Week of July 11, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the new ceramics at the top of our wish list, resin and glass tables that channel the California Light and Space movement, and a dream-team collaboration by Philippe Malouin and Bethan Laura Wood, pictured above.
More

Week of April 25, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the best in totally affordable and totally unaffordable fashion and design, two illustrations and a Toronto house we wish we could move into immediately, and a few more Milan fair stragglers, including the playful room divider above by Ana Arana.
More

Week of February 29, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A David Hockney library, a Gio Ponti flatware collection, a bracelet inspired by Mario Botta, and a brand new collection by two of the founding members of Memphis.
More

Week of January 25, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Everything old is new again: midcentury-inspired lamps (like the gorgeous one by Toronto's Lightmaker Studio, above), Memphis-inspired tea trolleys, and an ancient Japanese tray garden re-imagined as a post-industrial panorama.
More
EQ3 emerging Canadian Designers

A New Collection By a Dream Team of Canadian Designers

When we introduced you last month to Thom Fougere, creative director of the Canadian furniture brand EQ3, we had no idea this was coming down the pike: At next week's Toronto Interior Design Show, the brand will launch Assembly, a capsule furniture and accessories collection featuring designs by 10 of Canada's most exciting emerging designers, including Fougere himself, MSDS (who we featured last year) and Sight Unseen OFFSITE alum Zoë Mowat (whose beautiful geometric dressing table can be seen above).
More
South American design

Week of January 4, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a pastel cafe interior that made us swoon, two new affordable prints from two of our favorite illustrators, and the debut of a young Argentinian furniture studio whose work, pictured above, is helping reignite our interest in the South American design scene.
More

Jamie Wolfond

New York, jamiewolfond.com; goodthingny.com In 2014, only a year out of RISD, the Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based designer launched Good Thing, a suddenly of-the-moment design brand focused on the development and manufacture of small goods and housewares. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? In the US, designing a product seldom ends with the object itself, but continues all the way through the process of bringing that thing to an audience. When I was in school I wanted very little to do with American design. I’d been closely following the work of several European designers (in particular the Dutch, with Droog and the many other designers making process-based work there) and was a little jealous of them for being in a part of the industry with a great infrastructure for licensing. In Europe, there are so many manufacturing companies, and there’s such a strong market for unusual objects, that a designer doesn’t have to think about much more than the creative process. A manufacturing company handles production, sales, and all liability, leaving the designer with a tidy quarterly royalty check and the free time to move on to another idea. And yet, after I spent two summers working with designers in the Netherlands — first DHPH/Maarten Baas, and then Studio Bertjan Pot, two of the very best experimental designers in the industry — I found that the licensing model in Europe doesn’t leave very much opportunity to experiment beyond the design of the object itself. The flip side of a strong infrastructure for licensing design is that the companies that operate in this way have long since formulated their own ideas of what will and won’t sell. This makes it really difficult to introduce completely new ideas to the market. For example, I really hoped to find an opportunity to license my Sticker Clock design with a Dutch company, but consistently received feedback that customers would not buy something with the perceived value of a sticker. There was something really unnatural about ending the design process by simply taking someone’s word for it. The way a designer creates a product is by repeatedly testing ideas, and reacting to the result. I realized I could get a great deal more imperial feedback from trying to sell the clock than from trying to license it. The truly amazing thing about American design is the newfound prevalence of the designer/businessperson. … Continue reading Jamie Wolfond
More

2015, Part II

This week we announced the 2015 American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen’s unapologetically subjective annual editorial award for the 20 names to know now in American design, presented in partnership with Herman Miller. We’re devoting an entire week to interviews with this year’s honorees — get to know the second group of Hot List designers here.
More

Week of May 18, 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 bringing you a special ICFF edition, with our favorite finds from elsewhere around town (in other words, all the things we would have seen in person if we hadn't been tending to our own event!)
More

Week of February 23, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: long-awaited collections from two of our favorite designers, a new exhibition and book from the doyenne of Memphis, and a serious contender for the best watering can we've ever seen.
More

Week of February 2, 2015

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: two groundbreakingly gorgeous ways to hang your clothes, two making-of videos featuring Misha Kahn and Rafael de Cardenas, and two of the hottest Mexican talents to come out of the Zona Maco art show.
More