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05.18.20

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Welcome to Our First Digital Offsite Show! Here’s How — and Why — We Did It.

When our 2020 Offsite fair, scheduled to take place in May at Skylight Modern in Manhattan, was put on indefinite hold, we decided to pivot to a digital exhibition model instead — harnessing the visibility of our existing platform to create a much-needed creative and commercial outlet for the design community, as well as redefining what a fair can be in the digital age. Welcome to Offsite Online.
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05.04.20

Shopping

A Lanvin Alum Who Pivoted to Design — And Just Released Our ’80s Dream Lamp

Ever since Golden Girls style became a thing two years ago, it's become something of a sport among Instagram vintage accounts to continuously drop ever-larger, ever-more-curvaceous '80s lacquered furniture sets than you dreamed could possibly exist. But leave it to a former accessories designer to recognize that sometimes a little bit of a big trend is all you need — Nadia El Abany's new collection of striped and color-blocked columnar lamps, their high-gloss ceramic bases and linen shades straight out of a Miami estate sale, let you scratch that particular itch without having to go all in.
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04.11.20

Saturday Selects

Week of April 6, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a reissued Nanna Ditzel chair, a stylish oasis in the desert, and the only pocket knife we'd pay $375 to probably never use.
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03.07.20

Saturday Selects

Week of March 2, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: a scathing takedown of the millennial aesthetic, the first-ever museum exhibition on ASMR, and oh, a bunch of new design objects, too.
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03.03.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

Katie Stout and the Subversion of American Craft

In her latest solo exhibition at Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami, called Sour Tasting Liquid, Katie Stout focuses her experiments exclusively in ceramics, exploring processes like slab-building, mosaic, pinching, kintsugi, and more to make a body of work that is at once figurative and abstract, logical and absurd.
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02.13.20

Fair Report

Our Favorite Launches From Stockholm Design Week 2020

Some of our favorite launches from Stockholm Design Week include a duo of dream sofas — one soft and pillowy, one firm yet cozy — a lamp made from cast iron, a group of student furniture made from limestone, a curated apartment that beautifully mixed art and design, and a lamp from 1953 with — you guessed it — a ball base, in production for the first time ever.
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12.05.19

Gift Guides

Croissant Lamps and Bauhaus Blankets: The 2019 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part III

For today's gift guide, we turned the tables, asking some of our favorite designers and influencers to share their best gifts for giving and receiving. The results were kiiiinda great — who wouldn't want a croissant-shaped lamp (that's Ellen Van Dusen's pick), a portable jacuzzi (chef Angela Dimayuga), or a shiny pink purse adorned with fruit salad (interior designer Sally Breer)? Plus, over on Instagram, you’ll have the chance to win four of the coolest items from this guide.
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11.13.19

Sight Unseen Presents

We Asked 10 Designers to Make Us a Birthday Card — Here Are the Results

For our last bit of 10th anniversary content this week, we followed a tradition set forth on our first and fifth birthdays — asking a select group of designers to make us a "birthday card." This year, without any prompting by us, most of the submissions centered around something we often try to publish on the site — sneak peeks into a designer's practice in the form of as-yet-unpublished designs.
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10.22.19

Current Obsession

RIP Design Legend Ingo Maurer, Who Was More Relevant Than Ever

In a strange twist of fate, we had a story on the recent resurgence of legendary lighting designer Ingo Maurer on our calendar for today, even before we'd heard of his passing at the age of 87. We had of course followed Maurer's work over the course of our 15 years in the design world, but we had never gone in for Maurer's more purposefully kitschy designs. But to focus solely on those works is ignore Maurer's sheer breadth of output, and to dismiss a collection of his lights that has recently begun to feel more contemporary and relevant than ever.
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09.12.19

Fair Report

10 (More) Things We Loved at Paris Design Week 2019

Consider this the year that Americans took over the French design fair, much like Milan in 2017. The fair had strong showings from other countries as well, of course, and we've included 10 of our favorite projects here. But in a year when it's sometimes been hard to be proud to be an American, this was a bright spot.
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09.11.19

Sighted

This Breakout Korean Lighting Brand Was One of Our Favorites at Maison & Objet

For its debut, the new Korean lighting brand AGO has collaborated with designers from Korea, Switzerland, and Sweden to present eight collections that blur the lines between residential and contract. Each AGO collection has a distinct personality, from the elegant Bell by JWDA — a spotlight that brings a friendly form to traditionally cold track lighting — to the Mozzi by BYMARS, whose gentle dimple recalls lightly-poked mochi.
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08.02.19

Up and Coming

Meet the New Mumbai-Based Studio Making Lamps Inspired by Ancient Culture

The work of the new lighting design studio 500 B.C. comes from a fairly unexpected place, in more ways than one — not only is the firm based in Mumbai, India, but founders Anandita Shah and Shiraz Noorani both have backgrounds in disciplines other than product design. Before creating their very first lamp together a year ago, Shah ran a handbag company for 15 years, while Noorani was a civil and structural engineer. Since pivoting, they've been churning out lamp after lamp under the influence of icons like Luis Barragan, Alvar Aalto, and Ettore Sotsass.
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