Ask the Experts: How Do I Get Started With PR?

Whether you’ve been in the business for years or are just launching your studio, PR can be a powerful tool for boosting your reputation and visibility as a designer. But, as an independent creative or small business, we know your daily to-do list can seem insurmountable. Is doing PR on your own worth the effort? What can PR really offer, and how do you get started? As design fair season ramps up, Sight Unseen has partnered with Hello Human, a PR company for creative entrepreneurs, for a new series that breaks down some of the most common questions about the often nebulous world of public relations. Here, we’ll introduce you to the basics. 
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Meet the New Wave of Ultra-Affordable PR Services Making It Easier Than Ever to Get Published

In almost every sense imaginable 2020 has been an epic fail of a year, and yet thanks to eight months of collective introspection and recalibration, silver linings have already begun to appear. Today we're taking a closer look at one of them, which could yield huge benefits for early- and mid-career creatives: Some of the best PR people we know have recently launched affordable programs geared towards smaller clients, offering a la carte courses and consultations without the sky-high monthly retainers.
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What Makes An Ideal Hotel Room? We Asked 9 Design Insiders

Looking back on my travels, I see that hotels are often the thing I get most wrong, either from pure laziness or a less-than-ideal budget. But what if I could consult with a panel of experts to make sure I never stayed at a dud again? As part of our recent partnership with Hotel Tonight — the app that offers booking deals on some of the world’s best design and boutique properties — we turned to some of our favorite design-world insiders to get the scoop on where to stay, what's trending in the world of travel, and how exactly those details can make or break your stay.
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The 5 Things You’ll Find In Our (Arlo Skye x Sight Unseen) Suitcase

Whether you're heading home for Thanksgiving, traveling to Miami for Art Basel, or just using all that holiday time off to go someplace exotic (do Americans still take vacation??), we are about to hit peak travel season. Lucky for you, our new Arlo Skye x Sight Unseen suitcase is set to begin shipping just as it kicks into high gear. Here are the five things you'll always find in our suitcase.
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10 Key Designs For Your Bedroom, According to the Guys at TRNK

When the new luxury mattress brand WRIGHT decided to celebrate its launch with a pop-up shop in New York (pictured above), it tapped Tariq Dixon and Nick Nemechek of the popular online retailer TRNK to design it. Even full of revelers at WRIGHT's launch party, the space still looked so chill and lovely that we decided to invite the duo to give us a TRNK-style lesson in how to create the perfect bedroom, complete with the 10 key objects they'd recommend filling it with.
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10 Things We’re Looking Forward to at This Year’s Salone del Mobile

When we attended our very first Salone del Mobile fair in Milan a decade ago, we were instantly swept up in the magic of an event that’s served as the epicenter of the contemporary design world since 1961, and that each year packs a 2.5 million square-foot convention center (plus an entire surrounding city) full of everything that's new and next in furniture and lighting, from future classics by mega-brands to prototypes by design-school grads. Here are the 10 things we're most looking forward to at this year's show, which begins April 12.
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L.A. Jewelry Designer Kathleen Whitaker

For the past few years, Kathleen Whitaker's name has been practically synonymous with the ubiquitous gold dot and line earrings that are a staple in boutiques everywhere. But her work has been evolving recently, making it the perfect time to check in and see what's motivating her now.
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Creative Women at Work: Jade Lai

A lot of creatives these days flaunt some sort of hyphenate job title, but Creatures of Comfort owner Jade Lai might just be the most epic multitasker we know. The Hong Kong–born, New York–based Lai runs Creatures outposts in both New York and Los Angeles; she designs her own in-house line of effortlessly cool women's clothes, shoes, and accessories; she sources the best menswear, womenswear, and housewares from other designers for her shops (everyone from Christian Wijnants to Jessica Hans); and she champions the greater art and design community through a series of pop-ups and exhibitions at both store locations. (Remember our Shape Shop?!) In the final installment of our Creative Women at Work series with Shinola, Lai shares the items and rituals that keep her continually inspired.
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Creative Women at Work: Kyle DeWoody

If there weren't already plenty of reasons for us to love Kyle DeWoody — her friendliness, her amazing taste, the fact that she's not afraid to rock a baseball cap — she's also a poster child for blurring disciplinary boundaries, something we've long championed as well. She even named her company after the idea: She explains Grey Area, the online gallery she founded with Manish Vora in 2011, as "the undefined space between art and design, where art is made functional and the functional is made art." Even her own background has defied any categorization: Before founding Grey Area, she moved from curating to art consulting to design to film production and journalism. (In fact, DeWoody hooked up with Vora when he was running the arts website Art Log, for whom she used to write.) Her wide-ranging interests are in part what make Grey Area so great — the gallery sells everything from plush, hand-stitched Sharpies to elegant leaning brass bar carts, from plaster iPhone pillows by Snarkitecture to cat-themed beach towels by Andrew Kuo. DeWoody is constantly scouting new talent from unexpected sources, so for our Creative Women at Work series with Shinola, we got in touch to find out exactly how she does it. Here are some of her workplace essentials.
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Creative Women at Work: Bec Brittain

It's amazing what a difference five years makes. When we first profiled New York lighting Bec Brittain in 2009, she was an artist and creative director at Lindsey Adelman's studio, but her own design portfolio was so slim we featured only one of her creations: a chandelier she'd made for her own home out of off-the-shelf parts from McMaster-Carr. Fast forward five years and Brittain, who left Adelman's studio to form a solo practice in 2011, is now one of the most exciting, in-demand lighting designers on the American design scene.
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What Your Favorite Designers Are Listening To This Winter

When winter gets as unbearable as it has been for the past few weeks here in New York, we find the tiniest ways of coping — allowing ourselves to occasionally venture out of the house in our sweatpants, say, or to eat an inadvisable amount of ramen, or to shirk all our errands in favor of staying in bed just a little while longer. Music can't technically warm us up, of course, but it helps too; it keeps our minds off the cold, keeps us moving. And for those who spend their days in huge, drafty workshops, doubly so. With that in mind — and inspired in part by RoAndCo's annual "Wintry Mix" — we invited 13 designers and studios to share with Sight Unseen the songs they've been listening to this winter, and to tell us what they've been working on while listening to them. Check out their playlists on Spotify after the jump.
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Joel Evey, Graphic Designer

Joel Evey owes his career to Pixar, believe it or not. He made a name for himself as part of the team that was bringing edgy, high-brow graphics to Urban Outfitters back in 2010 — with a style some like to call the “new ugly” — but at age 15, it was Toy Story that changed his life. “I saw it for the first time and was like, wow, that’s crazy! You can do that with a computer?” recalls Evey, who at the time was already about to head off to college early to study computer science. Instead of hard coding, he decided to pursue animation and 3-D graphics instead. “But animations took so long to render that I started to think, ‘Well, what happens when I take this image and just render one of them?’ Then, ‘What if I put type on it? What would that look like?’” The rest, as they say, is history.
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