For His New Collab With Kvadrat, Artist Danh Vo Wrapped an Entire House in a Rediscovered Nanna Ditzel Textile

Kvadrat’s newest fabric release, Sisu, doesn’t look particularly remarkable in photos at first glance. A thick wool woven in 16 different two-color pairings, it closely resembles its cousin, Hallingdal, the best-selling textile designed in the 1960s by Danish icon Nanna Ditzel. But when we learned the full story behind its discovery and development — in collaboration with the artist Danh Vo — it was so interesting we didn’t even know where to begin telling it.
More

The Designers on Our Radar After This Year’s Design Parade in Hyères and Toulon

As we hurtle towards the September make-up version of Salone del Mobile — which will mark the first major in-person design fair since COVID began, advisedly or not — we first wanted to turn our attention to the return of one of our favorite smaller fairs, the annual Design Parade in Hyères and Toulon from Villa Noailles in the south of France. As always, we're smitten with the competition format for these two festivals, which seems to unearth amazingly talented designers we've never heard of.
More

This Exhibition Shows How Cranbrook Helped Pioneer the Cross-Disciplinary, Craft-Based, Experimental Design and Art of Today

Most people know the highlights of the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s storied 90-year history, from its campus by Eliel Saarinen to its role as a breeding ground for the stars of mid-century modernism. But in June, the school launched the results of a four-year deep-dive into its own history — in the form of a sprawling exhibition and a 600-page book, both called With Eyes Opened — that offer a much more nuanced view of Cranbrook’s game-changing influence. We spoke with curator Andrew Blauvelt about 6 artworks and objects by varied practitioners that were part of that narrative.
More

With Prints Inspired By Art-Store Pen-Test Doodles, These Curtains Are ‘Free and Wild’

Sarah Illenberger has a talent for recontextualizing everyday items in ways that are deceptively simple, yet at the same time so clever that there's an irresistible kind of magic in it. The same is true for her new collaboration with Danish textile purveyor Kvadrat, a series of three vibrant curtain panels created by scanning the little pads of paper people test pens on in stationery stores — the unremarkable made remarkable, through little more than a flash of creative inspiration and a change in scale.
More

Week of July 12, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a rainbow-colored housewares store in Berlin, the latest extruded-plastic works by James Shaw, a group show of vases by 19 ceramicists, and a highlight from this year's Design Parade in France (above).
More

A Playful Pét-nat, and Other Graphic Design Picks for July

Each month The Brand Identity shares with our readers a selection of the most interesting studios, packaging designs, and branding and identity projects featured recently on their site. This month: Colorful packaging for a sustainable beauty line, a photographer with a font inspired by the early 1900s, and a playful identity for a Ukranian wine brand (above).
More

Four New Design Hotels Across the Globe to Fuel Your Summer-Travel Fantasies

Travel took on a whole new meaning — and existential desperation — this summer, both for lockdown-weary regular people and for a travel industry that endured forced dormancy for the better part of a year. While not all of us have the privilege of much mobility over the next few months, we've put together another roundup of four recent design-hotel openings for both the doers and the dreamers among us: The Sunseeker, White Water, Maslina Resort, and Hotel Ami.
More

Sight Unseen x La Prairie, 2021

After a successful collaboration in 2020, the beauty brand La Prairie once again asked Sight Unseen to create content for its newest launch, in the form of three eye-catching animated GIFs shot by Lauren Coleman.
More

Week of June 7, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two truly excellent uses of glass blocks in interiors, a reissue of Tobia Scarpa's first-ever product design, a foot-shaped glass vase we're obsessing over, and a sinuous new table by Erik Olovsson, above.
More

Want to Travel the World Living in Airbnbs for a Year? Here’s Your Chance!

For many of us, our careers no longer require us to be chained to cities like New York and San Francisco. That means we can live out all kinds of unconventional fantasies, like buying a house in Maine, or going nomadic and changing locales with every Zoom meeting. It's in the spirit of the latter that Airbnb has launched an insanely good opportunity for those of us with the travel bug: Live Anywhere, a campaign in which 12 people will get to spend 10 months living for free in various Airbnbs, pretty much anywhere they choose. Keep reading to find out how to apply!
More

A ’70s-Inspired Sunscreen, and Other Graphic Design Picks for June

Each month The Brand Identity shares with our readers a selection of the most interesting studios, packaging designs, and branding and identity projects featured recently on their site. This month: An identity for a Black- and women-owned L.A. bookstore, a quirky custom typeface for a London underwear brand, and colorful, '70s-inspired packaging for a sunscreen brand (above).
More