Jonas Damon’s iPad Case and Fruit Bowl

The way Jonas Damon sees it, designers these days fall into two camps: those who hold fast to the principles of legendary German industrial designer Dieter Rams and those who are partial to the camp and kitsch of pop artist Jeff Koons. It’s a theory Damon, creative director at New York's Frog Design office, picked up from his friend and fellow New York designer Ross Menuez — both of whom often produce work for Areaware, a design company that moves expertly back and forth along the Rams-Koons continuum. Damon is decidedly a Rams guy, which is perhaps why he feels so conflicted about the retro wooden enclosure he made for his iPad, one of the many things he’s built in his spare time for use around his apartment.
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Sruli Recht, Product Designer

Sighted on Design Milk: A Friday Five interview with the intriguing Icelandic designer Sruli Recht, whose studio is "a small cross-disciplinary practice caught somewhere between product design, tailoring and shoe making," it writes. In the story, Recht shares five of his materials inspirations, including the chest of an Atlantic Seabird given to him by a leather tanner.
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Julian Faulhaber, photographer

Sighted this week on The Morning News: "German photographer Julian Faulhaber captures public spaces — supermarkets and parking garages — in the moments between their construction and when they are opened for public use. His long-exposure photos, which remain untouched after developing and for which he uses only available lighting, look unreal and Photoshopped. But what does it mean to say that reality looks Photoshopped?"
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MoMA’s Creative Minds

Sighted on MoMA's Inside/Out blog: "Many of MoMA’s employees aren’t just guardians of the Museum’s collection: they are artists in their own right, and have found inspiration for their own work through their engagement with artwork shown at MoMA ... This new series of blog posts will focus on a few of MoMA’s many employee/artists, and will address the ways in which they have incorporated their daily work experiences into their own artistic processes."
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A Carpenter’s Tool Box

A glimpse inside the toolbox of Bruce Greenlaw, a carpenter and architectural woodworker in Northern California. He explains: "It never fails that, as I perform my rituals to prepare for carpentry, such as sharpening plane irons and lubing gears, I see tools as something more than merely form following function. If only for a moment, I see art, animated by timeless design, world geography, and memories—every bit as riveting as the architecture and furnishings it helps to create."
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Jason Miller’s Candle Stand

Believe it or not, Jason Miller’s a candle guy. Not to knock the chandelier that made him famous — or Roll & Hill, the eagerly anticipated lighting company he’ll launch this May — but there are times when the gentle glow of an incandescent filament just doesn’t compare to the real thing. After he renovated his new Brooklyn apartment last year, installing a carpeted conversation pit in the middle of the living room, Miller bought an armful of tapers and pillars from a shop in Woodstock and grouped them together on windowsills and side tables. It wasn’t long before he decided they needed their own purpose-built perch.
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Justine Reyes, Photographer

Sighted today on The Morning News: Taking inspiration from Dutch vanitas paintings, photographer Justine Reyes’s latest series “Vanitas” creates still lifes from contemporary objects, getting the composition, textures, and colors so precisely “right,” it’s a wonder we’re not seeing some 17th-century Flemish take on contemporary life.
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