07.10.14

Studio Visit

Kate Miss

The fact that Los Angeles designer Kate Miss has, since we shot her Koreatown workspace last fall, chopped off her hair, adopted a dog, and moved studios not once but twice — the second time abandoning her freelance graphic design life altogether for a full-time position at Karen Kimmel — may tell you just how busy we’ve been around these parts. But it could just as easily be a reflection of how much Miss craves change. She’s the only person we’ve ever heard utter the words: “I love moving.” And yet that peculiarly peripatetic quality is what defines Miss — it’s what brought her from Seattle to New York and finally to LA, and why she’s equal parts known as a blogger, a photographer, a jewelry maker, and a graphic designer.

07.09.14

Studio Visit

David Taylor in Hälleförsnäs, Sweden

Every summer, the Stockholm-based, Scottish-born designer David Taylor retreats to his family's cottage in the Swedish countryside for a spell and spends his days foraging in the woods. It isn't greens and mushrooms he's after, though, but slag — the decidedly un-edible clumps of waste compounds left behind in the production of metal. Taylor's cottage happens to be in a town called Hälleförsnäs, also home to an iron foundry that was built in the 1600s and shut down for good in 2006. "Slag can still be found just about everywhere around here," Taylor says. "It’s a worthless by-product that was produced in huge quantities and mostly just dumped out of sight in the forest for centuries." For a recent project that debuted during the Saatchi Gallery's Collect fair in May, Taylor gathered up chunks of the stuff and upcycled them into a series of colorful candlesticks.

07.07.14

Graphic Design

Kristina Krogh, Artist and Graphic Designer

Kristina Krogh studied graphic design before setting up her own studio in Copenhagen in 2012, where she spends part of her time on freelance design projects and the rest on her extensive line of limited-edition art prints, notebooks, and notecards, pictured in this post. Her layered geometric compositions feature a mix of contrasting and complementary surface textures taken from everyday materials like marble, ply, wood, cork, and paper. "My inspiration comes from the things that surround me: a beautiful old parquet, a perfect color combination on a building, a stone floor in a church, a bike ride through Copenhagen," she says.

07.02.14

Sighted

Supreme Bon Ton’s Meteorite Collection

Suprême Bon Ton is a Paris-based textile design studio helmed by Ella Perdereau, who founded it last year after traveling around India and Latin America for creative inspiration. Her first collection, Meteorite, is a series of scarves that incorporate patterns and textures from rocks and minerals. Perdereau worked with traditional textile printers in Lyon to produce the scarves, then turned to the up-and-coming photographer Florent Tanet — known for playful pastel still-lives that have been featured in the New Yorker and Wired — to photograph them. Tanet also shot Perdereau's collection of painted rocks and other reference objects, which are featured in the second half of the post.

07.01.14

Studio Visit

Ilana Kohn, Fashion Designer

“It was running joke as a kid, that all I wanted to wear were cut-offs and T-shirts,” says Ilana Kohn. “My mom would buy them by the pack, and I would cut the sleeves and the neck.” Of course, Kohn is now known as the creator of a rabidly collected, Brooklyn-based, cult-favorite clothing line, so was fashion always the master plan? Sure, she was interested in clothes, she says, but her teenage self would be more than a little surprised at this turn. At 18, she says, she did not want to be a “fashion person,” intending rather to study fine art and spend her life of painting. But after high school — in a move that would appease parents who worried about her making a living — Kohn left her native Virginia for New York City to study illustration at Pratt.

04.09.13

At Home With

Luren Jenison, Textile and Display Designer

Luren Jenison tends to describe her professional life as a “wild goose chase” — a neverending manic hunt through thrift stores, flea markets, and even forests to find the vintage oddities, natural artifacts, and textiles she uses in her elaborate installations. She’s constructed woodland scenes with foraged moss and taxidermied foxes for internal meetings at Anthropologie, set up tableaux with vintage books and building blocks for weddings and corporate galas, and even traveled all the way to China once to find a master joss-paper artisan to help her build a shimmery paper R.V. for a Free People store (he later panicked and pulled out of the project). And yet no matter how spectacular the results, at the end of the day they’re almost all temporary, set up for a night or a week or a month and then disassembled into their constituent parts to be trashed or banished to storage. Only the hunt goes on. If there’s one place you’d expect to find any permanent evidence of Jenison’s talents as both a visual stylist and an eagle-eyed picker, though, it would be in her own home.

06.30.14

Excerpt: Exhibition

Morgan Peck at Jancar Jones Gallery

When we first took notice of Los Angeles ceramicist Morgan Peck in 2012, it was because she had suddenly become ubiquitous in the concept-shop scene, with her vessels and abstract mini-sculptures popping up at all of our favorite places (Mociun, Totokaelo, Iko Iko). Now that she's moved into an entirely new territory — the art world — with the opening of her solo show at LA's Jancar Jones Gallery last week, we figured it was the perfect time to revisit her work. We asked Peck for her thoughts on her change of scenery, and how her sculptures have made the transition from shelf to plinth. "When Ava and Eric offered me the opportunity to have a show at Jancar Jones last February the first thing I thought was: Are you sure?" she says.

06.28.14

Saturday Selects

Week of June 23, 2014

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week we indulge our inner shopaholics with a new Norwegian emerging-design purveyor, three designer pop-ups in New York and LA, and a mini online shopping guide that includes a little something for the guys, too — chic Op-Art pocket squares.

06.27.14

Sighted

Anny Wang’s 3D Illustrations

Today we posted an interview with the up-and-coming Swedish designer Anny Wang, who we found when she posted her BA project to Instagram. But Akin, that slamdunk furniture collection, is only half the story: In school, when Wang was trying to teach herself how to digitally model in 3D, she had trouble with some of the more typical programs and found herself turning to a little-known software called Luxology Modo. “People use it primarily for animation, but I began to play with it and understood I could use it as a canvas to make pictures,” Wang says. We’re presenting the resulting 3D illustrations here today, which look like some sort of mash-up between the Tumblr visual culture of today and the Archizoom movement of the early 80s.

06.27.14

Up and Coming

Anny Wang, Furniture and Interior Designer

If you're a design student, and you're still on the fence about whether to join Instagram (do people like this exist?) here's proof positive that you need an account, stat: Instagram is where we recently stumbled upon Anny Wang, a Swedish-born designer whose BA graduation project (above) blew us away but who cemented her visual artist bona fides with one of the most beautiful feeds we've ever seen.

06.26.14

Fair Report

At Design Miami/Basel and Art Basel 2014

If you've never been to the Swiss version of Art Basel and Design Miami/Basel, what they say about it is pretty much true: If Miami's overall vibe seems to put partying, relaxation, and hedonism first and serious business second, Basel is decidedly the other way around. People wear more clothes in Basel. Everything is twice as expensive. If there's one obvious advantage — for a journalist or casual observer — to attending Basel over Miami, it's that you're far less likely to be distracted by hangovers, pool parties, boozy brunches, and beach FOMO. You spend the entire day scrutinizing the actual work, and if you're lucky, like we were, you come home with a camera full of satisfying discoveries.

06.25.14

Sighted

Moving Mountains on Refinery29

There's only one thing we love as much as exhibiting the work of our favorite designers, like we did with Syrette Lew of Moving Mountains this May at our Sight Unseen OFFSITE event. And that's snooping around their studios, unearthing old sketches, and pleading with them to put killer side projects into production. Luckily for us (since we've been a bit flush with travel this summer) Refinery29 took care of Lew's visit for us. A gorgeously photographed studio visit with the Hawaiian-born, Bushwick-based designer ran on the site yesterday, and we thought it only fitting to share a few of our favorite bits here. Check out a short excerpt from that piece after the jump, then scroll down to read the rest over at Refinery29!

06.24.14

Travel

Taking the Temperature of the Scandinavian Design Scene In Norway

If anyone needed proof this year that Scandinavia had quietly usurped London's status as the world's hottest contemporary design scene, it could be found at the Salone del Mobile in April, where the presentation that Danish brand Hay put on, complete with a pop-up shop and an utter madhouse of a cocktail party, was pretty much the talk of the town. It's entirely thanks to the rise, in the past few years, of not just Hay but brands like Menu, Ferm Living, One Nordic, Muuto, Gubi, and Design House Stockholm, all of whom are working with emerging talents across the region. As we've watched the Nordic scene grow, we've managed to pay visits to Sweden (three times), Denmark (twice), and Finland (once, in the dead of winter, natch) — even to Iceland, for its DesignMarch festival three years ago. That left Norway as our personal holy grail, made doubly intimidating because of its famed reputation for being outrageously expensive. Two weeks ago, as you may have noticed on Instagram, we finally took the plunge.