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05.05.15

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

An Interview With Ford’s Moray Callum on the Future of Car Design

Next week marks the start of New York design week, which is jam-packed with events. But there is one place you'll be able to find a moment of respite from all the madness: inside the Dynamic Sanctuary, a 5' x 9' responsive light chamber created by Brooklyn studio the Principals for Sight Unseen OFFSITE, which is meant to bring the design thinking behind the 2015 Ford Edge to life.
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03.26.15

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Join us for the 2015 show!

After our phenomenally successful, inaugural Sight Unseen OFFSITE event last year — which included an Instagram-ready still-life photo booth, a Memphis-y soup of Print All Over Me goodness, and a cocktail party with a line around the block — the question on everyone's lips was: But will you do it again? Today, we're happy to announce that yes, Sight Unseen OFFSITE will be returning for a second, even more exciting year!
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10.06.14

American Design Hot List

2014, Part I

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 first five Hot List designers after the jump.
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10.06.14

American Design Hot List

Our 2014 Honorees

Last year, after being asked for the umpteenth time to share our take on who the key players are in the American design scene, we decided to launch the first annual American Design Hot List — an unapologetically subjective editorial award for the names to know now in American design. We intended for the list to act as our guide to those emerging and mid-career talents influencing the design landscape in any given year, whether through standout launches, must-see exhibitions, or just our innate sense that they'd be ones to watch. But when we thought about the fact that no one else was doing anything remotely similar, we realized that the American Design Hot List could play a wonderful ongoing role in spotlighting the hard work and superior skill of a group of creatives who we believe deserves recognition.
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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!
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05.30.14

Sighted

Ian Stell Shot By Rob Howard

With a debut solo show at Matter in April and a major presentation last week at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, up-and-coming furniture designer Ian Stell has had the opportunity to introduce his kinetic, transformable furniture to quite a few people this spring. Yet most of them, apparently, have read it completely wrong. "I've gotten comments recently from people who ... assumed I have an engineering background or was trained as an architect, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth," he recently told photographer Rob Howard, on whose portfolio site we recently discovered dozens of shots of Stell at home in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and at his nearby studio.
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05.27.14

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

A Tour of the Sight Unseen OFFSITE 2014 Show: Part II

Though your Sight Unseen editors have been in major curation mode for the past two weeks, we've also had day to day work to do as, you know, journalists. So for five days during our Sight Unseen OFFSITE event last week, Monica and I set up camp on the Astroturf-covered bleachers of the MOLD Future Food Café, where we caught up on emails and posted stories to this very site. It was the perfect vantage point from which to view our own event: We could see friends and VIPs on their way in, and we could overhear people heading to the elevator, on their way up to the second floor. The most common refrain we heard? "Oh my God, there's more upstairs?"
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05.23.14

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

A Tour of the Sight Unseen OFFSITE 2014 Show: Part I

When we founded the Noho Design District back in 2009, it was meant to provide a much-needed, well-curated platform for independent designers, whose numbers — particularly in America — had begun to surge. But it was also meant to add an extra dose of dimension and excitement to New York Design Week (or NYCxDesign, as it has since come to be known), which at the time was considered preeeeeetty lackluster, to say the least. By that measure alone, the first edition of Sight Unseen OFFSITE, our successor to the Noho Design District, was a massive success; word on the street was that this NYDW was the best anyone could remember, and we're proud to have played a significant role.
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05.23.14

What We Saw

New York Design Week 2014: Spanish Design at Sight Unseen OFFSITE

We've had a special place in our hearts for Spanish design for as long as we can remember. After all, the very first scouting trip we ever took for Sight Unseen, way back in the summer of 2009, was to sunny Barcelona. (Don't even get us started on Design in Spain, the last full issue Monica and I worked on at I.D. Magazine, and one of our personal favorites, period.) So when the Spanish trade commission in New York asked us earlier this spring if we'd be interested in curating a selection of our favorite recent Spanish designs for Sight Unseen OFFSITE, the answer was an unequivocal yes.
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05.16.14

Invitation

Print All Over Me x Sight Unseen

Back in December, we embarked on an experimental curatorial collaboration with Print All Over Me, the amazing print-your-own-pattern service, founded by fashion designer Jesse Finkelstein and his sister, Meredith, that allows designers to upload any graphic they please onto fashionable white blanks — sweatshirts, bomber jackets, shift dresses, backpacks, leggings, and more. The project — for which we hand-selected illustrators like Will Bryant, Tim Colmant, and Clay Hickson — was such a rousing success that Jesse approached us for round two a few months ago. We were already 100 percent sold on the idea, thinking we could sell the results at a pop-up at our Sight Unseen OFFSITE event — which opens today at noon! — when Jesse casually emailed this bomb: "Hey! Let's also talk about print all over furniture!"
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05.16.14

Studio Visit

Terri Chiao and Adam Frezza, Art and Design Duo

Partners in both life and work, Terri Chiao and Adam Frezza share a studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where they run an art practice together as well as a design company called Chiaozza. Yet the first two things they ever collaborated on belonged to neither of those disciplines: One was a stew they made for dinner soon after they began dating — which took so long to cook that joking about it inspired their eventual website name, eternitystew.com — and the other was the pancakes they made the next morning. “We were fascinated by their topography, so we took some printmaking ink, inked up a pancake, and started making monoprints with them,” Frezza recalls. “That was when it began, this idea of turning our everyday life and domestic play into some kind of product or work.” Two and a half years later, it’s still the motivation underlying many of their colorful projects, which they characterize as existing at the "intersection of imagination and the natural world."
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05.13.14

What They Bought

The I’m Revolting Ceramics Shop

Ceramicists know how to deal with heartbreak — these are artists, after all, who make something they love and then willingly throw it into a fire. So while the I’m Revolting Ceramics Shop that I've curated for Sight Unseen OFFSITE — opening at noon this Friday at 200 Lafayette in Soho — is in many ways a survey of talented young people working today in clay, it’s also a small tribute to the beauty in unpredictability and letting go. Unlike painting or weaving or most other mediums, potters don’t get to see the thing complete in front of them as they work. They shape a piece of clay with their hands and then give it over to the heat of the universe. And though this sounds totally cheeseball, that might be why I love it so much — that every piece carries in it some accident. The range of work in the I’m Revolting Ceramics Shop is a reminder of this possibility in imperfection: our perpetual struggle to take the same stuff there has ever been – mud and fire, failure and ambition – and create of it something distinctly personal.
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