Quote of Note | Neville Brody

neville_brody“In early 2002 I presented a lecture at the Design Indaba conference in South Africa, then newly free and celebrating liberation from eons-old social oppression and apartheid, extreme enforced inequality. The theme was ‘Can Design Feed People?’ The question wasn’t literal but was intended to pose the bigger question—what role can design and designers play today? Because we do not work in a vacuum. Design is not an innocent bystander. It is deeply integral to to the mechanisms of the social construct….We need to take more risks. As risks are no longer taken, minority interests become extinct and individual tastes are ignored. Just as governments limit the scope for intellectual and political debate, we don’t notice that the walls are moving inward and we no longer notice how shallow the cultural water. Vacuous top 10 lists fill our in-box and news feeds, cats, dinners, and prayers the rest. For mass communication, mediocrity is the goal, homogeny and vanilla the outcome.”

-Designer Neville Brody in an interview that appears in the March 24 “design issue” of Bloomberg Businessweek

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Chinese Artists Will Transform Your Instagrams into Oil Paintings

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Watch your back, Richard Estes. A photo and, at right, the resulting Pixelist painting.

Make 2014 the year that your Instagram masterworks break free of their pixellated prisons and start a new life as…photorealist oil paintings! That’s the transformative promise of Pixelist. The startup offers handmade oil paintings of any image you can capture or create, with “commissions” starting at $150. How? A bunch of willing and able Chinese painters sourced by founder Will Freeman, an Emory grad now based in Hong Kong. He made time to answer a few questions about the burgeoning business.

pixelist exampleHow did you get the idea to start Pixelist?
Pixelist came from a love of all things custom and creative. We’ve spent years designing our own clothes, shoes, furniture, and art and hunting for the best craftspeople to bring them to life. So we were naturally attracted to the idea of harnessing the popularity of Instagram to revive commissioned painting.

That part really describes me and my years in China and Hong Kong. But my business partner, Conor Colwell, originally came up with the idea. Conor and I used to work together and would always bat around startup ideas on our lunch break. I took him to visit one of China’s “art villages” in Shenzhen and he was hugely impressed by the painting quality. Conor has always been into Instagram, so he thought it would be a great way to immortalize photos people already loved. I loved the idea because I was already deeply into getting things custom made.
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Swiss Spritz! Helvetica the Perfume ‘Smells Like Nothing’

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Now that the literal feasting of Thanksgiving is over, the retail gluttony can begin. We have a feeling that you’re eschewing “doorbuster deals” in favor of web-surfing your way to elegant gifts (that don’t require resorting to fisticuffs or even leaving your home), but what do you get for the design-minded person who has everything? The answer, of course, is nothing—in the form of Helvetica the Perfume.

Technically, it is two ounces of distilled water, but to the typographically savvy, it is the olfactory equivalent of Max Miedlinger and Eduard Hoffmann‘s sans-serif marvel: pure, modern, neutral, and profoundly Swiss. Decanted into a glass bottle labeled in 24-karat gold Helevtica Bold and tucked into a letterpressed box, the limited-edition fragrance is yours for $62 from Guts & Glory.
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Bill Cunningham Plays Textile Detective in Paris

billAs if you needed further reason to procure a sturdy blue French workman’s coat, throw a couple of old-school cameras around your neck, and call everyone “child” this Halloween, check out Bill Cunningham‘s latest video report. The original street style photographer cast his sharp eye on the idea-laden Paris Fashion Week scene, and while the headline is netting (recall that Cunningham is himself a lapsed milliner), we think he buried the lead in spotting a flowery fabric on the Dries Van Noten runway that originated in the atelier of Charles Frederick Worth. Amusez-vous bien:
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The Getty Launches ‘Open Content’ Program, Lifting Restrictions on Use of Digital Images

Among the most well-known images in the history of photography is “The Open Door” (pictured), in which William Henry Fox Talbot used his pioneering calotype process to preserve forever the scene of a broom leaning at a jaunty angle on the threshold of Lacock Abbey. Talbot’s 1844 tableau is among the approximately 4,600 high-resolution digital images from the J. Paul Getty Museum that are now free use, modify, and publish for any purpose thanks to an open door policy announced today by The Getty.

“As of today, the Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds all the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose,” said Getty president and CEO Jim Cuno in a statement announcing the Open Content program, which aligns the institution with similar programs at the Walters Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Yale University, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Harvard University. Images were previously available upon request, for a fee, and permissions were granted for specific uses only.
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At Rubin Museum, Ignorance Is Not Bliss

But it does make for excellent fodder for discussions, film screenings, “interactive experiences,” and more thought-provoking happenings at New York’s Rubin Museum of Art. The reliably innovative cultural hub, the only museum in the United States dedicated to the Himalayan region, is now putting the finishing touches on “The Ignorance Series,” a fresh line-up of public programs that will explore how the unknown permeates our lives and impacts our perceptions of the world—at a time when it seems as if every answer is just a smartphone Google search away.
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Best Things to Do in Los Angeles: 1001 Ideas

Se questa estate siete nella città degli angeli vi consiglio questo libro scritto da Joy Yoon. In vendita su Amazon.

 Best Things to Do in Los Angeles: 1001 Ideas

Quote of Note | Elsa Peretti

“When I started with Halston, it was go-go-go fantastic. He loved my pieces, and they loved his clothes. It was great when he used my big belts in his fashion shows. I worked my ass off with him. He was working day or night, coke or no coke. We were going to Studio 54, but he was impeccable in everything. Halston gave me the discipline. He also gave me advice: when I started doing jewels that I thought were great but too expensive, he said, ‘Make small, medium, and large.’ It may sound simple, but it was very useful, and I have never forgotten it.”

–Designer Elsa Peretti, in the spring 2013 issue of TIME Style & Design

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Kickstart This: Brinca Dada’s Stunt Brothers

Toymaker Brinca Dada is best known for its stunning modernist dollhouses and “BiModal” building blocks–curvy, asymmetric wooden shapes that we’ve previously suggested deploying in games of Masochist Jenga. Now the promoters of beautiful fun are in the critical final days of a fundraising campaign for a line of thoughtfully designed wooden toys that teach kids simple principles of science. Meet the Stunt Brothers, adorable daredevils that perform classic stunts (human cannonball, anyone?) and tool around in retro vehicles. Help them get out of prototype purgatory and into production by backing the project on Kickstarter. Register your pledge of $1 or more by Friday to help Brinca Dada meet its fundraising goal.

Got an in-the-works project to tell us about? Write today: unbeige [at] mediabistro.com

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Blik Stickers Move from Walls to Furniture with ‘Surface Skins’

Blik isn’t sticking to walls. This week the self-adhesive wall graphics company launches Surface Skins, a new line of durable decals that promise to “bring some graphic goodness to humdrum furnishings everywhere.” Designed to cover desks, tables, cabinets, bookshelves, and other smooth surfaces in need of a boost, the removable stickers (which start at $42) debut in a dozen bold designs that are based on the artfully crafted gift wrap of Wrapped, Blik’s design-minded neighbor in Venice, California. Pattern options include a rainbow of Hirstian spots, AbEx-style flourishes, pseudocowhide, or good ol’ plywood. “We had the idea a few years ago and finally found a new material that made Surface Skins a possibility,” said Blik co-founder Scott Flora in a statement issued Monday. “Wrapped’s designs are so graphic, that you can take an ordinary object and make it really dynamic.”
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