Design

From Treestumps to Transformers: Dutch Laud Top Interior Design of '09

You know what the Dutch love almost as much as design? Design awards. Yesterday, they announced the latest: The 2009 Great Indoors awards, which selected five winners, from among over 380 entries worldwide. And the winners are...READ»

Making the Mall More Family-Friendly

Everyone knows that your holiday shopping excursion will only be as enjoyable as your youngest child. The designers at Rios Clementi Hale set out to reinvent the mall experience to keep the whole family happy.READ»

Rise and Sprawl: How Los Angeles Came to Be

Taschen's new photography book Los Angeles: Portrait of a City is quite simply the most comprehensive visual survey of the city ever published. Editor Jim Heimann begins with the first known photo taken in Los Angeles, and weaves a 500-page narrative of celebrity and politics, real estate and riots, pop culture and palm trees.READ»

Tim Burton at the Museum of Modern Art

Tim Burton has built his career on a personal aesthetic and vision, which drips from every film he makes. The Museum of Modern Art is giving him a blow-out, blockbuster retrospective, which opens this Sunday and runs through April 26. Here's a sneak peak.READ»

The Enduring Genius of Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams is a living legend. As Braun's head designer for almost 35 years, he defined what simple, functional products should look like. On Friday, London's Design Museum opens a mammoth survey of the more than 500 objects that Rams designed in his 50 year career, "Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams." Here are some highlights.READ»

Six Decades of Monumental Architecture: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the legendary architecture firm behind Chicago's Sears Tower and John Hancock Center, has been creating innovative and iconic achievements for six decades. "SOM: Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1997-2008," is one edition in a five-volume monograph showcasing the firm's most prominent works. Here are some highlights.READ»

Opening Today: Konstantin Grcic's "Decisive Designs" at the Art Institute of Chicago

Konstantin Grcic has quickly established himself as a master of contemporary design in the last twenty years. His grand theme has been a hyper-logical, ultra high-tech approach. Today marks his first U.S. retrospective, "Decisive Designs," at the Art Institute of Chicago. Here's a taste.READ»

Art House: The Private Spaces of 8 Great Artists

25 internationally known artists, architects and designers--including Andres Serrano, Vivienne Tam, Ellsworth Kelly, and Catherine Malandrino--invited Barbel Miebach to photograph their unique private spaces.READ»

David Rockwell Gets Academy Award Gig Second Year Running

David Rockwell, one of Fast Company's 2009 Masters of Design, has been just been announced as the set designer for the 2009 Academy Awards--for the second year in a row. His design for this year's Oscars--the 81st--channeled the ...READ»

The Biggest Stories of Our Time, Visualized

For the past year, David McCandless has immersed himself in the story-telling possibilities of charts, and the fruit of those efforts--works he's done, and works contributed by a slew of all-star designers--are now collected in "The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia."READ»

Phaidon's 100-Year, 1000-Product Survey of Design

Phaidon's most recent design compendium landed in bookstores with a thud: Spread over three volumes, it's a compendium of 1000 design classics, under three themes: Pioneers, Mass Production, and New Technologies. Here is a preview of what's between the covers.READ»

Plot Jewelry Is Neckwear for Data Fiends

A couple of employees of ad agency W+K have come up with one of the kookier ideas in recent memory: data-driven jewelry. After scores of meetings, planner Lisa Prince noticed that data was being packaged up in ever ...READ»

Masters of Design 2009 Event

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Sugar and Vice: From Neo-Pop to Low Brow and Back

With Halloween upon us, we thought it apropos to offer some inspiration for your costumes this year: The recently-released book "EdgyCute: From Neo-Pop to Low Brow and Back Again" explores art that is sometimes goofy, sometimes spooky, but always twisted. These artists shine light on the bizarre corner of the art world where cute can also indeed be edgy.READ»

Full Throttle: Vintage Motorcycles, Custom Choppers, and Racing Machines

The Shelburne Museum of Shelburne, Vermont showcased some of the most bitchin' motorcycles on the road in their exhibition, Full Throttle: Vintage Motorcycles, Custom Choppers, and Racing Machines. These cycles were so good-looking, words can't express it, so just take a look.READ»

How InterContinental Is Redesigning The World's Largest Hotel Chain

With more than 3,200 hotels around the world, InterContinental Hotel Group's Holiday Inn is the most recognized and most popular hotel brand in the world--every second, three people check into a Holiday Inn property. This year, the ...READ»

Negative Space: The Inside-Out Illustrations of Noma Bar

Noma Bar, an Israel-born illustrator based in London, tackles politically charged issues with eloquence and wit; his subjects ranging from Iraq to corporate greed. He works by honing the negative space of a drawing, so that it adds nuance to the dominant subject he’s depicting. Here's a selection of works from his new book, Negative Space, just published by Mark Batty Publishers.READ»

Scene Report: Art Basel Miami 2008

The Campana brothers, the hottest thing to come out of Brazil since Gisele Bundchen, are famous for their chairs made of teddy bears, flip flops and old tires. They are this year’s Designers of the Year.READ»

• Design of the Times

The Designer-Small Biz Connection

If you want your business to be noticed, design is everything. However, a lot of startups and small businesses often don’t have the budget for an in-house design department. In an effort to facilitate the connection between ...READ»

Redesigning a Brand

Redesigning a magazine's layout doesn’t just update it – it revolutionizes it. Luke Hayman, an art director with the design firm, Pentagram, spoke to an audience of about 50 students and professors at the final meeting of the ...READ»

Designing the Future

News typically doesn’t get blended in with art. Nor does the information in a lot of paintings, sculptures or other forms of art usually incorporate statistical or cerebral information. But an innovative new exhibit on display at ...READ»

Fast, and Not So Fast

OK, so I really like FastCompany.  Consistently good, compelling articles  . . . but I don't read it, I listen to the magazine that I download from audible.com.   I have too many trade magazines and email newsletters to contend ...READ»

Good and bad

I like the concept - that whether you are logged in or not governs how the site is personalized. I have quite a number of thoughts and will address each separately as I come across them, rather than providing a full review of ...READ»