Hasta La Ideas

The design whizzes over at C&G Partners have many talents, but among the most mind-blowing is their ability to transform grayish-yellowish mountains of historical documents and artifacts into visually stunning, user-friendly exhibits and displays. Feast your eyes (and your web browser) on their latest archival triumph: a website for The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. A C&G team led by partner Maya Kopytman (working in collaboration with Chicago-based web development firm Palantir) created a site that builds on the graphic identity established for a related traveling exhibition that the firm completed last year. At the core of the site, which launched yesterday, is a new digital archive for The King Center Imaging Project, a JPMorgan Chase & Co.-backed initiative to “bring the works and papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. to a digital generation.” Browse the archive to pore over King’s handwritten notecards and telegrams or zoom in on a Flip Schulke photo of MLK enjoying lunch with his family in 1964, under the watchful gaze of Ghandi, whose image hangs on a wall above them. Next up: more meticulously scanned and eminently searchable letters, speeches, drafts, notes, and photos. The King Center Imaging Project digital archive will eventually contain about a million documents.

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Last July, after the freshly launched design flash sale site Fab.com had landed its first round of venture funding (a cool $8 million, led by Menlo Ventures), founder Jason Goldberg touted the site’s diverse mix of merch, from chairs and stationery to bikes and biscotti. There was just one category he said that the company would steer clear of: fashion. “We don’t have any ambition in the fashion category,” Goldberg told Venturebeat, in what sounded like an attempt to differentiate his site from the flash-sale fray (read: Gilt Groupe). “That’s more about liquidation; our model is more about opening a new channel for suppliers.” Five months and $40 million in Series B funding later, Fab.com has flip-flopped on fashion and acquired FashionStake, which launched in the fall of 2010 as a kind of Kickstarter-style fundraising platform for independent fashion designers and evolved into an Etsy-like marketplace for their wares. “We’re going to do the exact same thing we’ve done with design products to fashion,” wrote Goldberg today in a blog post announcing the deal. “Make no mistake, we’re keenly aware that there are plenty of sites that sell high-end fashion for a discount. That’s not Fab. We’re doing fashion the Fab way; designed to make you smile.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but FashionStake founders Vivian Weng and Daniel Gulati will be joining Fab.com. According to Weng and Gulati, FashionStake will relaunch on Fab.com in mid-February.

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We can’t help but viewing 2011 in terms of artistic losses—from Lucian Freud and Cy Twombly [sigh!] to John Chamberlain and Helen Frankenthaler—and don’t even get us started on Hitch. This perspective makes our own 2011 highlight reel about as uplifting as the annual Academy Awards death montage, and so we defer to Mac Premo and Oliver Jeffers of The Daily. The video artists have whipped up this two-minute video recap of the biggest stories of 2011, from the January shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to the end of the Iraq War, all in a whimsical stop-motion style that recalls the interstitial programs of Sesame Street. Happy New Year!

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‘Tis the season for shiny new things, and among the gifts under the tree at mediabistro.com this year was a redesigned homepage, part of an ongoing effort to spruce up the company (which keeps the lights on here at UnBeige) in both the online and offline worlds. The homepage features a fresh header and logo as well as mega dropdown menus and a search box. “Previous to rolling out the new design, there were ten navigation points, and now, four, which happen to be, not accidentally, the four core areas of our expertise,” explains mediabistro.com creative director Skipper Chong Warson. “The left-hand sidebar also went away and the site became fixed-width.” Some additional tweaks and fixes are underway, but the creative team has already begun work on phase two of the project, a makeover of the content stream and site-wide sidebars. Warson took time away from optimizing mega dropdown menus to answer our questions about the redesign.

If you had to describe the new homepage in three adjectives, what would they be?
We’re not done yet, but in terms of what we’re aspiring to throughout the process: succinct, current, and compelling.

What were the priorities in redesigning the mb homepage?
There were many, to be sure—fixes for consistency, meeting modern needs, organization of content, branding, etc.—but really it’s about focus, focus, focus. Mediabistro doesn’t lack for content or product offerings but where we’re really concentrating our ongoing efforts is on clarity of message; one of the many ways that visual design excels, taking a large pile of information and helping people with different levels of acquaintance and experience make sense of it.

With any change, in life and in design, there’s always stress and some period of adjustment. People are going to come to the site and say, “Where’s community? Where’s the freelance area? Where’s this? Where’s that?” Which is why search was so important to this equation. There’s a lot of stuff that went on behind the scenes to make the search work—the hinting, the logic, the styling.
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“If somebody thought that when Valentino and I stopped working, we’d be sitting in Central Park feeding the pigeons, they’d better change their mind,” said Giancarlo Giametti, seated beside his longtime partner this morning at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “Because we’re not going to stop.” The debonair duo chose an actual museum as the setting to unveil their digital one: the Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum, which launched today as a free app. Designed and produced over the last two years by Novacom Associés and Kinmonth Monfreda for a sum that Giametti would describe only as “a lot of money,” the ambitious initiative showcases five decades of fashion history in thematically organized virtual galleries—each one illuminated by sun streaming through portals to a blue, cloud-strewn “Roma sky”—of Valentino dresses along with more than 5,000 archival photos, videos, and documents such as sketches and advertising campaigns. Meanwhile, the designer himself is something of a Luddite. “I am completely out of these mechanical things,” he said at this morning’s press conference. “I arrived at one of my houses and wanted to watch a DVD, and I had to call down to the town for a guy to come help me play it, but this is about the future.” Giametti explained that the virtual museum will continue to evolve, making use of new technologies and adding more rooms as well as “masterclasses” by leading fashion figures and critics. “I still love design and clothes,” added the 79-year-old Valentino of his own ongoing role in contributing to the museum. “And I’m going to do unbelievable drawings of new creations.”

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