12.15.16

Studio Visit

Inside the Downtown Los Angeles Loft Where Five Creatives Collaborate

Somebody knew somebody. That’s the short answer, according to Claire Cottrell, to the question of how five creatives — Cottrell, Michael Felix, David Rager, Cheri Messerli, and Saul Germaine, each distinguished in their respective fields — found themselves working out of a shared studio in LA’s Arts District, and occupying its airy second floor. “There are two degrees of separation between all of us,” she says.

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10.31.16

Up and Coming

A Parisian Creative Studio With An Epic Client List (We’re Looking At You, Rihanna)

In some ways, the five-year-old Parisian creative agency Bonsoir Paris has everything a modern-day entrepreneurial venture could want — creatively fulfilling commissioned work from cool, high-profile clients (everyone from COS to Rihanna) as well as the time and space to pursue their own work on the side. The studio has a lab that encourages its workers into "boundaryless exploration," as managing director Ben Sandler puts it.

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10.28.16

Graphic Design

This New Italian Studio Makes Textiles Inspired by Modern Art

Studio Testo, founded last year in Milan by two Italian art directors and visual researchers, makes work that's easily accessible and understood — cushions, wall textiles, upholstery fabrics, and pouches that are pretty and on-trend, what with their overlapping collages of line and organic shape. But take a deep dive into the two women's Tumblr or Instagram, and you'll see an incredibly wide and varied set of influences that have been synthesized into their current aesthetic.

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10.05.16

Up and Coming

Meet the New Generation of Italian Design

“Learning something new in every project gives us energy and happiness, which are fundamental not only while designing, but also in everyday life,” says Marco Zavagno on the curiosity that drives his collaboration with co-founder, Enrica Cavarzan, in their Venetian-based design practice Zaven. It’s a malleable mindset that sees the understated duo flexing their design muscles across various disciplines, having created everything from lights and chairs for companies such as Atipico and Secondome to catalogs and logos for design brands and schools.

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08.15.16

Graphic Design

Matisse-Inspired Prints By a Graphic Designer On the Rise

Much in the way our love for a book is evident in loose binds and worn-out pages, there's a certain value in the way we let beloved things blemish or roughen overtime. The Japanese call this permission of imperfection wabi-sabi — wabi denoting a singular, often uncontrolled uniqueness akin to a flowing streak of paint, and sabi literally meaning "chill" or "withered," which references the beauty of corrosion. Marleigh Culver, a graphic designer at Need Supply by day and visual artist by night, feels a certain kinship with this design approach. "I like sloppy shapes and rough edges, and for my pieces to look like they’ve been moved between houses for generations," Culver says.

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06.04.16

Saturday Selects

Week of May 30, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Beige is back, so are Tevas, and yet another Wright auction is absolutely killing it (the upcoming Contemporary Glass — which introduced us to this granite and glass concoction by glass artist William Carlson — is just. so. good.)

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05.01.16

Saturday Selects

Week of April 25, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the best in totally affordable and totally unaffordable fashion and design, two illustrations and a Toronto house we wish we could move into immediately, and a few more Milan fair stragglers, including the playful room divider above by Ana Arana.

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04.12.16

Up and Coming

This Former Acne Art Director Makes Furniture With a Graphic Eye

When we first encountered Swedish designer Erik Olovsson two years ago in the basement of Rossana Orlandi, he had but two products to his name — a wavy-lined metal and marble clothes rack and a modular, geometric shelving unit, both created in collaboration with his fellow graduate and graphic designer Kyuhyung Cho. Since then, Olovsson has been developing and tinkering with the beautiful projects he's unveiling in Milan this week.

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04.06.16

Up and Coming

A New Berlin Creative Studio Puts the Art in Art Direction

Before forming the design studio Eurodance in Berlin last year, Tom Singier and Jean Leblanc worked as, respectively, an art director with his own gallery specializing in fine-art prints, and an illustrator for clients like Nokia and Louis Vuitton — hence they were both fully acclimated to existing in the grey area between form and function.

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03.10.16

Excerpt: Book

Bauhaus-Inspired Sculpture From a Master of Swiss Graphic Design

Design obsessives know the late Max Bill primarily as a major figure in the Swiss graphic design scene of the 1950s and beyond. But a new exhibition catalog from a retrospective on view earlier this year at the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid reminds us that the designer was the ultimate polymath — an architect, silversmith, painter, industrial designer, and, most stunningly, sculptor of the geometric stone and metal pieces seen in the first half of this post (which sent us on a major Google Image search).

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Isabel + Helen Constructivist Kinetic Sculptures

01.26.16

Up and Coming

Isabel + Helen’s Constructivist-Inspired Kinetic Sculptures

What happens when restrictive graphic forms are expanded into three-dimensional objects? The kinetic sculptures produced by London-based duo Isabel Gibson and Helen Chesner seem to be one modern-day answer. In their projects, references to historical art and architecture movements are offset by an unabashedly free creative approach that escapes all formal restrictions. Even the final pieces are difficult to categorize: Are they sculptures, products, or props?

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01.05.16

Sighted

New Affordable Art Prints by Parisian Illustrator Alma Charry

Ever since we pulled together our first styling gig late last summer, we've been obsessed with the most niggling aspect of the whole process, which was where we could find pretty but affordable art (and amazing patterned rugs, but that's another day and another post). So we were happy to get news this week that one of our favorite illustrators — the young Parisian graphic artist Alma Charry, who we featured around this time last year — has not one but two new outlets from which to purchase her work.

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