AIGA Eye on Design
Unit Editions Pushes and Preserves Graphic Design by Publishing Books That Go Against the MainstreamWith books on the likes of FHK Henrion, Lance Wyman and Total Design, as well as graphic stamps, corporate manuals and punk records under its belt, Unit Editions has established itself as the go-to for cultivated and rigorous publishing on design...
AIGA Eye on Design
What Happens When We Reach Peak Magazine?Issue 01 of Beige, the modern lifestyle magazine for discerning independent thinkers and makers, was released today to a rapt audience of creative influencers the quarterly considers the entire scope of everyday life for the contemporary connoisseur...
AnOthermag
Design Duo Soft Baroque on Materiality and Making MiniaturesSoft Baroque, a studio for furniture that serves and surpasses its function, was founded in 2013 after co-founders Saša Štucin and Nicholas Gardner graduated from London's Royal College of Art, in Visual Communication and Furniture Design respectively...
AnOthermag
Five Talking Points from Milan’s Annual Furniture FairWisteria climbs and collapses over Milan’s streets in spring, and with the bustle of Salone del Mobile, its terrazzo floors and imposing concrete arches are set aflutter with throngs of design devotees and cherry-red Campari...
AnOthermag
Five Works that Defined Sussex ModernismIn the early 20th century, rural Sussex was cast as a kind of arcadia for artists and writers of diverse practice, whose spells in the countryside were acts of both retirement from and rebellion against the modern world...
AnOthermag
Inside the Home of Everyday Modernists Aino & Alvar AaltoFinnish architects and furniture designers Aino and Alvar Aalto had long believed in the integral crossovers between art and technology when they established furniture design company Artek, alongside Nils-Gustav Hahl and Maire Gullichsen, in 1935...
AnOthermag
Larry Sultan’s Iconic Pictures from Home, 25 Years OnLarry Sultan’s Pictures from Home was first published in 1992, the culmination of a decade-or-so of travelling up and down California’s coastline, with the intention of creating a portrait of his father..
AnOthermag
Ten Things you Might not Know About David HockneyBorn in Bradford, West Yorkshire in 1937, David Hockney has been relentlessly reinventing and evolving his practice ever since he won a scholarship to his local grammar school. This week, the best part of a century on, London’s Tate Britain opens its extensive survey of his work...
AnOthermag
The Artist Constructing Modernist Ruins in a Gallery GardenIn a garden facing onto, and somewhat consumed by, a basin of London’s Regent’s Canal sits the cavernous ruin of a modernist home. The ruin is, in fact, a fiction – one constructed by artist Alex Hartley for the exhibition After You Left at Victoria Miro’s east London gallery...
AnOthermag
Your First Look Inside The Met’s Ettore Sottsass ExhibitionHe’s perhaps best known for his work with the design group Memphis – so-named after Bob Dylan’s Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, the ancient capital of Egypt and the modern city in Tennessee – but Ettore Sottsass’ practice spanned a vast range of media, contexts and applications...
Disegno
All in the BalanceThere is a distinct lack of dogma to the designer Peter Ghyczy’s practice. Although concerned primarily with function, his approach has never discounted form, decoration, beauty or, indeed, even the principle of design as a sort of divine intervention.
Head, Heart & Hand
The GreenhouseThe Greenhouse was closed in the early 1990s following the end of the Environmental course a few years prior. It had been built in 1961 according to the intention of then Rector Robin Darwin, whose studio sat at the back of the ‘house amongst the canopies John Norris Wood had been appointed tutor of Natural History and Ecological Studies in 1971, caring for the plants...
It's Nice That
“I Always Try to Have Some Logic to the Job, to the Work”: An Interview with Letterpress Legend Alan KitchingIn Alan Kitching’s hands, “the typography workshop is a complex and subtle instrument: his brushes, paint and easel; his film set; his orchestra,” according to John Walters, who interviewed the designer about his life and letterpress for a beautiful new book...
It's Nice That
A City of Contradictions: Meet the People Shaping Beirut’s Creative FutureBeirut is a city of contradictions, both buoyed and bound by its past and present the push and pull between its history and future is particularly acute in the divergent experiences of older and younger generations...
It's Nice That
A Repetitive Day in the Life of One of Ragnar Kjartansson’s TroubadoursOf his exhibition at Barbican, Ragnar Kjartansson remarked that he hadn’t realised the extent to which his work is about, or uses, repetition until he saw the show. “Maybe it comes from being an altar boy,” he says. “You repeat stuff again and again until it becomes divine"...
It's Nice That
An Exercise in Style: Interviewing John MorganAs we ascend the stairs from his subterranean studio, our conversation turns to the subject of design writers. “Are there any? And if there are, why?” A point of contention is, if they do exist, “can [they] write about a subject other than design in an interesting way...
It's Nice That
An eye for the uncanny: Viviane Sassen on her concurrent exhibition with Lee MillerLee Miller and Viviane Sassen’s work, intentions and verve crossover in ways that may be unexpected considering the close to a century’s gap between their births. Both started out as models: for Sassen, her shift to photography was initially driven by a desire to show a kind of sexuality that was different from that created by the male gaze, “one that’s more fractured and disjointed”
It's Nice That
Eduardo Paolozzi: On a Singular Teacher and His Devil-May-Care Philosophy“It’s the one with the red motorcycle outside” said David Queensberry as he gave directions to his west London home. The former head of ceramics at the Royal College of Art, and trustee of The Paolozzi Foundation had agreed to meet to reminisce on Paolozzi’s time as a tutor at the RCA...
It's Nice That
Elizabeth Friedlander: A Legacy of LettersOn her commission from the then Frankfurt-based Bauer Type Foundry in 1927, Elizabeth Friedlander became one of the first women to design a typeface, and particularly one of such exhaustive variation. Completed in a variety of point sizes in roman letter and cursive, and detailed in bold and swash characters, it took until 1939 for Elizabeth-Antigua and Elizabeth-Kursiv to be cut – six years after Friedlander had been forced to leave Germany.
It's Nice That
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for UtopiaHippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia examined the intersections of art, architecture and design with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s Shown at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis earlier this year, the exhibition was loosely organised around Timothy Leary’s famous mantra, “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out”...
It's Nice That
Inside The Happy Reader, the Perfect Foil to “Binge-Reading” Online ContentThe Happy Reader has attracted a vast and loyal following since it first flew through letterboxes and landed on newsstands in the winter of 2014 Each issue of the quarterly has two halves: an in-depth interview and an in-depth look at one piece of classic literature. The first issue featured...
It's Nice That
Into the UnknownRarely does anything date faster than our visions of the future. From the flying cars and under the sea croquet parties of the En L’an 2000 cigarette cards; to the need to ‘retire’ bio-engineered replicants who travel to Earth illegally and assimilate to 2019 Los Angeles...
It's Nice That
M/M (Paris) and the ongoing conversations that define its practiceOn a rainy Paris morning, I met with Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, the namesakes of renowned agency M/M (Paris), at their studio in the 10th, beside Canal Saint-Martin.
It's Nice That
Tears Shared: work-form on Collaboration, Ornamentation and Bootlegging Their Own WorkNOIT is a journal that revolves primarily around the work of conceptual artist John Latham, his practice and theoretical concerns In previous issues it has been a sort-of memoriam for the artist and his work, and considered how burning is used by Latham and his contemporaries...
It's Nice That
The Couple that Reimagined Space: A Portrait of the Work of Charles and Ray Eames at BarbicanCharles and Ray Eames’ holistic approach to design was rooted in their interest in addressing and resolving the needs of any given problem; be that executive seating, the welfare of sea creatures, plywood leg splints or their pre-eminent vision of the “information age"...
It's Nice That
The Legacy of War: Giles Duley Photographs the Lives and the Horrors of Conflict“Wars don’t end when a treaty is signed, for the people affected, the legacy continues” Giles says. “Whether that be through contamination of land mines, lasting physical injuries, the psychological damage; or in the case of refugees, the loss of homes, livelihoods and culture, war leaves a legacy decades after the last shot was fired...
It's Nice That
The Ulm Model: A School and Its Pursuit of a Critical Design Practice“My feeling is that the Bauhaus being conveniently located before the Second World War makes it safely historical”, says Dr. Peter Kapos. “It’s objects have an antique character that is about as threatening as Arts & Crafts...
Marguerite
An Interview with Brita Fernandez-SchmidtWhen Brita Fernandez Schmidt first got the call from Women for Women, she had read founder Zainab Salbi’s autobiography a couple of years prior and hoped that she’d at least get to meet the author she so admired...
Somesuch Stories
The Garden of Celestial DelightsThe Galactic Expressway Resort had been in development for just short of a decade when they celebrated their soft launch ‘Leave to Remain’ on that fateful Friday of June 24th, 2016...
Book Test Unit
“Who Shot J.R.?”In the closing scene of the third season finale of Dallas, dastardly oil baron J.R. Ewing was shot by an unknown assailant The question of “Who shot J.R.?” plagued viewers until close to a year later, when it was revealed that he was in fact alive, and the assailant had been none other than...
It's Nice That
The New Look: Looking Back at Roundel’s 1980s Identity Design for British Rail’s RailfreightAt the launch of the Design Business Association in 1986, John Bateson, a graphic designer and later partner at design agency Roundel, met a product designer who was working with British Rail’s Railfreight on a repainting scheme...
Somesuch Stories
Bedding the PresidentStraddling two continents, the opposing strips of land that form the city are split by bustling seas. Lit by candy-floss skies, this 8000-year old metropolis undulates to the rhythm of traffic and construction, its rising population cocooned by smoke and mirrors...