Quote of Note | Pilar Guzman

“[At Martha Stewart Living] we work in this open plan office, and it’s really more like a creative arts studio than it is like any office I’ve worked in. Every other corporate publishing company looks like corporate law offices, but this is an amazing backdrop for creative people. I spend my day going through story ideas, doing run-throughs once story ideas are developed to see what kind of ideas would be featured in a given story, and having art meetings to determine what photographer or what direction we want to move in for each story. We talk in length about just making beautiful pictures, or how to put together a page that delivers both inspiration and elevates everyday life. A lot of thought goes into the visual side and the editorial side, so a lot of meetings are bringing those two halves of the brain and two types of editors and designers together so we can all be on the same page—literally.”

Pilar Guzman, editor-in-chief of Martha Stewart Living magazine, in an interview published today on mediabistro.com

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Quote of Note | Don Freeman

“I wanted the book to be like an interior design magazine, but with more pages and more images. Normally, a beautiful interior design story is only six pages, and you really don’t get enough. So I wanted 20 pages of these houses, and I also wanted really tight, detailed shots. There’s a lot of text in the book [written by Michael Owen Gotkin] and you can learn a lot by reading it, but that wasn’t an essential goal of mine. Through photography, I wanted to give people a perspective on these houses. Yes, you could visit them, and maybe you can’t, but you’ll never see them in the way that I photographed them. I shoot in natural light. I shoot the way the house looks. I don’t bring in massive amounts of equipment. I shot the whole book on negative film with long exposures. I painfully tried to create a sense of romance and nostalgia—and silence.”

-Photographer Don Freeman, speaking with us about his new book Artists’ Handmade Houses (Abrams), a collection of 13 homes handcrafted by artists and craftsmen including George Nakashima, Sam Maloof, Wharton Esherick, and Russel Wright.

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Quote of Note | Russell Flinchum


The new “Pioneers of American Industrial Design” stamp pane honors designers including Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss. (Photos: United States Postal Service)

Raymond Loewy’s prototype pencil sharpener continues its headlong progress towards becoming the most recognized industrial design never produced.”

-Design historian Russell Flinchum after today’s dedication ceremony for the new Forever Stamps commemorating 12 legendary American industrial designers. Flinchum, author of Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in the Brown Suit (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and Rizzoli, 1997) and American Design (MoMA Design, 2008), acted as consultant to the United States Postal Service on the Henry Dreyfuss stamp.

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Quote of Note | Michael Kinsley

“…[T]he real star of the show isn’t a human being at all. It’s a building: Renzo Piano‘s magnificent Times headquarters. Page One gives us tantalizing glimpses but never takes explicit notice. No journalist should work in conditions so glorious, and few outside The Times do. In 2009 the company sold and then leased back part of its headquarters to generate some much needed cash.”

Michael Kinsley, reviewing the new documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times in today’s New York Times

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Quote of Note | Philip Johnson


From left: Andy Warhol, David Whitney, Philip Johnson, John Dalton, and Robert A. M. Stern in the Glass House in a 1964 photo by David McCabe and Jasper Johns’ “Flag” of 1954-55 (Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY)

“He was an eighteen-year-old or something. He was a student up at RISD….We met because of [Jasper] Johns’ flag painting. He said, ‘Why did you buy that flag?’ It was his first question to me in the world. He just came up to me after a lecture [at Brown University] and said, ‘Why did you buy the flag?’ I said, ‘Because Alfred Barr told me to.’ I told the truth too soon, as usual. So then we got started.”

Philip Johnson on meeting David Whitney, who would go on to be his partner for 45 years, in The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A.M. Stern, edited by Kazys Varnelis (Monacelli)

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Quote of Note | Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough


P.S. We Love You Looks from the fall 2011 Proenza Schouler collection.

“One of our biggest regrets is the name of our company. It’s like alphabet soup. There are so many letters. Even coming up with a font was a mission. We had to do these fine, little letters. We couldn’t do strong, bold letters because it would be, like, out to here….We like ‘P.S.,’ but Paul Smith has taken it. It’s trademarked.”

-Fashion designer Jack McCollough, who in 2002 co-founded Proenza Schouler with fellow Parsons grad Lazaro Hernandez. The womenswear and accessories label incorporates their mothers’ maiden names.

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Quote of Note | Jimmy Lai

“In New York, I was very hungry one day and somebody gave me a couple of cookies. I didn’t know that they had marijuana in them. I became very munchy. I walked into a pizza joint called Giordano and thought: Hey, people would think that this is an Italian brand name. Why not? So I put the napkin in my pocket, came back to Hong Kong and asked our graphics people to copy it.”

Jimmy Lai, founder of Hong Kong-based retail giant Giordano, in an interview with Andrew Goldman published in today’s issue of The New York Times Magazine

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Quote of Note | Tim Gunn

“My sister and I used to take the FBI tour once a year. It was a big deal in D.C., and we never missed it. One year, 1961, when I was eight, I was on the tour and my father [FBI agent George William Gunn, who worked as J. Edgar Hoover‘s ghostwriter] asked me if I’d like to meet Vivian Vance. According to Helen Gandy, Hoover’s secretary, Vance was visiting Hoover, and she said she’d be happy to meet us. I was a rabid I Love Lucy fan and was beside myself with excitement. ‘Ethel Mertz is here?’ I screamed. My father smiled and took my sister and me into Hoover’s office, where I shook Vivian Vance’s hand and chatted with her. I was thrilled.

Years later, I was reminiscing with my sister about the meeting and suddenly I realized something. ‘Does it seem odd to you,’ I asked her, ‘that when we met Vivian Vance in Hoover’s office, Hoover wasn’t there?’ I’ve since looked at photos of both Hoover and Vivian Vance from that period of time, and the similarities are rather eerie… I’ve called some Vivian Vance experts, including Rob Edelman and Audrey Kupferberg, who wrote Meet the Mertzes: The Life Stories of I Love Lucy’s Other Couple; none of them knew of any meeting between Vance and Hoover. I’m not saying at the age of eight I definitely met J. Edgar Hoover at his office in the FBI wearing a dress and makeup, only that I strongly suspect it. My mother says I’m crazy, but she wasn’t there.”

Project Runway mentor and chief creative officer of Liz Claiborne Inc. Tim Gunn in his latest bestselling book, Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making It Work.

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Quote of Note | Sarah Burton

Lee [Alexander McQueen] got inspiration from everything. ‘I was walking to work and I saw this poster,’ or ‘I was watching Friends and Joey was wearing this green shirt.’ He loved the Discovery Channel and nature books. We all used to get National Geographic. It was that disparate. But he had an amazing way of editing. Each day was a different thing. He’d say, ‘I’d like this as a jacquard,’ or ‘I want this damask in a new laminated technique,’ or ‘Let’s get someone in the sewing room to make this into a suit.’ You never said, ‘No, I can do that,’ because either he could do it or you had to learn to do it, and he was always right.”

Sarah Burton, creative director of Alexander McQueen, in the exhibition catalogue for “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” opening today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Quote of Note | Marc Newson

“Working with an airline is like working with a country. The politics, the bureaucratic issues—not to mention health and safety—there are huge challenges on every level, really. Just being able to track your bag at any moment during your trip—so much about the aviation industry is lacking. In some ways, it’s inherently technologically driven, and in many others it’s retarded. Things are so slow, so expensive and so mystified. Aviation is a touchy-feely industry—the interface between the airline and the customer is still very traditional. For it to work well, it needs to be very personal.

I designed a range of luggage for Samsonite almost 10 years ago, and we thought then, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be great to be able to embed something in this piece of luggage that would let you know where it was at any moment?’ Ten years later, with the RFID chip, the technology is mature. So embedding that into a luggage tag seemed like a no-brainer. It offered the opportunity to redesign something as inane as a luggage tag to the point where you think, ‘Maybe people would actually like to have this on their bag, because it looks really, really cool.’ That led us to create a physical object [Newson’s Q Bag Tag, for Qantas, lets travelers track their luggage in real time] people were proud to have on their bag. That’s what all airlines are trying to achieve, but they’re all doing it in the same way, with their silly little cards that you hang on dopey fake leather straps. And as a designer you think, ‘This is just crying out to be done!’”

-Industrial designer Marc Newson in the May issue of WSJ. Magazine

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