Hasta La Ideas

Is it nudity week here at UnBeige? Sure, why not. We talked about Kim Cattrall getting naked to save art yesterday. And there was Terry Richardson‘s Pirelli calendar. And now here’s a third. The AP is reporting that two artists who staged a nude photography session at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a museum full of nude painting and sculptures, have been let off the hook by a New York City judge. Here’s how they pulled it off (semi-pun only semi-intended):

Defense lawyer Thomas J. Hillgardner says [model Kathleen “K.C.” Neill] did nothing indecent while posing in an institution full of depictions of nudes. He says she was making art and he noted court rulings saying public nakedness isn’t necessarily lewd.

Prosecutors say they aren’t sure they could prove the charges beyond reasonable doubt.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

CR’s December issue looks back at the year in visual communications, plus features on surrealism, the Illustrative festival and much more

This is the first time we’ve done that magazine staple, the year in review. We start off with a look back at the stories that cuased the most debate right here on the CR Blog

Then, we asked image libraries to analyse their data to reveal what you have been searching for over the past 12 months

And we couldn’t ignore all the illustrative work that was done using paper (a trend that has been simmering away for a couple of years but which reached boiling point this year with the publication of three books on the subject)

In type, we look at the enduring influence of Herb Lubalin as well as revealing the top-selling typefaces from some of the world’s leading foundries

And we also look at the impact of social media, and Augmented Reality, advertising’s buzzwords of the year

Plus we’ve got Jeremy Leslie on the year in magazines, Magma’s Marc Valli picking his books of the year, the impact of Twitter, plus pieces on scam ads and the end of the creative team.

Elsewhere in the issue, Steve Hare reports from the Portbou Festa del Grafisme in Spain

And James Pallister does the same for the Illustrative festival in Berlin

CR’s former editor Lewis Blackwell discusses what he has learned about the future of photography while interviewing many of the world’s leading practitioners for his new book, PhotoWisdom

And Rick Poynor urges readers to attend the Pompidou’s major show on surrealism and photography

For subscribers, our Monograph this mopnth features illustrator and tutor Matt Lee’s collection of Indian matchboxes

And, as a little Christmas surprise, we commissioned illustrator Johanna Basford to decorate a tree for everyone (regular readers will remember Johanna from this). Subscriber copies arrive in this envelope

With a bit of careful cutting and folding, it becomes this

Giving art to a spouse, boyfriend, lover is truly romantic I believe, so here is a suggestion handmade and eco-friendly artworks by Chicago mixed media artist Dolan Geiman…

Manchester designers Dorothy have designed a set of Christmas baubles shaped like hand grenades for social initiative Ctrl.Alt.Shift and British design brand Suck UK. (more…)