An Iconic Children’s Book is the Inspiration Behind This Incredibly Joyous Exhibition

A friend of mine and I have often joked about how Goodnight Moon, the classic 1947 children's book written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, would make an excellent moodboard for a gloriously maximalist interior design project: The incredible color blocking! The striped drapes! The scalloped picture frames! The animal hide rug! And while we still would love to see those benchmarks turned into something truly livable, a new exhibition has done the next best thing.
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In Quarantine, Some of Our Favorite Products Are Hardly Products At All

Some of the more interesting submissions we've gotten lately have existed outside the boundaries of what we typically think of as a product. Number one amongst these is a series of vases by Dutch designer Willem van Hooff, which were commissioned as holiday gifts for the EDHV design studio and Dutch Invertuals teams in Eindhoven, each vase based on the personal characteristics of its recipient and meant as a way to honor each team member in this difficult year of working remotely.
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Wright’s Upcoming Glass Auction is a Good Way to Stay Inspired From Your Couch

Among the other, more pressing, concerns this virus has wrought — Will production partners close? Will businesses go under? How the heck do you keep your kids out of the frame on a video conference call? — there is the more simple concern of how to stay inspired and engaged when there are no studio or site visits, no travel, no visiting with friends or other makers, and even a walk in nature has new rules. One of our most reliable sources of inspiration, though, has always been auction catalogs, and Wright has a doozy of one coming up in early April.
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Guide to Mexico City

A Tour of Mexico City’s Secret Spots With One of Its Biggest Tastemakers

Despite being a recent transplant, Su Wu — who rose to prominence as a writer and curator with her cult-favorite blog I’m Revolting — is already a fixture on the local art and design scene in Mexico City. Spending the day with her would be a dream assignment for any design writer, or really anyone who considers themselves a fan of good things and great stories. From her family home to an all-but-lost Noguchi mural tucked away above a bustling downtown market, Wu’s vision of Mexico City stays true to her own compelling vernacular.
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Salvatore Fiume Italian Ceramicist

Meet the Late Italian Ceramicist Inspiring Today’s Coolest Artists

As trend scouts, avid social media consumers, and Google Image Search addicts, we often happen across works, names, and images that cause our internal YES bells to go off. Starting today, we've decided to give them the airtime they deserve in our new Current Obsession column, the first of which is devoted to Salvatore Fiume — the late Italian artist whose lumpy, curvaceous sculptures seem to somehow be having a resurgence in the work of designers like Sigve Knutson, Thomas Barger, and Carl Emil Jacobsen.
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For Brooklyn Artist Landon Metz, Painting Takes on a New Dimension

Surprising elements — from a Duchamp readymade and postmodern tables to avant-garde music and architecture — are the seedlings with which 30-year-old Landon Metz sows his artistic philosophy. For Metz, whose studio resides in Bushwick, these are all materials that belong to the same creative ecosystem. They also provide fertile ground for his spare, lighter-than-air paintings, which tend toward the biomorphic and richly hued repeating patterns. His latest exhibition, open now through April 9th at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, centers around Metz’s affinity for the work of Color Field painter Morris Louis, one of the movement’s central figures.
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7 Design Insiders On Their 2015 Faves … And What’s Coming Up Next

We come here every day to tell you about our favorite things — so for our last round-up of 2015, it seemed only fair that we spread the love! We asked seven of our favorite design insiders to reflect on their best design moments of the past year — an experience they had, an exhibition they saw, a discovery they made, an interior they fell in love with — as well as offer the one thing they're most looking forward to in 2016. Enjoy, and see you back here next Monday!
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Set Designer Robert Storey

Robert Storey, Set Designer for Kenzo, Nike, and More

What really interests Storey is creating immersive environments. “A spatial design work can exist in an image and it’s great for people to experience it that way,” but it’s not the same as being there. The temporariness is an essential part of the experience. Here are 8 of the London set designer's most lasting inspirations.
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Peter D. Cole, Sculptor

Let's be honest for a second: The internet is wonderful. It's a fantastic platform for research, and it enables creatives all over the globe to gather inspiration. It allows for artists and designers to see what exists, what's missing, and to create accordingly. It's hard to imagine a world without it. But what if you were a young artist trying to make it in 1960s Australia? Where did one find insight and inspiration? If you were artist Peter D. Cole, you probably looked to your art-history textbooks and the latest imported magazines from that hotbed of modernism, New York. Perusing his work, you begin to see patterns, and his influences become ever more apparent. There's the very basic color palette of fire-engine reds, cool sky blues, and bright sun yellows, reminiscent of a Mondrian palette. There's the tilted shapes, which could be a nod to the fathers of abstraction, the Russian Suprematists. Further still, you begin to see a pattern of grids and cubes, an obvious allusion to Sol LeWitt, one of the most famous artists practicing when Cole graduated in 1968. Mobiles similar to Calder's, colorful forms attached by thin black lines reminiscent of Miró — we could go on but we'll stop ourselves there. It's through this weird, sometimes obvious amalgamation of influences that Cole is able to create original, inspired work that's evocative yet far enough removed to be his own style.
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Ron Nagle, Ceramicist

One of the best things about ceramics' recent ascent in the art world is that a brighter light has been shone on designers who were practicing in the medium long before "urban claymaking" was ever a thing. The latest artist to experience a massive upswing in attention is Ron Nagle, the San Francisco–based postwar ceramicist who, in his 70s, still adds to his already massive body of work at an amazing clip. Shown at the last art Biennale in Venice, Nagle is currently the subject of both an exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art and a lovely feature in the new issue of PIN-UP Magazine, who writes of Nagle's process: "Each [piece] boasts the presence of a monument covered in variations of fine stucco textures sprayed with layers of pastel, blush fields often overtaken by thick glazed pools and electric pinstripes. The pieces begin as collections of hand sculpted elements, and are slip cast, carved and fitted to each other, gaining their deep beds of color from multiple firings that are finished with chinapaint. The forms have shifted in theme through his career: from lean green tendrils hailing from ikebana to diorama scenes housing pulsing red cubes." We're particularly fond of a recurring trope in Nagle's work that resembles glassy spears of asparagus, so we've rounded up a few of our favorite examples here.
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2014, Part V

This week we announced the 2014 American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen's unapologetically subjective annual editorial award for the 25 names to know now in American design. We're devoting an entire week to interviews with this year's honorees — get to know the next five Hot List designers here.
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2014, Part IV

This week we announced the 2014 American Design Hot List, Sight Unseen's unapologetically subjective annual editorial award for the 25 names to know now in American design. We're devoting an entire week to interviews with this year's honorees — get to know the next five Hot List designers here.
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