Hasta La Ideas

Halsey McKay recently presented “Angel Error,” a solo exhibition of the work of Brooklyn-based artist Joseph Hart. (All images courtesy Halsey McKay Gallery)

Once upon a time, the East End of New York’s Long Island was an artistic refuge that drew the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to set up homes and studios. The region’s legendary light, charming potato fields, and shimmering views now command stratospheric prices that have priced all but the most successful artists out of the market, but there’s still plenty of art to see in the Hamptons, which last fall gained a powerhouse in the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. We recently journeyed a bit further east to the town of East Hampton and left impressed by the assured exhibitions on view at Halsey McKay Gallery, founded in 2011 by sharp-eyed curator Hilary Schaffner and artist Ryan Wallace. In the wake of a supercharged summer of shows, including solo exhibitions of Joseph Hart, Anne-Lise Coste, Patrick Brennan, and Graham Collins, we asked Schaffner to tell us more about Halsey McKay, what exhibitions she’s looking forward to seeing this fall, and some other Hamptons must-sees.

1. What led you to open your gallery in East Hampton?
It’s amazing to think that this all began with a conversation Ryan and I had one evening in 2011. We were both surprised and intrigued by the fact there were so few galleries on the East End focused on emerging artists. A place with such a rich art history presented a great opportunity to support our programming. We thought that we could be more accessible to collectors out here than if we were in New York City. Without all the distractions and competition of the city, we envisioned we could meet interesting people in a short amount of time and give our artists a great platform for being seen. It’s been rewarding to bring our generation of artists out East and introduce them to the to the area. For me, there was also this continuation of family history. The Halsey’s were one of the first families to settle out here in the 1640s. It feels significant to be working in a place with such strong familial and art historical ties.

2. How would you describe the gallery’s program/artist roster?
This was another aspect that evolved organically. We already had a community of mainly Brooklyn-based artists that ended up being the foundation of our program. I have a MFA in photography and Ryan went to RISD and is a painter, this has lead us to show a range of mediums. Our middle ground has ended up being abstraction. We have some great figurative artists in the mix, like Ben Blatt and Ryan Schneider but there is certainly a mutual interest in abstract works. We’ve also had a lot of fun doing two and three person shows with artists whose work might not be immediately associated together.

3. How did you choose the name Halsey McKay?
Halsey is my grandmother’s maiden name and McKay is Ryan’s grandmother’s maiden name.

4. Tell us about your current show, “Ether Scrims, Dark Rooms, and Calculative Planes,” on view through Sunday.
We were thinking about how space is rendered in an artist’s practice —the flattening of space and the creation of space. Photography, sculpture and painting are all represented here yet each artist has this underpinning of optical illusion in their work through combining virtual and analog interventions. Before the show was installed we were operating in this very conceptual space but after seeing it all hung, these wonderful formal relationships have sprung up. The geometry and patterning that each artist has come to, in very distinctive ways, feels quite unified.
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This house by architect Marlene Uldschmidt has been built into the side of a hill in Portugal and features a vertical light well that links its upper and lower floors (+ slideshow).

Located in the fishing village of Ferragudo, the split-level building was designed by Portuguese studio Marlene Uldschmidt Architects with layers of internal and external glass partitions that allow natural light through each of the rooms.

Interior and exterior staircases link the different levels of the sloping site, leading down from a staggered rear terrace to the two main floors of the house, and then further down to the entrance at street level.

“The difficult topography of the site meant that our concept would need to allow for the design of the internal space to strengthen the visual connection with the rest of the village and beyond,” said architect Marlene Uldschmidt.

Built on a narrow rectangular site, the glass, stone and wooden house is squeezed between a pair of neighbouring buildings on the hillside street.

“The challenge was to create a facade which would be a physical barrier between the public and private areas whilst enhancing the visual connection with the village and the river,” added the architect.

A small wooden door at street level leads into a long entrance hall on the ground floor, then through to the spacious master bedroom and the only two bathrooms in the house.

A flight of white stairs appears to grow out from the surface of one of the walls, leading to first-floor kitchen, dining and living room spaces.

The upstairs kitchen and dining area opens out to the rear terrace, which steps up to various gardens and patios.

A rectangular swimming pool, wooden sun deck and a private solarium complete this garden.

Other Portuguese houses featured on Dezeen include a weekend retreat created from farm buildings and animal pens, a house with its rooftop extended into the hillside and a home with a long stone wall and a folding timber facade.

See more Portuguese houses »
See more houses »

Photography is by Fernando Guerra.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Living Behind the Wall 

Our studio were excited to take on such an interesting project in the Fishing Village of Ferragudo, Portugal.

The historic centre of Ferragudo is an extremely sensitive area to work in and we believed that our intervention should be balanced harmonious and above all integrate with the surrounding architecture and history.

The studio decided to explore the concept of “LIVING BEHIND THE WALL” ! connection.

The challenge was to create a facade which would be a physical barrier between the public and private areas whilst enhancing the visual connection with the village and the river levels.

The difficult topography of the site meant that our concept would need to allow for the design of the internal space to strengthen their visual connection with the rest of the village and beyond.

The concept we chose was to use the changes of level within the site in order to achieve this goal.

Another challenge of this concept was to create a light and airy feeling within the building.

We created a vertical well of light that links all levels to achieve this.

In order to balance the simple white walls natural materials of wood and stone in earthy tones were chosen.

Author: ultramarino |marlene uldschmidt architects; Marlene Uldschmidt, Arq.a
Collaborating: Maurícia Bento, Arq.a
Location: Ferragudo, Algarve, Portugal
Area: 230 m2
Year: 2010-2013
Structure: Protecna Engineering Team
Carpentry: equipa quatro

The post Casa 103 by Marlene
Uldschmidt Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

Cartoon from The Awesome World of Advertising

Fed up with life at the agency coalface? Sick of working all weekend and not getting any credit for it? Murat Mutlu feels your pain. His heartfelt rant sums up the frustrations of many a creative today

Over the past few months it seems like I keep having the same conversation over and over again with friends in dozens of agencies around London. It usually starts off like this: “Who do you think is the best agency is at the moment? Is anyone doing good work?”

And ends with them explaining why they are thinking of moving on. The reasons why are always the same:
“I want to work on an actual product people want to use”
“I want to build my own thing”
“I want to explore more new technology and ideas not gimmicks”
“We never do any interesting work”
“We only care about hitting targets”
“I don’t feel like I’m learning”
“We never push back and tell the client their ideas are shit”

The exodus of talent we’ve been hearing so much about at executive/director level is now filtering down to smart young digital/mobile creatives, planners and account managers. And can you blame them?

The people who generate all the ideas and work are evolving and realising that they themselves could be reaping the rewards rather than the agency. Agencies, on the other hand, are happy to keep trying to live in a world which is ceasing to exist. Clinging onto the same ideas, tools, and ways of working with CEOs who are either oblivious to the current mindset or too frightened to instigate change. It’s the perfect storm of increasing entrepreneurialism, decreasing loyalty and an industry revelling in mediocrity.

Startups are offering equal or better salaries than agencies with more perks and chances to get equity, brands are taking design and development in-house after realising they’ve been spending a fuck-load of money on sub-standard work, pure play product and design studios are quickly emerging with young and talented leaders, and of course technology is lowering the barrier to starting your own business, in both time and cost with the freelance market also booming.

Many agencies are offering whatever trend makes them seem relevant to existing and potential clients (who sadly lap this shit up). Whether that’s UX, User Centred Design, MVP, incubators or the current shiny thing – innovation labs.

While many people will shout “Well agencies aren’t about innovation or hacker-like creativity, it’s just about billable hours”, the sad truth is that whether they are or not, this is what agencies sell, not only to clients but to staff, and that’s the problem.

Promises made in job descriptions and interviews aren’t kept. You never get an agency intro that says “We pride ourselves on creating branded apps that no one wants and churning out banners that no one clicks on. We say yes to all our clients’ daft suggestions because we know it’s the easiest way to make money. Oh and you’re gonna leave here with nothing worth putting in your portfolio. Fancy joining us?”

The talent is there, as is the desire. Agencies can try to stop the bleeding and try to create places where talented people want to use their skills to build great things for clients and users, or they’ll take their passion and curiosity somewhere else.

So here’s a small but potent list of reasons why talented creatives are leaving your shitty agency. It’s a view from the ground for the agency execs and CEOs. My own thoughts and those collected from designers and creatives (and a few PMs/devs/planners too) in agencies around London.

1) You won’t stop taking on shit work
We understand, you’re an agency, you need to keep the lights on and pay people. We get that. Everyone gets that.

But at the same time we expect you to have ambitions just like we do.

In the beginning it was cool to take the low-hanging fruit of animated GIF mobile banners and cookie-cutter augmented reality apps, just like we thought making club flyers at uni was cool when we first got into design, but after a while that shit has to stop and you need to start aiming higher.

It’s your job to get the best brands and companies doing interesting projects that push our boundaries. If you’re not winning these projects then that’s something you need to address, it’s down to you.

2) You don’t innovate
One of the worst feelings as a creative in the digital or mobile space is when it feels like the industry is just passing you by. In the time it takes to finish one or two mediocre projects the industry takes another leap forward with new software, frameworks, services, devices, APIs, design patterns and interactions, and we take a step back.

The place where you spend 8+ hours a day should be teaching you new skills and giving you hands-on experience and progressing you as a designer.

Clients are often reactive and risk-adverse, they want something after everyone else has done it to death. It’s understandable that clients have this approach. Brands may not be comfortable with putting experiments and prototypes into the wild, but there’s no reason why you can’t explore this stuff without them.

If you sell ‘innovation’ as one of your agency’s capabilities (who doesn’t these days?) then you should be making experiments and prototypes with technology, plain and simple.

3) You keep hiring shit (and not doing anything about it)
Passion and engagement are contagious. But so is negativity and mediocrity. There’s nothing more brutal than watching C players bring down A players. And when your A players leave, who’s going to attract your future talent?

Agencies are fast paced places to work and it’s common for teams to scale up in the blink of an eye. It’s inevitable mistakes in hiring are going to be made whilst under pressure, but the problem is that you don’t have the guts to correct them until it’s too late. Bad hires are like a cancer, they bring down morale, work and confidence in the business.

So how do you fix it? Advice from Mark Suster:
“One of the ‘tells’ for me of a management team that will not be extra-ordinarily successful is that they’re not always recruiting. I’ve seen it before – I send a talented member to a team and they say to me, ‘we don’t really have a role for that person’. Really? I always have a role for talented people. I may not have a BUDGET for talented people – but I always have a role for them. What role? Who the F knows. But let me at least have a coffee and feel out their enthusiasm, talent and ambitions. I might choose to do an upgrade on my existing team. I might be grooming them for when I have more money or more revenue. I might not be able to persuade them now but I want them to know my company so that when I’m ready to step on the gas I have a list of A players I want.”

4) You don’t stop taking on projects that can’t be delivered unless we work 12 hour days
Ahhh working til 9pm several days a week, it’s just the agency way of life right? Wrong, it’s bad management.

Tell your account managers (or yourself) to stop selling things that can’t be completed unless we work ourselves to death. I’ve seen people strain their health, relationships and family lives for what? So a deodorant can get more brand awareness? So that we can meet the unrealistic deadline you promised whilst trying to win a pitch? Or so a client can get dozens of mockups before they go on holiday?
This is advertising we’re talking about, not some higher calling. Everything we make is forgotten about in 6 months. Who gives a shit?

Matt Steel puts it in perspective in a brilliant, must-read blog post:
“Before his work as a business coach, Peleg ran a successful design firm in LA. He once told me that in the 18 years he owned Top Design, he never encountered a true design emergency. That simple truth resonated deeply with me. At Peleg’s firm, they weren’t saving lives or fighting wars. It was a service firm, and they lived accordingly. His team was in the office from 9-6 Monday through Thursday, and 9-2 on Fridays. They set realistic expectations for their clients and met deadlines. The business thrived.”

As Matt says later on in his post, sometimes you have to stay late because you’ve created a problem or need learn a new tool but too many unrealistic deadlines means that you stop creating because you love what you do. You begin working out of fear.
“When fear rules our lives, even the most amazing calling in life can be downgraded to a career. On the trajectory of fear, careers wane through the grey purgatory of jobs, and jobs break down in quivering heaps at the fiery gates of slavery.”

Fear becomes the driving force, the fear of missing a deadline, disappointing a client or wasting time trying to find inspiration. You begin churning out work and forget the reason why you wanted to be a creative in the first place.

The rewards for creatives are often minimal, we’re happy for a pat on the back and to be included in a ‘thanks for your effort’ all staff email but the chances of getting money, shares (LOLZ), or even getting your name dropped into the press release for all that hard work are slim to zero.

Which brings us to the next point:

5) You don’t give staff any credit
I really don’t understand why more agencies don’t give exposure to the people who do the actual work. Instead of putting yet another fucking generic CEO/creative director quote into a PR piece, why not grab a line from some of the people who actually worked on the project and busted their arse meeting its deadline?

The junior creative who stayed late for two weeks getting the project out of the door, the account manager who endured weekend calls from the client asking to make a logo bigger, these guys are the agency heroes. Thank you emails are great but they don’t come up in Google and you can’t link to them on blog or CV. Do the right thing.

Another way to give staff exposure is to start a blog and everyone contribute. Agencies are full of engaged people with ideas and passions, why not let them have dedicated time to blog?

6) You don’t buy us decent equipment
This is a no brainer.

Our job is to create, not worry about the ancient equipment you dragged out the cupboard. No designer wants to play ‘Guess whether Photoshop has crashed’ for half of the day.

Have you ever had to toggle between designing in Photoshop, a PDF containing wireframes, a email from a client with amendments, Facebook and Twitter all on one poxy 15-inch TFT Dell monitor that the last finance director left behind?

Get your designers some big fucking screens.

So there you have it.

I know people will say that agencies have always had high-turnover of staff and that these reasons have always existed, but I’ve been doing this for just over 7 years and it just feels different this time. There’s so many more options now that weren’t around 3-4 years ago, the way people are talking and the general mood has completely changed.

Whilst working at Isobar, every talented graduate or young UI designer I tried to recruit wanted to get experience working on products. They didn’t care about the type of work the agency produced. The brands were no big draw either. iPhone app for a beer brand? Mobile site for moisturising cream? So what?

When one of the designers told me “I want to look after users, not brands”, I had no reply, he was right. That’s all that you ever really do in a place like that.

I stayed in touch with a few of them, they work in tech companies or startups now.
Once they get a taste of real problems and caring for the end user, it’ll be near impossible to go back to doing marketing fluff.

Dustin Curtis wrote in his recent post:
“Learning how to think like this is like discovering halfway through your life as a flightless bird that you have wings and can fly. And once you discover it, there is no going back. It’s addictive and powerful. It ruins your ability to be a worker bee, because you’ve tasted blood: you become a killer bee, intent on understanding why things are the way they are, finding their flaws, and pushing the universe forward by fixing them.”

This feeling is the one that is rarely understood by the execs but it’s critical to realising the future of the industry. Maybe when the hackers and makers are running the show, things will change.

The cartoons in this piece are reproduced with permission from The Awesome World Of Advertising. See more here

Murat Mutlu is a product designer and co-founder of Marvel App. This post was first published on Mutlu’s site Mobile Inc. Follow him on Twitter @mutlu82

Images courtesy of Volvo

Last week, we received word that Volvo would be debuting their radical new design direction with what they’ve dubbed the Concept Coupe, the first new vehicle under SVP of Design Thomas Ingenlath, and it’s been lighting up the boards, so to speak, since it was unveiled on Thursday. Forum members’ reaction to the XC90 has been mixed but mostly positive thus far, and there is indeed more to it than meets the eye. Ingenlath offers a few choice remarks about what he calls “Volvo unleashed”:

The last few years car design has become increasingly standardized and streamlined, and too often defined by cluttered and overly complex design. While other brands try too hard to look luxurious and muscular, Volvo Cars will stand out as the calm, confident and naturally powerful challenger. We have no ambition to blend in, and the Concept Coupe efficiently manifests how iconic design will reinforce Volvo’s identity…

Think about the powerful calmness of a lion. He doesn’t have to prowl to radiate respect. Even lying down, he shows very clearly what he is capable of…

It’s up for debate as to how successfully the XC90 actually “merges contemporary Scandinavian lifestyle and design with iconic elements from Volvo’s 1960’s era” (per the press release). Yes, it includes certain signature elements such as the distinctive grill—the ‘cow horns’ at the bottom also refer to the iconic P1800—but the streamlined form factor doesn’t quite scream Volvo. Not that it’s a bad thing: Michael DiTullo notes that “It feels a bit like the concept that Bertone did for Jaguar last year in a really good way,” and Orrkwankit gets a little more specific: “I see some G35 Coupe C-Pillar, some VW XL1 tail, some MB CLA lower grill, some Jag F-Type front fenders… Yet somehow it all comes together pretty nicely.”

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Déjà connu pour son magnifique projet Monolith Skate, l’artiste Reynald Drouhin revient avec une série de photographies de paysages retravaillés. Utilisant cette même forme monolithique pour déformer et travailler les clichés originaux, ces créations très réussies sont à découvrir dans la suite en images.