Hasta La Ideas

It’s a daunting project to design a new website for a design-driven, project-based New York City nonprofit: The Design Trust for Public Space (motto: “We love public space.”). Kiss Me I’m Polish and Type/Code were up for the design and development challenges, respectively, and behold the freshly launched Designtrust.org. The new site is intended to be “an effective tool for cities, citizens, and organizations worldwide interested in initiating change in their communities,” according to the Design Trust. In addition to a database of Design Trust initiatives such as Five Borough Farm and Under the Elevated, it includes case studies, a publications library, and an impact map of projects across the five boroughs.

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Admit it. Your seven-year-old nephew could out-HTML tag you any day and you think that a Cascading Style Sheet is something with a thread count. That’s where the Mediabistro mothership comes in. They’ve asked us to tell you about the online course in HTML and CSS that kicks off next week. Over four fun-filled sessions, web designer (and illustrator) Laura Galbraith will guide you through a variety of web page production techniques, from column-based layouts and search engine optimization to semantic markup and advanced CSS styles. And you’re bound to ace the typography sections. The online learning fun begins April 1 (make of that what you will). Preview the course syllabus and register here.

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Here at UnBeige HQ, every week is Internet week (if the wi-fi goes down for even a few minutes, we become testy and commence the hoarding of foodstuffs), but capitalize that “W” and you’re talking about a “festival of technology, business, and culture” that has been taking place in New York since 2008 and in London since 2010. Each Internet Week consists of hundreds of events that draw thousands of people, and yet the festival’s logos have long been, well, less than cutting-edge—sufficed to say that at one point there was a pixellated apple involved. Then they got Collins on the case.

A team that included Brian Collins, Dave Frankel, and Ali Ring looked beyond familiar tech tropes—the slash, the dot, the leaning arrow—and onward to the bracket. A three-dimensional pair is at the core of their flexible new identity for Internet Week. Not only can the brackets open to accommodate copy, photography, and illustrations but their angles play nice with the letterforms involved, all of which can be layered at various weights to simulate a blinking cursor. Keep an eye out for banners real and virtual that herald the next installment of the festival, which gets underway on May 19 in New York.

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Fab knows a thing or two about fresh starts. After a period of explosive growth fueled by hundreds of millions in funding, the design flash sale site imploded—itself. A massive restructuring that halved its employee count and winnowed down a product assortment that had ballooned to include pepperoni pizza t-shirts and Jesus kites has left the company leaner, meaner, and with a designer—Kiel Mead—in a leadership role. One of Mead’s first initiatives as executive vice president of Fab is “First Things First,” which invites designers across disciplines to submit ideas for “the first product that makes a house a home.” Selected items will be shown in New York in May, as part of Fab’s presence during NYCxDesign, and could eventually be put into production by the company. Submissions are due by March 21.

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A stubborn Israeli landlord is partially to thank for a delightful new Tumblr. When that building owner refused to extend Avner Gicelter’s lease, he and his partner were forced to search for a new apartment in central Tel Aviv, which in 2003 was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its collection of more than 4,000 Bauhaus and International Style buildings. “That process awakened my dormant passion for Tel Aviv’s unique architecture, and I got more interested in the buildings than in the apartment we were looking for,” says Gicelter, a graphic designer. He decided to share his interest with the world through Tel Aviv Buildings, a site inspired in part by Jose Guizar’s Windows of New York. “I wanted to use this simple yet very honorable way of design to show my love for my hometown and its most beautiful buildings.” We asked Gicelter more about the project and some of his favorite Tel Aviv buildings.

How do you describe the architecture of Tel Aviv?
I don’t really have a professional way to describe Tel Aviv’s architecture, only a point of view as a designer—in Tel Aviv’s central area (where you can find most of my illustrated buildings) there are two major architecture styles: the eclectic style which was active during the 1920s and 30s, and the International Style which was the major architecture movement during the 1930-50s and led UNESCO to name Tel Aviv as a world heritage site for its International Style architecture. I think that the difference between these two styles creates an unique and very interesting dialogue throughout the street of the city. In my opinion this dialogue is the best way to describe Tel Aviv’s architecture.

How do you decide which buildings to illustrate?
I start by walking throughout the city’s old areas. During that I shoot photos of buildings I find interesting, whether it is their architectural style, the way the residents designed their balconies or the presence of the building in the street. After choosing and shooting the buildings, I illustrate them with the pictures as reference.
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