Atlanta Artist Kevin Byrd

Dazzle camouflage was a frenetic patterning applied to ships during World War I to scramble the depth perception of enemies — not exactly a motif you'd expect to see applied to the walls of a major corporate office. Yet inside the new San Francisco headquarters for Dolby, Atlanta painter and dazzle enthusiast Kevin Byrd was given carte blanche to do just that.
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Stas Volovik, Painter

Born in Uzbekistan and now living in Berlin, Volovik didn’t pursue any formal artistic training but rather taught himself the principles of abstraction.
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Week of August 31, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, we're keeping it short so we can enjoy the last gasp of summer this holiday weekend, sharing just a few discoveries like the colorful anthropomorphic ceramics of Branden Huntley and a new marble-faced watch by AARK and Daniel Emma. See you at the beach!
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Tunisia Furniture Studio Marlo & Isaure

When we discovered the design duo Marlo & Isaure — founded by former ECAL classmates Marlo Kara (Swiss-Greek, born in Geneva) and Isaure Bouyssonie (French, born in Tunisia) — we assumed they were simply a furniture studio, creating products like the Fabrique lights, pictured above, for galleries and manufacturers. But it turns out that assumption was only half correct.
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Top 5: Bookends

A periodic nod to object typologies both obscure and ubiquitous, featuring five of our favorite recent examples. Today, our subject is the bookend — a.k.a. five new ways to make your killer design library look even cooler.
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Das Wilde Denken: Depot Basel in Berlin

There's an easy way to tell whether or not you were born to be a maker: sit down at a table piled with random junk and scraps of material, and see how long it takes you to conjure something useful and/or beautiful. For the Das Wilde Denken workshop last month, Matylda Krzykowski and the team behind Depot Basel joined forces with my favorite design/fashion boutique in Berlin, Baerck, and invited a handful of local designers to spend two days doing just that. The results, of course, were amazing — where an observer like myself couldn't really make the mental leap past a jumble of discarded trolley wheels and wooden boards, this group envisioned lamps, sculptural table mirrors, jewelry trays, and stationery sets. The curators saw it as a chance for the designers to get back to basics and enjoy the simplicity of an open-ended crafting session, but they also likened the experience to reconnecting with childhood, when making wasn't goal-oriented but immediate and spontaneous — hence the name Das Wilde Denken, which means "wild thinking." (Momentary flashback to Malin Gabriela Nordin's children's workshop, which we featured last month.) All of the pieces created during the session, a selection of which are featured in the slideshow after the jump, will be on view and for sale at Baerck through February 2.
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Melbourne Artist Matthew Dettmer

Melbourne-based Matthew Dettmer's work spans painting and sculpture, but in Dettmer's hands, those practices become relatively indistinct from one another. "During art school, I was painting photos and images that I'd found. But there was no reason the outcome needed to be a painting when it could just exist as a photo. So I started making sculptures of found objects or forms that didn’t exist — ones that I wished did."
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Views by Designer Tom Hancocks

In his new Views series created exclusively for Sight Unseen, New York designer Tom Hancocks used the 3-D graphics software Blender to conjure six different rooms inhabited by various types of chairs, whose forms and relationships to their immediate surroundings were intended to convey certain moods and emotions.
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Baskets and Jewelry by Philadelphia’s Karen Gayle Tinney

For us, Karen Gayle Tinney was one of those surprises that you're shocked to find lurking in your own backyard — the artist and designer lives in Philadelphia, where for the past year she's been making elaborate woven baskets, planters, and necklaces for stores like Vagabond and Brooklyn's People of 2morrow.
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Week of August 24, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: fall previews from NYABF and Maison et Objet, a new place to score succulents in Scandinavia, and a serious showing of Aussie design power, including a new collection from Melbourne furniture-maker Fred Ganim, above.
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Dee Clements of Chicago’s Herron Studio

For Dee Clements, who makes beautiful hand-woven goods out of her Chicago design studio, Herron, sustainability is key. “I know it’s an overused buzzword, but it’s really important,” she says. Though she’s talking about the environmental impact of large-scale textile production and why she mainly uses small-farm fibers that aren’t chemically or unethically produced, sustainability, in a creative sense, is also on her mind.
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Wonderplants Prints by Sarah Illenberger

Berlin illustrator and photographer Sarah Illenberger turned her recent six-week trip to Porto, Portugal, into an extended personal art project, collecting leaves from local botanical gardens and then decorating and photographing them for her new Wonderplants series.
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BZIPPY, Kathryn Bentley, and Waka Waka at L.A.’s Dream Collective

We've seen creatives collaborate in plenty of novel, inventive ways — by mailing materials back and forth, by playing games of exquisite corpse. But sometimes the best joint projects arise more loosely, like the one currently on view at Dream Collective in Los Angeles, featuring work by Bari Ziperstein, Waka Waka, and store owner/jewelry designer Kathryn Bentley.
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