Design for Progress benefit auction

Bid on Works By Design’s Biggest Names in Our First Design for Progress Auction

The day after the election in November, we launched Design For Progress, a fundraising initiative meant as a call to action for the design community to rally behind progressive causes. Today we're launching the first-ever Design For Progress auction on Paddle8, featuring 40 contemporary design objects by talents like Bower and Lindsey Adelman and benefitting the ACLU, Run for Something, Sierra Club, and Campaign Legal Center. Get involved by bidding, or just by helping spread the word.
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Nationale Portland gallery

This Portland Gallery Has Shown Only Female Artists Since the Beginning of 2017

Nationale is an art gallery in Portland, Oregon that represents eight emerging artists: four male, and four female. But since the beginning of 2017, the gallery has shown three female artists in quick succession — Amy Bernstein, a painter; Francesca Capone, a textile artist; and Emily Counts, a sculptor; whose work is everything we look for in a Sight Unseen subject — colorful, multidisciplinary, and meaningful. And while directors May Barruel and Gabi Lewton-Leopold swear that the suddenly gendered roster wasn't purposeful, it certainly feels refreshing in the current climate.
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Design and Art Are More Connected Than Ever at New York’s Newest Gallery

Whither Johnson Trading Gallery? The New York design gallery — which in its heyday introduced an American audience to the work of contemporary designers like Max Lamb, Kwangho Lee, Katie Stout, Aranda/Lasch, and more (not to mention Rafael de Cárdenas's epic first furniture collection) — had been relatively quiet of late. Now we know why: Earlier this month, it was announced that while JTG will continue selling vintage work, the contemporary artists in their stable will be absorbed into a new program at one of our favorite art galleries, Salon 94.
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10 Designers and Brands to Watch at Salone del Mobile

Of course we'll always head to Salone del Mobile to see what's new with some of our favorite companies like Vitra, Moroso, e15, Glas Italia, and Flos, as well as to scout the emerging talent section, Salone Satellite. But the sheer number of independent designers who are either planning their own booths or who have major projects with big-name companies seems to have increased this year — including Raw Color for Nanimarquina, Max Lamb for Bitossi, Philippe Malouin for Resident, and Atelier de Troupe and Lambert & Fils at Euroluce. Most of the launches are still under wraps for now, but we've picked 10 of our favorite designers and brands to give you a sneak peek of what's to come starting April 4.
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Week of March 13, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a new place to shop in Florida, French high design comes down to earth, and a look inside the ultimate Venetian design destination.
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Site Specific: LA at Austere, 2015

Invited by the downtown L.A. shop Austere to curate a selling exhibition of new furniture and products, we called upon our favorite L.A. design studios, including Only Love Is Real, Waka Waka, Eric Trine, and more.
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Your Search for the Perfect Coffee Table Ends Here

What is it with designers named Jonathan? Our preoccupation with the Perth, Australia–born, Los Angeles–based Jonathan Zawada in some ways reminds us of the way we feel about Jonathan Muecke — they don't release new work all that often, but when they do, we seem to want every single piece of it. In Zawada's case, that spartan output may be a professional necessity — Zawada spends much of his time creating digital art, album covers, and advertisements in his more commercial practice. But this week finally saw the official expansion of Zawada's Affordances line, which we first covered way back in 2013.
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Quiet Town stylish bathroom accessories

Meet the Couple That’s Reinventing Bathroom Style

Call it what you will — wash room, water closet, commode, loo — the bathroom is nothing if not the unsung hero of many a home and apartment. It is a place of quiet refuge for space-deprived urbanites and, if Pinterest is any indication, an actual spa if you live outside New York City. No one knows this better than Lisa and Michael Fine, the founders of Quiet Town (she, a stylist, he, a photographer). They've taken their complementary skill sets and combined them to make a covetable line of bath essentials including shower curtains, rugs, and wall hooks that pleasingly upend convention while marrying (often geometric) form to function.
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A Brooklyn Home Accessories Brand On Mining the 1970s For Inspiration

Phoebe Sung and Peter Buer — the couple behind the textiles and accessories line Cold Picnic — make conversation-starters. Their witty, often abstracted designs work as décor, for sure, but they also exist as their own little worlds. Recently, Sung and Buer took this idea of imaginary landscapes one step further, turning their newest rugs into a series of dioramas that are as evocative as they are fun.
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Week of March 6, 2017

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: linoleum gets a big thumbs up, a dive bar in a Super 8 motel gets a jaw-dropping reinvention, and a master of Dutch design gets a beautifully designed retrospective (above).
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A Turner Prize–Winning Architecture Collective Sets Up Shop in Brooklyn

U.K. architecture collective Assemble has created an installation — dubbed “A Factory As It Might Be” — in the courtyard of A/D/O, the brand-new, forward-looking design space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The temporary factory features an industrial clay extruder, which Assemble — and their Liverpool-based social enterprise the Granby Workshop, along with fellow collaborators — used to make the factory’s cladding as well as a host of products from dinnerware to planters. The effort is the debut US project for the team, who famously became the first architects to win the Turner Prize in 2015.
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An Up-And-Coming Dutch Duo On Why They Don’t Identify As “Designers”

In 2008, when Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf and Laurens Manders began collaborating, they kept their studios separate. It wasn’t until four years later that they officially founded their company, compounding ideas and names — the latter of which was deemed a challenge until the Internet threw up the solution. “We were looking to find out if images of our products had been published, and we found an image of our lamps with the name ‘Daphna Laurens’ written above it.” Upon reading this, they realized that it was exactly what they’d been looking for — an anonymous name that symbolized their way of working together; a new ego that has allowed them to playfully carve out a space for themselves as form-flexing experimenters.
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We’re Taking the Day Off to Support Women’s Rights

Today, across the world, women — when they can — are staying home from their jobs, refusing to spend money, wearing red, or heading out to marches and rallies as part of A Day Without A Woman, a 24-hour strike to support equality, justice, and human rights for women. Sight Unseen, of course, is run by women, and so in lieu of content, we're posting a simple statement of support. We'll see you in the streets.
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