Hasta La Ideas

Here’s your chance to walk a mile in Christoph Niemann‘s shoes—or those of John Maeda, James Victore, Ellen Lupton, Jessica Helfand, or Louise Fili. Each of these design world luminaries has customized a pair of TOMS shoes that are now up for auction on eBay to raise funds for the Art Directors Club scholarship fund, which is open to sophomores and juniors enrolled in accredited U.S. art schools and colleges. Neimann kept the focus on feet, while Victore created DIY Nikes, complete with swoosh. Lupton’s handpainted pair, a ribbon-strewn take on chirality by way of Stubbs & Wootton, is our pick for prettiest, and Helfand wows with a scrapbookish take on the Geneva Convention. Get a closer look at all the shoes here. Bidding starts at $100 and closes Sunday.

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It’s a bit hard to write even a sentence about a duo that is so enigmatic and cryptic. It feels anything I say may take away from the amazing body of work they’ve created. With that said, the work reminds me a bit of Matthew Barney’s work from his Cremaster Cycle. It might have something to do with that menacing stare.

Check out Lucy and Bart’s site here, it’s worth it just to make their faces morph back and forth. Trust me.

Tel Aviv-born, Eindhoven-educated, and New York-based Dror Benshetrit is showing off his Isaac Mizrahi-style high/low range. After making a splash at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair with his crowd-pleasing crumpled felt peacock chair for Cappellini, the designer and founder of Studio Dror this month sees the launch of his sprawling range of affordable homegoods for Target. The limited-edition “Dror for Target” range includes bedding, decorative accessories, and stationery in a palette of brown, raspberry, plum, and aqua. Among the items that caught our eye? A modular shelving system (pictured above) that can be configured to fit a range of environments and functions. At $89.99 per set, it’s the most expensive item in the 23-product collection, which also includes 99-cent mini-composition books and pillows that flip from abstract patterns to pixellated birds or butterflies, depending on your appetite for fauna and figuration. More Dror-designed Target merch is featured after the jump.

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In a charity project that might well have been called “Forever in Blue Jeans” if Neil Diamond hadn’t already taken cultural custody of the phrase, Barneys and Elle have teamed up on a charity auction of redesigned, recycled denim to benefit Oceana, the international advocacy group dedicated to protecting the world’s oceans. Project Blue was born when Julie Gilhart, Barneys’ sustainably savvy fashion director and senior vice president, helped to implement a program collecting and repurposing customers’ used denim. Eight fashion designers were invited to create unique pieces out of the old jeans (just like that Project Runway episode!), and the resulting garments are now up for bid on eBay through Sunday, May 10.

From our wildly talented friends Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte comes a ballerina-style dress (pictured above, at far right) that manages to make denim delicate, frayed edges and all. Bottega Veneta creative director Tomas Maier also went with a dress (above, second from right), a sleekly tailored number with a Thierry Mugler-on-the-farm vibe that Maier describes as “a dress for the future with a beautiful history.” Check out the work of the other participating designers—Derek Lam, Ann Demeulemeester, Alexander Wang, Rogan, Versace, and Stella McCartney—on eBay or in Elle‘s May “Blue Issue,” which features a portfolio of all eight “recycled chic” looks styled by Joanne Blades and photographed by Michael Armstrong.

(Photo: Pentagram)

Sure, Shepard Fairey has had a chat with the Obama administration about something akin to a Works Progress Administration for the 21st century, but Michael Bierut is way ahead of him. For the past nine years, the Pentagram partner has led the firm’s work for the Library Initiative, a Robin Hood Foundation program to build new school libraries in elementary schools throughout New York City, and the results have earned comparisons to WPA murals. While architects such as Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Richard Lewis, and Deborah Berke have handled the design of the more than 60 libraries completed so far, Pentagram created all of the graphics, including signage, wayfinding, and this master logo for the initiative:

“We were trying, on a corny and simple level, to say ‘this is a library with a surprise inside,'” Bierut tells us. “I also like any logo that works when typed in any font (or at least any font with caps and an exclamation point).” Among the surprises inside the new libraries? Extraordinary murals that fill the space from the top of the bookshelves to the ceiling with the bookish whimsy of artists and designers including Christoph Niemann (his murals for P.S. 69 in Clason Point, the Bronx, are pictured at the top of this post), Peter Arkle, and Charles Wilkin. Maira Kalman, for example, curated a four-walled, three-dimensional alphabet scrapbook for P.S. 47 in the Bronx, while Stefan Sagmeister and Yuko Shimizu emblazoned the walls of P.S. 96 with an illustrated Sagmeisterism: “Everybody who is honest is interesting.” A squad of faux ladybugs is involved.

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