Hasta La Ideas

Jeff Rogers (Jeff is profiled in the current issue #10)

There’s a new tumbler blog dedicated to lettering and typography called Type Everything. And with folks like Dana Tanamachi, Darren Booth and Jeff Rogers (among others) curating the stream, there’s sure to be lots of inspiring images!

Darren Booth (illustrated the cover of Work/Life, first edition)Dana Tanamachi works for Louise Fili (who was profiled in issue #9)

Clutter Magazine announced the winners of the inaugural International Designer Toy Awards (DTA) on Friday at Comic-Con International in San Diego. Designer toys have become a hot topic within the last decade and with that we’ve seen an entire industry built around them. Although, at first, these toys may not seem like a true part of industrial design, designer toys are truly just another type of product to design. At Core77 we value the intense design and manufacturing processes behind these products that are also works of design art. Now, here are our favorite picks from this year’s awards:

Artist of the Year: Ashley Wood

Ashley Wood of threeA Productions has already seen a little Core77 coverage by way of his collaborations with graphic designer Tom Muller. Wood is mostly known for his comic book illustration on titles such as Tank Girl, Metal Gear Solid, and Popot. His most recent venture was founding threeA Productions with Kim Fung Wong in 2008, a Hong Kong production house for creating products based on Wood’s characters. The toys threeA has produced in the past few years are ripe with extreme detailing, weathering and graphics. Given their quality, I find it hard to believe that these are produced en masse and not merely one-offs.

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Picture Perfect Kate Spade’s capsule collection of accessories featuring “Touch of Dew,” a 1961 photograph by Lillian Bassman.

If you’re still kicking yourself for missing out on that Tommy Hilfiger/Sam Haskins collaboration from a couple of years ago, don’t let this photoprinted merch pass you by. Kate Spade has just introduced its Lillian Bassman collection, a trio of smart accessories (leather tote, silk scarf, and zip-top pouch) printed with “Touch of Dew,” Bassman’s 1961 photo of model Lisa Fonssagrives behind the wheel of a creamy convertible. Bassman began her career as a textile designer and fashion illustrator before working under legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar and finding her calling as a photographer. Now 94, she has embraced digital methods, mastered Photoshop, and is at work on a new book of photographs slated for publication in 2012.

“I love the way she photographs women,” says Kate Spade creative director Deborah Lloyd, who fell in love with Bassman’s work at a 2004 exhibition at New York’s Staley-Wise Gallery. “She beautifully captures both their femininity and their strengths.” In an interview posted yesterday on the Kate Spade blog, Bassman discusses her career, the influence of Brodovitch, summers spent with pal Richard Avedon, and her commitment to black and white photography. “It’s how I see things—in black and white,” she says. “I know that there’s color around, but it doesn’t give me the same kind of excitement that pure black and white does. I find it thrilling.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Reviewed by Ray Jepson

GM has routinely been singled out in the last two decades as an example of a bloated enterprise that is so focused on maximizing today’s profit that it sacrifices its very future to do so. According to Bob Lutz, that is a fairly good description of GM when he arrived in 2001 as Vice Chairman in charge of product development. In his book, Car Guys Versus Bean Counters, he chronicles the very wary GM of 2001 through it’s first still-born turn-around, it’s acquisition by the American and Canadian governments and it’s new born success since 2009.

It might seem that a book written by a businessman about how to turn around a business would have little to say about design. In fact, it is clear that Lutz has only a small understanding of design. However, he consistently argues for its position at the front of product development through-out this book, from the horrible failures of the ’80′s and ’90′s to GM’s incredible success of the last few years.

Page Left: GM’s product development hit its stride in 2007, winning double honors: both the North American Car and Truck of the Year awards for teh Saturn Aura and Chevy Silverado. Page Right: (top) Chevy Malibu, 2008 North American Car of the Year and (bottom) 2008 Cadillac CTS, Motor Trend Car of the Year

To start with, Lutz reminisces on the some of the early super-star designers that GM made: Harley Earl and Billy Mitchell. Earl is responsible for creating the GM styling department. After working as a coach builder for years, Earl was hired to design the 1927 LaSalle (a now defunct GM brand). It was such a success that GM president Alfred P. Sloan decided to create the GM art and color section with Harley Earl as its chief. Earl’s success and brilliant work got him all the way up to a Vice President in GM, the first designer to become a VP in a major corporation.

Billy Mitchell took over from Earl in 1958. Mitchell continued a GM prominence in automotive styling, as well as design’s leadership role in defining products. Lutz recounts the story of Mitchell sending a man to Ferrari in Italy, buying a brand new Ferrari for list price, flying it back to Detroit where Mitchell instructed GM engineers to remove the Ferrari V12 and put it in a new Pontiac Firebird concept car he was working on. Mitchell then called the chief engineers down to the GM proving ground. As the Ferrari Firebird V12 circled the track, with it’s engine screaming, Mitchell told the engineers, “That’s how the car should sound!”

However, as GM continued to evolve, the design department lost it’s flamboyant leaders, with Mitchell retiring in 1977. After which, inspired by the successes of Toyota and Honda, GM leadership became obsessed with efficiency and repeatability. In the 1980′s, executives with a purely business background were placed in charge of development projects. All decisions started to be based on metrics and complicated mathematics rather than the emotional touch that successful products always use.

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