Hasta La Ideas

The June issue of Fast Company, celebrating the “100 Most Creative People in Business,” is covered in Conan O’Brien—nine of him, in guises ranging from Madonna to Moses—and ends with Margaret Rhodes‘ delicious backpage infographic about pastries (in honor of National Donut Day, which is this Friday, June 3). At the creative helm of all this creativity is Florian Bachleda, who since his appointment last fall, has dedicated his considerable talents to ensuring that the design of Fast Company is just as visionary as its subject matter. Bachleda, whose previous positions include creative director of Latina and design director of Vibe, was kind enough to pause his Memorial Day festivities to answer our questions about his lead-off presentation at next week’s ABSTRACT conference, career highlights (other than those involving O’Brien and exotic costumes), his summer reading list, and more.

1. You’ll be presenting at the upcoming ABSTRACT Conference in Portland, Maine. Can you give us a sneak preview of your presentation?
I’ll be talking about the four or five guiding principles of the ongoing Fast Company redesign. For previous titles, I’ve always employed specific design frameworks based on an editorial idea, so I’ll be sharing how that approach works, and doesn’t work, for Fast Company.

2. What is your greatest graphic design or publication design pet peeve?
People who don’t create content passing judgement on those who do.

3. What is your best or most memorable design-related encounter?
Three things: 1) Working for many years under Bob Newman, and trying to practice daily the lessons he taught me; 2) My first SPD Board meeting in 2002, and sitting at the same table with people like Diana LaGuardia, Janet Froelich, and especially Fred Woodward, who is the reason I’m a designer; 3) Having the opportunity to get to know George Lois, which is an experience and a privilege all it’s own.

4. What do you consider your proudest design moment?
Seriously, it’s every single day that I get to make a living doing a job I love. My father worked as a steel smelter for one company all of his life, from the age of 16 (he told the company he was 18) to 62. He never understood what I did, but he saw that I loved it. It’s a luxury he never had.
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The mission, if you chose to accept it: propose ideas for retrofitting a circa-1965 Los Angeles federal building to attain net zero energy status. Hundreds of young designers devised design fixes to transform the eight-story office building—in a memorable, beautiful, and original way—for the eighth annual Metropolis Next Generation Design Competition, held in partnership with the U.S. General Services Administration. And the winner is…a 15-member team of HOK / Vanderweil architects and engineers that impressed judges including Michelle Addington, Brian Collins, and Lawrence Scarpa with an entry that addressed every aspect of the building’s design and systems.

Led by HOK’s Sean Quinn, the Washington, D.C.-based team proposed a new facade featuring 35,000 square feet of photovoltaic film, a 25,000-square-foot microalgae bioreactor system that would generate approximately 9 percent of the renovated building’s energy needs, and 30,000 square feet of rooftop solar collectors circulating water through floors for interior climate control. Meanwhile, changes such as migrating the building to a cloud computing system and using equipment powered by the L.A. sunshine would save an impressive 80 percent in office equipment energy use. The interdisciplinary team will be honored on Monday at the annual Metropolis conference at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. As for the $10,000 prize, they’ve pledged to reinvest it to further research the development of the proposed renewable energy technology.

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SF-based Pop-Up Magazine brings their live act to NYC for a collaborative production with ESPN The Magazine

While the big debate among publications today mainly falls over print versus digital, Pop-Up Magazine offers a new way to think about editorial formatting with their with their ephemeral live events. At four “issues” strong, the performances piqued the interest of ESPN The Magazine‘s editor-in-chief Gary Belsky, who brought the San Francisco-based team behind Pop-Up to NYC for an unrehearsed, sports-enthused “Live Issue.” The upshot was a highly entertaining and informative 90 minutes that mixed various forms of media to its full potential.

Keeping each edition’s contents top secret (images here are of the team preparing), Pop-Up founder Doug McGray explained that as a whole, they “try to make it flow like paging through a magazine, giving a brief editor’s note and then straight into the content, no MC or introductions.” With a who’s who of journalists, artists and directors on board to contribute—including Starlee Kine, Cheryl Dunn and Craig Damrauer to name a few—the show gave commentators often masked by the written word the chance to tell stories in their own way.

For example, infographic maniac Andrew Kuo brought his charts to life with an entertaining break-down of his New York Knicks obsession. Kuo’s idiosyncratic analyses might go overlooked by the uninitiated pilfering through a magazine spread, but the passion behind his heartfelt explanation really captured just how big a fan he is. Radiolab producer Pat Walters would have had a difficult time demonstrating just how long world champion free diver Tanya Streeter could hold her breath without asking the audience to participate in the challenge, as he told her backstory in the time frame she would use for one dive (roughly six minutes).

Despite its sports-focused theme, the mix of longer and shorter stories, video excerpts, animated performances and more, the Live Issue was an exciting way to peruse the news and it definitely had the audience on the edge of their seats. Keep an eye out for Issue 5, hitting the San Fransisco Opera House this summer.

Some big news out of Architectural Record this week. Longtime former architecture critic and arts editor at Newsweek, Cathleen McGuigan, has signed on to become the magazine’s new editor-in-chief, effective at the end of this month. We’ve long been fans of McGuigan, having publicly professed our crush on her back in 2008 not once but twice in the same year (one for her writing a piece about the troubles surrounding green architecture and another for her, or her staff, deciding to include UnBeige in Newsweek‘s special issue on design, which was in of itself a terrific read), and of course generally admiring all of her other stellar work over the years. Her hiring seems like a great refresh for AR, considering the recent slew of not-fantastic news (the AIA’s leaving to join up with rival Architect as their official magazine and former editor-in-chief Robery Ivy sudden exit to go head the AIA) outshining the positive stuff, like the magazine’s iPad app. So of all the many applicants who likely saw our post about the position being open, we’re pleased as punch that it went to McGuigan. Here’s a bit about why she’s more than a little qualified:

McGuigan, a Michigan native, comes to the company with more than three decades of cultural journalism experience. After earning an English degree, with a minor in art history, from Brown University, she joined Newsweekin 1977 as a researcher and reporter for the magazine’s art critic. She rose up through the ranks, becoming a senior editor in 1992, a demanding position that entailed overseeing a weekly arts section and managing a staff of a dozen writers and reporters. That same year, she earned a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In 2008, McGuigan left the full-time staff of Newsweek and became a contributor to the magazine. 

In recent years, McGuigan has worked as a consultant for various clients, including the U.S. Institute of Peace (while it was building a new headquarters designed by Moshe Safdie) and the Syracuse University School of Architecture. She also served as an executive editor of HQ: Good Design Is Good Business, a McGraw-Hill pilot project. Her articles have appeared in venerable publications, such as The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, and Harper’s Bazaar. Presently, she is conducting research for a biography of the critic Aline Saarinen.

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Last week we reported on the ongoing controversy over Los Angeles’ MoCA‘s Art in the Streets street art exhibition, which has seemed to spawn in influx of graffiti in the area surrounding the museum and caught the ire of local officials. Capitalizing on the all-star lineup of street art talent in town for the exhibition, and to paint the totality of Los Angeles’ walls, and likely to help increase their own street cred, LA Weekly commissioned British street artist Ben Flynn, more commonly known as Eine, to tag their building up in his familiar type-based style. Hoisted up by a cherry picker, he stenciled and sprayed a crossword-looking pattern of various words and phrases across one whole side of the building. Here’s an interview the Weekly did with him after it was complete and a very complete slideshow of the work in progress.

Elsewhere, very quickly, the MoCA exhibition, as you might be aware, was co-curated by the Brooklyn Museum, which will be Art in the Streets‘ next stop come next year, starting at the end of March 2012. Apparently New York is already bracing itself for the same sort of influx of new, outside-the-museum street art, as judged by this wonderfully titled and very angry editorial by the NY Daily News, “Plan to Bring Exhibition Glorifying Graffiti Vandalism to the Brooklyn Museum Should Be Tagged ‘No Way’.”

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