Hasta La Ideas

This week a team of sharp-eyed astrophysicists announced their discovery of a new planet: a young, cold, and roguish type that refuses to orbit any star. They’ve named the sunless planet…CFBDSIR2149. While this is an improvement over “Uranus,” it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. An astronomy- and space-focused startup is seeking to end this squandering of planet-naming opportunities with its first commercial project. Uwingu–”sky” in Swahili–is challenging the people of Earth to create a “baby book of planet names” for the 160 billion or more planets astronomers now estimate inhabit our galaxy, the Milky Way (cut to image of delicious candy bars).

“You can nominate planet names for your favorite town, state, or country, your favorite sports team, music artist, or hero, your favorite author or book, your school, your company, for your loved ones and friends, or even for yourself,” suggests Uwingu founder and CEO Alan Stern, an aerospace consultant and researcher who formerly directed all science program and missions at NASA. Each nomination costs 99 cents, with proceeds going to create a private sector fund for space projects. Names can be up to 50 characters (latin letters only), from any language or culture, and “can be anything the average grandmother would be proud to hear her grandchild say.” A contest will determine the 1,000 most popular planet names in the database, which will be communicated to planet-hunting astronomers for consideration. Voting is now open (votes also cost 99 cents each). Among the early leaders are “Pale Blue Dot,” “Heinlein,” and “Ron Paul.”

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(Photo: Philip MacCarthy)

With a megastorm on the horizon for the country’s East Coast, we present this calming fall foliage break. “A Perfect Fall Day” by Philip MacCarthy has been declared the winner of Rhode Island Monthly’s “I Luv RI” photography contest and appears in the November issue of the magazine. “I took the photo a few years back when I moved here from San Diego, after being in what some would say the best weather in the United States, and realized there is something heart warming, rejuvenating, and serene about fall in Rhode Island,” said MacCarthy, who lives in Warwick and snapped the photo at Indian Lake in South Kingstown. “Everyone must take time to sit still and watch the leaves turn.”

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Earlier this year, AIGA put out the call for “stories that reveal the value design creates for clients, the public and, most especially, customers” for Justified, a new kind of competition. Hundreds of entries poured in—from design firms, in-house design departments, design entrepreneurs, and freelance designers—and a jury of top designers chaired by Terry Irwin, head of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design, has selected 18 exemplary case studies that serve as an effective tool to explain design’s value to clients, students, peers, and the general public. Five entries made the shortlists of all of the jurors: the Feed the Future Website, Make Congress Work!, Earth Lab: Degrees of Change, HTML & CSS: Design and Build Websites, and CODA Experience Center. “In a challenging economic climate, articulating what we do has become more important than ever,” said juror Petrula Vrontikis, creative director of Vrontikis Design Office, in a statement issued by AIGA. “It is possibly the most useful skill we can master, allowing us to keep good clients and make purposeful (and beautiful) work.”

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“Valencia” (1961) is included in “The Photographs of Ray K. Metzker and the Institute of Design,” on view through February 24, 2013 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

• Feast your eye (well, eyes) on the new Eye magazine website. The London-based graphic design review’s overhauled online home incorporates the four-year-old Eye blog as well as an issue archive that goes all the way back the first issue in 1990. Look for more writing from the archives and many more images to be added in the coming months. Get a taste of the latest issue–#83–with Adrian Shaughnessy’s reevaluation of Herb Lubalin.

• Comics legend Stan Lee has turned to Facebook for some crowdsourced captions. Learn more about the contest from our sister site, Galleycat.

• Our friends at the art flash sale site Exhibition A are preparing to showcase their suitable-for-framing wares in the real world. On Saturday, the Exhibition A Pop Up Gallery will take over Half Gallery in NYC. Stop by between noon and 6 p.m. to preview and collect prints by the likes of Olaf Breuning, Les Rogers, and Jessica Craig-Martin. Not in New York? Peruse the latest crop of offerings at your leisure online.
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Montana’s Grinell glacier photographed in 2008 by Project Pressure, a non-profit that is developing the world’s first glacier atlas consisting of hundreds of images of the world’s retreating glaciers.

• Studies show that pizza tastes even better when consumed in the midst of pizza-related memorabilia, and so Philadelphians are in a for a treat with Pizza Brain. The pizza museum-cum-restaurant is the creation of Brian Dwyer, who owns the world’s largest collection of pizza memorabilia. NPR recently caught up with the pizza fanatic and his team as they put the finishing touches on the place. “We want this place to feel like [an] interactive art installation,” Dwyer told Elizabeth Fiedler. “Instead of just putting it all in a bunch of cases that are very linear and sterile, where you just kind of stare at it and say ‘There’s a thing’ and walk away, this is like, ‘Oh! What’s this little thing?…There’s a pizza face!’” His buddy Ryan Anderson had a slightly less ambitious goal: “All that I want is to not make this place look like an Applebee’s or a Hard Rock Cafe or a Cracker Barrel with ephemera just like stapled to the walls.”

• Photographers Linka Anne Odom and Klaus Thymann, alongside agencies Good Pilot and Mother London, have been selected as the recipients of this year’s Getty Images Creative Grants. The two teams will each receive $15,000 to cover the costs of developing new imagery to strengthen the communications of a non-profit organization they have chosen to support. Odom and Good Pilot are collaborating with D-Foundation to pursue a project that aims to recruit volunteers to increase effectiveness of medical care provided to vulnerable people in India. Meanwhile, Thymann and Mother London will visually highlight “global glacial history”: the photog will travel to Bolivia to document the fieldwork of Project Pressure and the impact of glacial retreat on the local population.

• In other Getty Images news, the sale of the photo giant is moving right along. Final bids, due Monday, August 6, are expected from Carlyle Group and CVC Capital Partners, according to a report from Reuters. The price tag could be as much as $4 billion.

• Can Tino Seghal turn questions into art? That’s the question posed by Lauren Collins in a profile of the artist that appears in the August 6 issue of The New Yorker. The story includes an interesting portrait of the artist as a young Grinch, describing an 11-year-old Seghal’s decision to cancel Christmas. “I wrote my parents a letter and said, I don’t want to be part of this Christmas thing,’” he told Collins. “I rejected my presents. This whole kind of Christian colonizing of what was a collective, pagan ritual—I’ve mellowed out a bit, but I was enraged, somehow, by that.”
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