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03.15.10

Excerpt: Magazine

A Guide Magazine

We’ve seen magazine issues themed around water, procrastination, infrastructure, age, Belgium, and sex. But horses? Not until we picked up the latest issue of one of our favorite new reads, A Guide Magazine. Conceived by the Vienna-based husband-and-wife duo of graphic designer Albert Handler and his fashion-world wife Ulrike Tschabitzer-Handler, and named for the city guides that will be available as a pullout in each issue, A Guide Magazine is a biannual publication devoted to craft and creativity.
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03.10.10

8 Things

Lisa Congdon’s “A Collection a Day”

On January 1, the San Francisco–based artist and illustrator Lisa Congdon began documenting her various collections on a new blog, A Collection a Day. A new day, a new grouping: vintage Boy Scout cards, delicate sewing notions, paint tubes, plastic charms, erasers, paintbrushes, pencil leads, even — strangely — multicolored buoys. “No, I don’t have a collection of buoys,” Congdon laughs. Or a collection of Victorian shoes, for that matter. As her website explains, while she photographs the collections that decorate her house and studio, "some are imagined; those I will draw or occasionally paint.” Scroll through her site, and you’ll find twigs and toiletries drawn with ink on paper, and, yes, buoys painted with gouache on Masonite.
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03.05.10

What They Bought

Fair Folks & a Goat

At Fair Folks & a Goat, a new retail gallery and tea salon hybrid on New York’s Upper East Side, everything inside the gracious late 19th-century studio apartment is for sale. Well, almost everything — a small candy dish that reads “When I count my blessings, I count you twice” was a gift from co-owner Anthony Mazzei’s mother and “it’s a million dollars,” he jokes, while the vintage paperbacks lining a wall of shelves constitute an actual lending library. Here, the props and merch blend into a seamless backdrop for a new kind of social gathering. “We wanted to create a space for young people to have a home away from home, where instead of alcohol and loud music it would be more like a physical incarnation of a magazine, with design, art, fashion, and culture,” says Mazzei.
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03.01.10

The Making of

Welcome to Vörland, by Reed Young

Reed Young’s photography career has taken him from a sumo wrestler’s home in Tokyo to the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic to the halls of Fabrica, the Benetton-owned creative lab for young talent in Treviso, Italy. But he probably wouldn’t have gotten to any of those places if he hadn’t faked his way into art school. At 17 and a middling student at a Minneapolis senior high, Young, now 27, borrowed a photography portfolio from a friend and was accepted into his hometown’s prestigious Perpich Center for Arts Education on its merits. “When I arrived, I think they found it a bit strange that I didn’t know the difference between an aperture and a shutter speed,” he says.
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02.24.10

Studio Visit

Scholten & Baijings, Product Designers

The story of Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings began, like many Dutch stories do, in a church. In the late ’90s, Baijings was working for an agency whose headquarters were located inside one of the country’s many abandoned houses of worship. Scholten, a graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven, had a burgeoning design practice nearby. Scholten was asked to design a small bar for the agency’s office, and “the rest is history,” says Baijings.
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02.19.10

Up and Coming

Kimm Whiskie, photographer

There’s something charmingly mysterious about the 24-year-old Lithuanian photographer Kimm Whiskie. The name alone sounds like an alias (turns out the second half actually is — Whiskie did time in a rock-and-roll band) and its gender is ambiguous (an embarrassed email straightens this out). A request for an interview is politely downgraded to a Skype chat; when a portrait arrives, it’s a grainy Lomo shot of the photographer lying face down on the pavement.
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02.12.10

Excerpt: Book

Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

The products featured in Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams will be familiar to any Rams disciple, but what struck us most about the book was a section devoted to Braun’s beautifully understated communication design and to that department’s fearless leader, Wolfgang Schmittel. He ran a tight ship — an in-house manual went out to each member of the design team with instructions on how to appropriately and inappropriately market the Braun product line — but as a result, the Braun image “differed greatly from the existing design forms of other manufacturers at the time, due to its clarity."
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02.08.10

Invitation

A Color Study by Raw Color

It’s not unusual for a designer to become synonymous with a single project. Think of Konstantin Grcic’s galactic-looking Chair_One, or Stefan Sagmeister’s AIGA poster carved into his flesh with an X-Acto knife. For Christoph Brach and Daniera ter Haar, it’s more like eponymous: A project called Raw Color gave their studio its name (though it's since become known as 100% SAP so as to avoid confusion) and it has consumed them by varying degrees since they graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2007.
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02.03.10

8 Things

Alexandra Verschueren, Fashion Designer

At 22, Alexandra Verschueren has interned for Preen, Proenza Schouler, and Derek Lam. She’s been honored by a jury that included former Rochas creative director Olivier Theyskens and the International Herald Tribune’s fashion critic Suzy Menkes. And in the last six months, her graduate collection Medium has been fêted by Wallpaper magazine and the Mode Museum in her hometown of Antwerp. So why, when she applied to that city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts straight out of high school, did no one expect she’d get in?
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01.08.10

8 Things

Atelier NL, Product Designers

Atelier NL’s Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck keep a studio in the airy loft of a ’70s-style church in Eindhoven. They live there, too, but you wouldn’t exactly say that’s where they work. More often than not, the designers can be found doing fieldwork, whether that means scouring the area’s secondhand shops for mechanical knickknacks to inspire their more analog designs — like van Ryswyck’s hand-cranked radio — or digging up clay in the Noordoostpolder, an area of reclaimed farmland north of Amsterdam that until the 1940s was submerged under a shallow inlet of the North Sea.
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01.06.10

Studio Visit

Peter Buchanan-Smith, Graphic Designer and Axe-Maker

Ah, the impotence of the urban dweller. Ever since the Best Made Company axe debuted this spring, you’d be hard-pressed to find a New Yorker who isn’t dying to snap open that wooden case and heave the Tennessee hickory–handled thing at… well, what, exactly? “At first I thought a lot of New Yorkers would buy them,” says Peter Buchanan-Smith, the New York–based graphic designer who founded the company along with his childhood pal Graeme Cameron. But it turns out the best audience for an axe — even one with a handle saturated in gorgeous shades of spray paint — is a person who actually might use an axe.
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01.04.10

What They Bought

Kiosk’s Portugal collection

It’s hard to put a finger on just how the New York store Kiosk — which peddles quirky housewares from around the world, one country at a time — vaulted from cherished destination of a few to the kind of place Jasper Morrison, London's best-known everyday-object apologist, feels obliged to check out when he’s rolling through town. But while the 4-year-old Soho shop has begun to shed its air of secrecy, it has never lost its charm. Climbing a set of graffiti-covered stairs to its second-floor entrance, you never know what you’re going to find at the top.
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