09.25.20

Up and Coming

The Founder of AAKS Had to Return Home to Ghana to Bring Its Weaving Traditions to a Global Audience

After an eight-year stint in London, where she studied fashion, designer and entrepreneur Akosua Afriyie-Kumi returned to her native Ghana in 2014 to launch her brand AAKS. With AAKS, Afriyie-Kumi wanted to center the importance of hand-making by presenting her take on Ghana’s weaving traditions to a global audience.

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02.10.20

Current Obsession

2020’s Biggest Design Trends Are All About Our Desire to Escape

We know that putting out a trend forecasting story in February is a bit like still saying "happy new year" to people, but hear us out: We've been thinking a LOT about where this latest trend cycle came from. And last week, when Yellowtrace wondered aloud why everything suddenly looks like the inside of a cave, it hit us — everything we've been noticing lately, particularly in interiors, has been focused around the idea of escape

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11.12.19

8 Things

Introducing Our New Sight Unseen T-Shirt — and What Inspired the Illustrator Who Designed It

To celebrate our 10th anniversary, we asked one of our favorite designers, Berlin-based illustrator and art director Jonathan Niclaus, to re-interpret what a Sight Unseen T-shirt should look like in 2019. We chose the name "Seeing Things," Niclaus channeled the idea into a hand-drawn composition incorporating some of our signature colors, and the result launches for sale today in the Sight Unseen Shop. Get to know the design — and the designer — a bit better after the jump.

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09.10.19

Studio Visit

This Former Acne Accessories Designer Wants to Change the World, One Hemp Vessel At a Time

To mold by hand her instantly recognizable, multi-faceted, ultra-colorful shapes, Yasmin Bawa works with Hempcrete, a sustainable mix of hemp fibers, lime, and plaster that's light-as-a-feather but with the sculptural flexibility of clay. An otherwise industrial bio-composite material generally used in sustainable home building, scaled down to the realm of object design.

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04.20.19

Saturday Selects

Week of April 15, 2019

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A sneak preview of an all-star Spanish design exhibition coming to New York next month, the hard-to-get pastel-colored glassware we're pining for, and a jaw-dropping new collaboration between a Belgian fashion designer and architect, pictured above.

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04.05.19

Fair Report

The 9 Best Things We Saw at DesignMarch 2019 in Iceland

Iceland's DesignMarch is no New York design week — and we would never expect as much from a country with a total population of 340,000 — but like every other up-and-coming design scene around the world, from Norway to China, its practitioners are getting more savvy, more entrepreneurial, and more ambitious, resulting in more impressive work all around. Click through to see our favorite discoveries from our recent trip to this year's fair.

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02.27.19

Current Obsession

We Asked 13 Design and Fashion Influencers to Predict Spring’s Biggest Color Trends

When a color suddenly feels like THE color, it lodges itself in your brain temporarily, influencing every eBay search, shopping trip, and Instagram like you make until the next color comes along to replace it. This month we reached out to 13 of our most trusted design and fashion authorities to find out what hue they were stuck on for spring — folks like Dusen Dusen, Tekla Severin, and Harry Nuriev — then teamed up with Behr to suggest the perfect paint color to get the look in your own home.

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12.19.18

Interiors

At Gray Matters’s New Bower-Designed Showroom, the Shop Matches the Shoes

Since founding her cult-favorite shoe line Gray Matters in 2015, designer Silvia Avanzi has made sculptural heels her signature — suede-covered cubes, Plexiglas diamonds, hand-painted stones, and lacquered eggs have all offered support for her sandals, pumps, boots, and slingbacks. So it makes sense that when Avanzi went looking for a studio to design her new Brooklyn showroom, she chose Bower, a firm that knows a thing or two about unexpected sculptural details.

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11.13.18

Shopping

Tomato Red is Suddenly Everywhere — Here Are 35 Ways to Bring It Into Your Home

It isn't the easiest color to incorporate, there's no doubt about that. The trick is to steer clear of anything remotely resembling a primary-color trifecta (lest you end up in some frightening Memphis feedback loop) and to pair it with hues like lilac, peach, pale pink, and other neutrals.

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08.04.18

Saturday Selects

Week of July 30, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: IKEA re-releases vintage favorites from the '50s through the '90s, Céline debuts a new Miami flagship, and the lumpy terracotta furniture trend hits Urban Outfitters in record time.

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05.18.18

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Vonnegut/Kraft and Mary Ping Team Up to Showcase a New Custom Textile-Design Service

When a textile has a pattern woven into it rather than just printed onto its surface, it gains a unique property: It’s equally visually interesting on both sides. That was the first element fashion designer Mary Ping and furniture studio Vonnegut/Kraft seized upon when they teamed up to work with the new textile start-up Weft — which offers users the ability to design jacquard fabrics online and order them on demand — and it inspired their collaboration in more ways than one.

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03.17.18

Saturday Selects

Week of March 12, 2018

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: greatest hits from the Collectible fair in Brussels, new vases and bags that indulge our longtime obsession with hammered metal, and the design-y beach towels giving us a reason to start dreaming about summer.

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