50 in Le Corbusier's famous Cité Radieuse housing complex in Marseilles, France, has played host to a rotating cast of designers — Jasper Morrison in 2008 followed by the Bouroullecs, Konstantin Grcic, and, perhaps most successfully, Pierre Charpin. But a group of Swiss design students may have just completed our favorite intervention yet.
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06.10.15

Shopping

Top 5: Dust Pans

Our Top 5 column is a periodic nod to object typologies both obscure and ubiquitous, with five of our favorite recent examples highlighted in each post. Today, the subject is dust pans, whose utilitarian beauty is being rediscovered by a new generation of retailers and designers.
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