A FIRST FOR THE SECOND CITY
Chicago may wear its sobriquet as the Second City with a certain pride, but it’s about to register a significant first for the nation. From Sept. 15 to Oct. 15, the Chicago International Poster Biennial will present an outdoor exhibition in the city’s lakefront Grant Park as the crown in a competition that summoned entries from around the world. It’s the first North American venue for the global series of festivals held in cities such as Chaumont, France; Tehran, Iran; Warsaw, Poland; Hong Kong, Taiwan and more.
Endorsed by icograda and IDA, the series has become the premier showcase for international poster art. Chicago’s first Biennial won’t come up short in global content, either. Entries to the competition came from more than 40 nations, and jurors for the exhibition include Michel Bouvet (France), Shigeo Fukuda (Japan), Yossi Lemel (Israel), German Mantalvo (Mexico), Alfred Halasa (Canada) and a hearty helping of Statesiders: Luba Lukova, Lanny Sommese, Martin Venezky and Chicagoans John Massey (who chairs the jury) and Jay Ryan.
Juror Yann Legendre qualifies in three categories: He’s French, practices design in both the U.S. and France, and partners in a Chicago studio with Lance Rutter; Rutter and Legendre are codirectors of this newest Biennial, having shepherded the concept from an idea that initially met with skepticism from many to a bonafide draw that aims to enhance Chicago’s standing in the global design community in more ways than one.
Rutter and Legendre’s devotion to the art of the poster spurred their interest, and their resolve was only heartened by the fact that although Chicago has its share of outstanding poster artists, it doesn’t exactly have a reputation for the medium. “We want posters to be identified as the quintessential public art form, because they engage citizens at street level, requiring an emotional and intellectual response,” say the codirectors. “Secondly, we want to help the City of Chicago craft its reputation as a proponent of international cooperation and communication—and as a strong civic advocate of design.” www.chicagobiennial.org
[In the interest of full disclosure: STEP is an Official Partner of the 2008 Chicago International Poster Biennial.]
FIRST COMES BRAND …
New York’s Carbone Smolan Agency started working on the brand behind Nizuc—an upscale resort and residential development under construction in Mexico—before there was even a plan for what all the buildings would look like. “In the absence of anything material, the brand takes on an even greater role,” says Leslie Smolan, founding partner. “We’re creating the song sheet of which all the creative partners will sing, so we’ll all sing in the same key.” After a site visit and research, her firm defined the development’s brand and created everything from a logo—it was inspired by the site’s Mayan history—to an ad campaign, a website and even products related to Nizuc. The latter added presence to an on-site photo shoot, and some of the resulting images feature a model wearing a necklace featuring the Nizuc logo, as well as a sarong with a pattern based on the mark. “We painted a picture of what it will feel like when it’s built,” Smolan says. And if you buy a residence at Nizuc, you’ll get one of those elegant necklaces.
www.nizuc.com
IMAGINATION STATION
It won’t be a live-action version of
The Twilight Zone, but it may inspire that same, slightly eerie sense of wonder and awe. The Cusp dimension will include a woman who spent more than six months broadcasting her entire life on the internet and another who explored body-hacking by having a magnet inserted into one of her fingers. These two are just a small slice of the speaker lineup for the firstever Cusp Conference, taking place September 10–11 in Chicago. “We’re being true to our tagline, ‘the design of everything,’” says Greg Samata of SamataMason, the design firm behind the event (see our Q&A with Greg and Pat Samata in this issue on page 42). “I think you can come away with a different perspective on who designers are and what they mean to the world.”
www.cuspconference.com
JUST FOR KICKS
Leny Evangelista describes herself as a closet illustrator, but her skills with a fabric pen still laced up the top spot in the Sole SearchDesign Contest. This AIGA/L.A. competition challenged designers to turn a pair of white canvasTOMS shoes into stylish kicks. In her winning design, Evangelista depicts the freedom of flight through a highly stylized bird that wraps around the outside of the shoes. “When I do illustration or drawing, it allows me to be free, to be free as an artist,”she explains. In addition to creative autonomy, the contest gave designers the chance to rack up a few cosmic brownie points. TOMS matched each entrant’s shoe purchase by donating a pair to children in need, as the company does with all its sales. Plus, $8 from each purchase went to the AIGA/L.A. scholarship fund. To improve your own style and karma, look for Evangelista’s design to be offered as a limited edition through TOMS.
www.tomsshoes.com
ART MEETS COMMERCE
Think of the GAIN conference as relationship therapy for design and business. From October 23–25 in New York, this everyother-year AIGA event promises to smooth over the rough patches, helping you figure out how to boost everything from return on investment to brand value. The who’s who speaker lineup includes
New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, IDEO general manager Tom Kelley and folks from Google, Target, Saturn, Johnson & Johnson and more. New this year are workshops geared to in-house designers, but there are old favorites like“20/20,” which gives 20 designers 60 seconds each to answer a big-picture question, such as, “What is your secret to success?” or “How do you win business?” Or you can cut to the chase and strip-mine the collective unconsciousness at a talk given by a Jungian analyst.
http://gainconference2008.aiga.org
BILLBOARD IN A BAG
For a mere $75, you can carry a piece of advertising history over your arm. After Sao Paulo, Brazil, banned outdoor advertising, designer Zoë Melo decided to turn hundreds of abandoned banners into fashionable tote bags. “The idea of billboards being outlawed seemed crazy and intriguing,” says Melo, the founder of Touch, which develops socially conscious products. “We had to do something around that.”
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to figure out what any given bag advertised in its former life, but these graphic snippets give off a bright, cheery vibe. Melo collaborated with Straat, a socially conscious product development company in Brazil, who helped her acquire materials and find local craftspeople. Each bag is hand-made in this South American country and lined with a traditional, patterned fabric called chita. Hurry, there are only 600 banner bags up for grabs. http://www.do-not-touch.com/limited_bags_main.html
FROM FILMSCAPE SECTION OF ANDY WARHOL: OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS. INSTALLATION VIEW AT THE MODERNA MUSEET IN STOCKHOLM, 2008. SCENOGRAPHY BY CHEZWEITZ & ROSEAPPLE. PHOTO BY ALBIN DAHLSTRÖM.
WARHOL MEETS COLUMBUS
Even if you’re still waiting for your 15 minutes of fame, you’ll want to put aside your angst long enough to consider the only U.S. stop for
Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms. The exhibit, which drew throngs in Europe, hits the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, from September 13 through January 4. With roughly 700 items, the show places a heavy emphasis on the pop artist’s film and video work. The Filmscape portion of the exhibit even includes Warhol’s first movie,
Sleep—a six-hour experimental film showing poet John Giorno sleeping. But no pressure—you don’t have to watch the whole thing.
www.wexarts.org
THE ORIGINAL STARCHITECT
These days famous architects might seem a dime a dozen, but before them all, Le Corbusier earned the title “father of modern architecture.” This Swiss-born designer created some of the most impressive buildings of the past century and still found time to become an accomplished furniture designer, painter, sculptor and writer. A new book,
Le Corbusier Le Grand (Phaidon, $200), offers an up-close view of his entire life, including youthful travels around the world and his hunt for big commissions. It’s a hefty coffee table book—measuring over 16 x 12 in. and weighing 20 lbs.—with a price tag to match. But there’s something worthy of closer inspection on nearly every page of this image-heavy tome. Pore over the letters, drawings, photographs, sketches and artwork to gain insight into where all those big ideas really came from.
www.phaidon.com
SMALL-BOX STORE
Ignore all the noise about the demise of publishing and take a few minutes to check out PictureBox Inc. This indie publisher works with artists to create books that charm the debit card out of your wallet. “The books aren’t about their work,” says publisher Dan Nadel. “The books are meant to be examples of their work.” In addition to supporting this admirable philosophy, Nadel and his cohorts recently opened the PictureBox Departmental Store in Brooklyn, where you can peruse all the goods in person. The store features the publisher’s books, music, art and comic books. And there’s also an impressive selection of other art books, Japanese graphics and comics, prints and stationery products. It’s a simple, modular space that lets the merchandise provide the personality. Plus, charming faces painted by one of the publisher’s artists, C.F., stare down at shoppers from the tops of the bookcases, helping to separate the store from the office. Keep an eye out for PictureBox’s new two-book set on artist Gary Panter, known for his punk graphics and work on
Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
www.pictureboxinc.com
GOOD (LETTER) WORKS
There’s a tendency when designing things for people with learning disabilities to make objects look a little childish. But when FontSmith created a custom font for this audience, the London type studio intentionally avoided any resemblance between their letterforms and refrigerator magnets. “We didn’t want to make something patronizing,” says Jason Smith, FontSmith creative director. “We wanted to make something beautiful that was easy to read.” So FontSmith worked with the client, a British charity for the learning disabled called Mencap, to conduct a series of focus groups. The designers tested existing fonts to see which held the most appeal (Comic Sans?) and explored several in-progress designs, assessing how width, style, letterspacing and other factors affected readability. Ultimately, larger, rounder letters proved more accessible, and Smith hopes the new font, FS Mencap, becomes a standard in user-friendly fonts, maybe someday rivaling Arial and Helvetica.
www.fontsmith.com
YOUNG GUN
Raking all those leaves when he was growing up has finally paid off for Ryan Jansen. His design for the Rake N Take—a new yard tool that lets you gather
and grab leaves—won first place in Dyson’s Eye for the Why competition. Sponsored by the James Dyson Foundation, this annual contest challenges design students to improve on an existing product’s shortcomings. Jansen’s entry started out as a class project at Southern Illinois University, where he recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in industrial design. He spent months researching the entire leaf collection process before sketching out ideas for combining steps and decreasing the hard labor. “For me, the aha! moment in the design process is the most rewarding and is only found once every other possible solution has been explored,” Jansen says. He took home a$5000 prize and got to meet James Dyson of Dyson vacuum fame … and his project moved on to the international competition, where he won third place. He plans to spend his prize money on prototyping, but says his fiancé may already have other plans for the cash.
www.designawards.dyson.com
IMAGES COURTESY THE ESTATE OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
BUCK TO THE FUTURE
Buckminster Fuller was an environmentalist decades before it was hip. Perhaps best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, some of this designer and philosopher’s ideas seem more relevant today than when he died in 1983. This summer the Whitney Museum of American Art hosts the first major retrospective on his work in nearly 20 years.
Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe runs from June 26 to September 21 in New York. The show includes the only existing Dymaxion car, a three-wheeled, rear-engine automobile with space-age looks. Other highlights include Fuller’s geodesic dome study models, sketches and notebooks.
www.whitney.org
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