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Architect and Atlanta native John Portman, who designed a hefty chunk of his hometown's downtown, gets the star treatment in a peachy new exhibition at the High Museum of Art. On view through April 18, 2010, "John Portman: Art & Architecture," features architectural projects by Portman, now 85 (Frank Lloyd Wright guest lectured in one of his college courses at Georgia Tech), as well as his furniture, paintings, and sculpture. Among the 15 completed and current projects featured in the show is the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Portman's pioneering atrium hotel of 1967 that he followed up with soaring airy spaces in Detroit's Renaissance Center and the Marriott Marquis in New York City. These days, his firm is doing a bustling business in Asia, with projects underway throughout China and in India (a Hyatt for Hyderabad), and of course, South Korea's Incheon Tower, a twin-towered complex that will stand 151 feet tall. Can't make it to Atlanta? You need not be tardy for the party—check out the below video for more about Portman.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

When we posted our Special Black Friday edition last Friday, we were remiss to include one of our other favorites: Core77's annual picks for the best things to get those design crazed folk on your holiday buying list. And unlike A Daily Dose's Holiday Gift Books guide, Core77's Gift Guide branches out in a variety of directions, from t-shirts to even, weirdly, the entire Star Wars collection. Though excluding the latter, the them this year is do pick items that are good for the world (which one you could argue that screenings of Star Wars still fits that bill). Plus, you won't just be buying picks thought up by a couple of the site's editors. Nope, this year you'll have a creme of the crop of personal shoppers for you:

This year's giftguide contributors are Alissa Walker, Rob Walker, John Thackara, Glen Jackson Taylor, Lisa Smith, Bethany Shorb, Emily Pilloton, Rain Noe, Jen van der Meer, Lunchbreath, Eric Ludlum, Jessica Helfand, Bill Hanff, FueledByCoffee, Allan Chochinov, Valerie Casey, Victoria Brown, and Emilie Baltz.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Welcome back to the internet. We hoped you've regained your vision after gorging yourself up to your eyeballs in food yesterday. We are finding it difficult to type, finding ourselves running out of breath just from hitting these few keys to write these sentences. But here we are, back on the job for you. And since it's Black Friday today, we thought we'd make this post about buying stuff. First up, A Daily Dose of Architecture is back at it again with one of our favorite things of the season: their Holiday Gift Books guide. It's one book selection from 50 separate publishers and if you haven't completely maxed out all your credit cards by the end and forgotten to buy gifts for anyone else but yourself, then we don't know who you are anymore. We think you'll also find it's a great resource to send to those family members who never know what to get you, thus sparing them them search and you another incorrectly-sized bit of wardrobe. And speaking of ill-sized, we turn to number two in this special consumer-focused post. Millions of dollars and man hours were presumably spent designing Motorola's attempted-iPhone-killer Droid phone, but the one thing the gadget's box "don't do" is actually hold the product well. Consumerist reports that the packaging design is atrocious, leading the phone to fall to the ground and possibly being damaged as soon as its unpacked. And it's reportedly happened to lots of people. So while it may seem like such a minor thing, packaging isn't something to take lightly.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

On the heels of relaunching its website (have you noticed the background changes from white to black according to the New York City sunset?), the Whitney Museum of American Art has announced two curatorial appointments. The whipsmart and charming Scott Rothkopf will join the museum on December 1 as curator, while Dana Miller has been promoted to curator of the permanent collection. Miller, who co-curated last year's stellar Buckminster Fuller exhibition, has been the Whitney's associate curator of the permanent collection for the past seven years.

Rothkopf comes to the Whitney from Artforum, where he has served as senior editor since 2004. Don't miss his "Best of 2009" picks in the magazine's December issue. Among Charles Ray, MoMA's Joan Miró exhibition, and the collected writings of Herbert Muschamp is a shout-out to Aretha Franklin's bowtastic inauguration hat, designed by Detroit milliner Luke Song. "Although it threatened to overshadow her face (and everyone else on the dais), Aretha's exuberant headgear is the enduring emblem of a high point in our nation's optimism and pride," notes Rothkopf.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Farmers are the new hedge fund managers, but neither group has had much use for highly skilled Flash developers—until now. The Concept Farm, an independent ad agency, production company, and entertainment development group, is looking to harvest one prize flash developer for its New York City office. The position entails collaborating with product managers, interaction designers, and other members of the project team on everything from requirements specification and feasibility analysis to detailed engineering analysis and launch planning for Flash animation and applications. ActionScript expertise and object-oriented programming prowess are required. Overalls, tractor skills, and a way with livestock? Optional (but a sure way to gain a competitive edge).

Apply for this senior flash developer, Concept Farm position or see what other design, art, and photo gigs have cropped up on the Mediabistro job board.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Visionaire is always among the things we're most thankful for, so what better time to tell you about the new issue? The fifty-seventh edition of the art-meets-fashion triannual brings together images from 365 artists in the format of an electronic 2010 calendar. The works that light up the sleek HD screen were selected by 52 influential figures from the worlds of art, design, fashion, and film. Curators including Zaha Hadid, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Louise Bourgeois, and Rei Kawakubo, chose works by artists from Richard Artschwager to Andrea Zittel. Among some of our favorite curator/artist pairings: Pharrell Williams (who we hear is starring in a film by artist Yi Zhou that will debut next week at Art Asia in Miami) selected an image of a Marc Newson-designed aircraft, MoMA's Klaus Biesenbach opted for an ethereal work by Marlene Dumas, and Mario Testino got in the holiday spirit with a Steven Shearer photocollage of inverted Christmas trees. The issue was produced in collaboration with smart, the lower-cased Daimler division that is launching an electric version of its pint-sized fortwo, thus the smart car-shaped plug on the rechargeable display console. And it's a bargain at a mere 80 cents per artwork (or $295).

Previously on UnBeige:

"Have I ever been horrified to see someone in my clothes? Many times, but I close my eyes and look the other way. That happens to everyone. What can you do? Go and tell her, 'Don't wear that dress again'? We designers always have fantasies in our heads, but the difficult task is to make them reality. Because you can be the best designer, but designing in your own place and with nobody wearing [your clothes], then what happens? You're nowhere."
-Carolina Herrera, in WWD

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

They may no longer have Gijs Bakker at the helm, but Droog is pushing forward, now into residential housing design. For next week's Design Miami, the collective will be unveiling the Droog Townhouse, which they didn't exactly build (the architecture stuff was created by Tokyo's Atelier Bow-Wow) but will feature a 100% Droog interior, from the lighting to the furniture to everything in between. The whole project was commissioned by an Amsterdam housing association and will be on display from the 1st to the 5th.

Imagined for a single, a contemporary family or as a VIP guesthouse, the one-of-a-kind layout is essentially a seamless flow of spaces, each with its own functionality merging with circulation space. Private rooms such as the master and optional guest bed, the bath, the balcony and a sound-proof refuse are amply separated by shared space, creating a unique combination of contact and independence, spaciousness and intimacy.

We call first dibs if they decide they don't want it after the 5th.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We are headed to the airport in just a second to head home for the holidays and while we want to smack our heads and ask "What were you thinking?!" we also don't want to be put on some kind of watch list which would make travel today even more impossible, so we'll just stick to the facts, if you please. The head smacking culprit here is the airline easyJet, who for a fashion spread their in-flight magazine decided that a good locale would be the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Designed by new Yale professor Peter Eisenman, the concrete monument also goes by the name, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which makes it seem that much more incredible that somehow everyone involved in the photo shoot, from the photographer (the chief suspect in our book) to the models, would find going in to take some moody shots in any way appropriate. But so they did and so easyJet is now apologizing profusely and pulling copies of the magazine from all of its aircraft.

In a statement to the New Statesman, the airline said:

"easyJet profusely apologizes to anyone who may be offended by the inappropriate fashion photo shoot at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin featured in this month's issue of the in-flight magazine."

"The magazine is produced by INK -- an external publishing house, and easyJet were not aware of the images until they appeared in print. As a consequence we are now reviewing our relationship with the publisher and are withdrawing this month's issue from all flights."

INK has also issued an apology on their site.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Is it nudity week here at UnBeige? Sure, why not. We talked about Kim Cattrall getting naked to save art yesterday. And there was Terry Richardson's Pirelli calendar. And now here's a third. The AP is reporting that two artists who staged a nude photography session at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a museum full of nude painting and sculptures, have been let off the hook by a New York City judge. Here's how they pulled it off (semi-pun only semi-intended):

Defense lawyer Thomas J. Hillgardner says [model Kathleen "K.C." Neill] did nothing indecent while posing in an institution full of depictions of nudes. He says she was making art and he noted court rulings saying public nakedness isn't necessarily lewd.

Prosecutors say they aren't sure they could prove the charges beyond reasonable doubt.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

You may recall that photographer Terry Richardson welcomed 2009 with a racy calendar for Vogue Paris that celebrated the joys of Louis Vuitton lingerie. The high-profile project, styled by Carine Roitfeld, led to the ultimate calendar gig: the much anticipated Pirelli calendar, now in its forty-sixth year of delighting corporate tire buyers worldwide. Richardson shot the 2010 edition, which debuted last week in London, on the beaches of Trancoso, Brazil. In contrast to the collaged exoticism of Peter Beard's 2009 Pirelli calendar, Richardson went for an old-school vibe in steamy shots that conjure the '70s and are free of retouching. Among the props bandied about by models such as Lily Cole and Miranda Kerr are tires and Brazilian wildlife, including some very happy sloths. For Richardson, less is always more. "My technique is the absence of technique," he has said.

Previously on UnBeige:

Famed literary critic Lionel Trilling once described Henry James as a "social twitterer." Sure, he meant it as an insult, but it makes us feel better about having signed up to twitter ourselves. Look to the official UnBeige Twitter feed, for up-to-the-minute newsbites, event snippets, links of interest, design trivia, and free candy (OK, we're still working on the physics of that last one). The mediabistro.com tech wizards have added to the sidebar at right a handful of our most recent word bursts (limited to 140 characters), but you can sign up to follow all of our twittering, and start twittering yourself at twitter.com. A few other twitterers we suggest following: Pentagram (@pentagramdesign), Frog Design (@frogdesign), Paper's Kim Hastreiter (@kimpaper) and Mickey Boardman (@AskMrMickey), designer Constantin Boym (@OhBoym), RISD president John Maeda (@johnmaeda), and of course, Karl Lagerfeld (@karl_lagerfeld).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

There are obvious benefits to spending the extra time and effort grouping your layers into folders and naming them appropriately.

For one you will appreciate the organization if you have to work further on the file after considerable amount time went by. Second, your coworkers or your css programmer will appreciate a neat file as well.

There are some less obvious and immediate advantages to such tidy practices. Design is not done on paper or on screen. Design is something you do in your mind. You continuously evaluate your work and make further design decisions while you work. Design is an internal dialogue and the result is your design work.

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Adapted from Photoshop CS4 After the Shoot (Wiley Publishing)
By Mark Fitzgerald
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

I work with lots of photographers, most of them professionals. When I first begin to work with a new photographer, one of the first questions I ask is how she handles sharpening in her workflow. That’s because sharpening is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the postproduction workflow. When it’s done incorrectly, it can have a detrimental effect on the final image. If someone is making this mistake, I want her to know before moving on to other things.

Understanding Sharpening

Digital photo sharpening is nothing more than enhanced edge contrast. Photoshop tricks you into thinking a photo looks sharper by isolating edge detail and enhancing contrast along those edges. One side of the edge is lightened while the other side is darkened. The enhanced edge contrast is referred to as haloing because of the effect it causes along these edges.

There is no magic formula for sharpening because the amount of sharpening for a particular image depends on two very different things — the content of the image and its overall dimensions. Images with lots of edge detail, like the bowl of silver rings shown below, can handle more sharpening than images with fewer hard edges, such as photos of people or a photo of a landscape on a foggy morning. This is because lots of sharpening adds to the feel of the ring photo, while it would detract from the softer feeling of the portrait or foggy landscape. Additionally, a smaller print of this shot doesn’t need as much sharpening as a larger version would require.

Read further on Graphics.com

Suddenly some explosively positive and futuristically pragmatic policies about the Internet and global e-commerce are creating amazing galaxies of business naming. With already 1.7 billion online users and 1 billion more on its way the new business naming capabilities befitting advance and intricate platforms of global cyber branding provide mega opportunities. Depending on types and styles of businesses, for a fraction of cost, several dozens of multiple websites in multilingual formats with right type of domain names skating worldwide can easily catapult sales many folds and increase visibility to brand new stratosphere.

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Google after introducing Similar Images Search which recently graduated from Labs, now brings us another lab project: Google Image Swirl.

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Adapted from Real World Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom, 2nd Edition (Peachpit Press)
By Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

Creative sharpening is the catch-all term for localized adjustments to image detail. Unlike optimizations for capture and output processes, creative adjustments can’t be applied automatically based on specific parameters—they require creative judgment, hence the name.

But automation plays an important role in making many of the tools we use for creative sharpening. The only part of the process that can’t be automated is the actual localizing of an effect to a specific area of an image. So in this section we’ll discuss building creative sharpening (and blurring) tools and applying them effectively to images in Photoshop. The first valuable lesson to learn is that you can turn any adjustment into a brush!

Read the full article on Graphics.com

I love minimalist ads. They feel like they were created without much effort. They are usually quick and easy to get. They minimize visual clutter. The signature of a minimal advertisement is the use of few elements, single color and handful of words to deliver a simple yet witty idea.

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The winners were announced today:
We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.

While Drupal and Joomla! have always consistently featured among the top three in this category, WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.

Creativebits runs on Drupal since 2005 when we switched over from Google's blogger and phpBB forum engines. So far it served us well because it was relatively easy to maintain and upgrade when there was a need.

I would be highly interested to hear what is your preferred platform of web development and why?

Adapted from Photoshop CS4 After the Shoot (Wiley Publishing)
By Mark Fitzgerald
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

I’ve met many photographers who don’t understand how to change an image’s size or resolution correctly. The problem usually stems from a lack of understanding about image resolution and how it affects image size.

Caution: Always save a master file with all layers before changing size or cropping. Otherwise it may be hard to back up and resize the file for a different output use later.

Understanding Resolution

One of the things that can be the hardest to get your head around when you start down the digital path is resolution. This confusion is compounded by the fact that there are two different kinds of resolution in the digital world. One is dots per inch, and the other is pixels per inch.

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Andy Rutledge (who's site is well worth putting some time aside to read) has put together a great design test.

Working through the questions not only makes you realise what you are capable of as a designer (and where further study is required) - it also certainly made me better able to clarify what it is that I actually bring to a project and to explain that to others.

Definitely recommended reading.

HypeForType just released Exclusive Faces Volume 02 including one off type creations from the likes of Non-Format, Research Studios, MWM Graphics, Suprb, and Richard Perez. To celebrate this HypeForType are offering 10 free typefaces (one per person, non exclusive only) for the first 10 people to comment on the release. All you have to do is write down the font of your choice in the comments box, and it will be mailed to you free of charge. Here's a preview of Exclusive Faces Volume 02 featuring Otto, Capset, and Vetena.

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