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Ever since we, and everyone else on the planet, posted about Unhappy Hipsters, a simple Tumblr blog that lends captions to photos from Dwell, the site's been completely unavoidable of late. Hard to believe that it's only been around, by our estimates, since mid-January. But that's the internet for you, quick, quick, quick. With all that attention, some interesting bits have sprung up. First, the LA Times' Christopher Hawthorn filed a two page report about the site, talking all about how popular it had become and how its owner(s) still wish to remain anonymous. Strangely he also comments on how its quality has declined: "once the world noticed -- it was only a matter of time before its crisp satire started to droop a little, as it has in the last few days." We know the guy's a critic, but geez, he just says so himself that the site's only three weeks old. Less discouraging than that review, and much more interesting, is that Psychology Today picked up on the site and put together a great read on why exactly these hipsters are unhappy and asks if modernism is inherently a big downer. Here's a bit:

I think that modernism's restrained quality is fundamentally in tension with the idea of delight. Delight is an emotion of abundance -- a celebration of sensation and richness. Delight and joy are primally connected to wellness, and wellness in nature is lush, plump, vibrant, and bountiful. Throughout our evolution, these were the aesthetics that signaled a good place to settle -- one that provided adequate water, food, and shelter to sustain life. The matte, bare surfaces beloved of modernists signal something else entirely. I can't help but think there must be something primal within us that understands such stripped down spaces as inhospitable -- the emotional equivalent of dry desert, or fallow fields.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

While we said back in January that 2010 might be shaping up to be another rough and tumble year for Frank Gehry, what with the recent stop work order on his Beekman Tower and his pulling out from Jerusalem's troubled-from-the-start Museum of Tolerance, the guy is still a starchitect after all and that's a pretty choice spot to be in. It's just been announced that he's passed on potentially working on a museum project in Dundee, Scotland (where he's worked before with the small Maggie's Centre building), saying that "he has too much work on at the moment to contemplate taking part in the competition." One of the things most likely keeping Gehry busy at the moment is the main structure for the Saadiyat Beach Golf Club in Abu Dhabi. The building, Gehry's first clubhouse, will be quite large, coming in at around 18,000 square feet, and is described as "a postmodern twist on the traditional garb worn by Arab men." The new building, set to finish in two years, will be surrounded by a golf course designed by golf legend Gary Player. If you want to golf in the middle east in the next couple of years, we're willing to bet that there's more likelihood of being able to do it here than at the proposed Tiger Woods course in Dubai.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Looks from the spring/summer 2010 collections of Prabal Gurung (left) and Bibhu Mohapatra (right), who are among the 12 designers selected for tenancy in the CFDA Fashion Incubator.

With fashion week looming, a crop of young designers have received the good news that they have been selected as the inaugural tenants of the CFDA Fashion Incubator, a business-boosting initiative of the Council of Fashion Designers of America that was established last fall with a $200,000 grant from the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Each designer (or design team) will be able to take advantage of a two-year lease on an individual studio in New York's Garment Center at below-market value rates as well as business mentoring, educational seminars, and networking opportunities. The designing dozen are:

Last week saw us back in product wonderland, better known as the New York International Gift Fair (NYIGF). Our first stop at the biannual gifts and home accessories extravaganza is always the juried Accent on Design division, where the likes of Marimekko, Jonathan Adler, Umbra, and Artecnica showcase their latest and greatest items. Tasked by the fair to select one item as "the next big thing," we chose the Brelli: the world's first biodegradable umbrella! Designed by Pam Zonsius, the Brelli covers a bamboo parasol frame with a sleek canopy of transparent biofilm. The result is a sturdy reimagining of a delicate design classic that also happens to be 100% green. Available in three sizes that retail from $38 to $62, the Brelli comes tucked inside an organic cotton carrying case and can be decorated with permanent paint markers (non-toxic, of course). Finally, a way to protect oneself from the environment without contributing to its destruction.

Previously on UnBeige:

Looks from the spring/summer 2010 collection of Sophie Théallet, who will show her fall collection next Tuesday, February 16, in New York City. (Photos: Dan Lecca)

"For me, creating a collection is a very painful process. I just like looking at my environment: walking in Prospect Park, going to the movies, reading a book, listening to music. At some point, something shows up and I begin to design on the paper, and I start to play with it. It depends on a lot of things but when the ideas come, I feel free and happy."

-Sophie Théallet, winner of the 2009 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Prize

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Unfortunate and belated as it is, you run into some pretty interesting lives in the obituaries. Case in point, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported that Clifford A. Nahser passed away last week. In addition to working for the Atlanta Public School System for 26 years, designing new buildings for them, and being "an early expert in the installation of AstroTurf," Nahser was also the chief architect behind the Waffle House, the iconic, greasy spoon restaurant chain you run into every two minutes in the south of the country. Here's the story:

Co-founder Joe Rogers Sr. asked him to help design new restaurants from the prototype diner he opened in Avondale Estates in 1955. Mr. Nahser worked on the blueprint for one of the earlier units, then went on to help design hundreds more as the restaurant chain grew.

Tweaked and updated a little over the years, the same basic plan was used for Waffle Houses in 28 states, said his brother Donald Nahser of Alpharetta.

"He used to say, 'Anybody who's ever traveled through the South by car has been in one of my buildings,'" his brother said.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As the LA Times' critic Christopher Knight puts it: "'Great Recession'? What 'Great Recession'?" He's commenting on the news that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced that it has raised $250 million in just six months, largely to help expand their space to make way for the massive Donald Fisher Collection, which you'll remember they were able to hold on to after the Gap founder's sudden, unexpected passing last year. Kenneth Baker at the San Francisco Chronicle reports that there haven't been any designs yet for the new extension, but now that the money has poured in, the museum is planning to add roughly an additional 100,000 square feet to its current facility, making it one of the largest modern art museums in the country, larger than the MoMA in New York. The big story of all of this, however, is this:

The $250 million raised thus far comes from what [museum director Neal Benezra] called "core members of the board" and is intended to challenge other affluent friends of the museum to pitch in. The museum will not divulge individual contributions, but its board includes luminaries of business and philanthropy such as Charles Schwab, Mimi L. Haas, Helen Hilton Raiser, Paul Sack and Roselyne Swig.

To which Christopher Knight responds, "Those pockets are not merely deep, they are also open. Good for them."

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We think we've made it perfectly clear in the past that there are a lot of things we don't know about Barbie. We know it was the doll's birthday last year and she can get Jonathan Adler to design her Malibu Dreamhouse, but that's about it. So it was interesting to read about a controversy surrounding the iconic toy coming out of Buffalo, New York. Story goes, according to the Buffalo News, is that a 2002 competition called "I Can Be," which asked the public to select the next career-themed edition of the toy. But when "Architect" won, "Mattel balked at producing an architect doll." Now that the company has launched another similar contest eight years later, architecture professor Despina Stratigakos has kicked off a campaign to finally give architecture its due. Here's a bit:

"This is a powerful icon, and it does speak to little girls," said Stratigakos, an assistant professor in [University of Buffalo]'s School of Architecture and Planning. "We need role models."

Architect, environmentalist, surgeon, news anchor and computer engineer are the five jobs voters can pick from in the contest, which runs through Wednesday at www.barbie.com/vote. "An architect designs buildings and makes sure they're safe, sturdy and cool-looking," the job description reads on the contest Web site.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We're sure your head hurts too after last night's pummeling of greasy food, beer, and some occasional bits of football thrown in there for good measure, so we'll start out gently this morning. An interesting new iPhone app has been released by the Japanese company Wowlab. Called addLib (not to be confused with the popular sound card company, AdLib, of the 1980s), it's essentially a random design generator. You plug in a photo, it kicks out a poster that looks like it might have been laid out by some famous Swiss designer, all at random, using "the Grid System, a fractal theory, the golden ratio, and the Facial Recognition System." A fun toy, sure, but we'd be interested to hear what you think it says about design, that quality can come from formula rather than unique, practiced artistry. Or are we just over thinking the whole thing? Here's the app in action:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Diana Vreeland and Louise Dahl-Wolf prepare model Lisa Fonssagrives for her close-up in this 1947 Arthur Rothstein photograph, among the images from Look magazine on view through April 10 at the Museum of the City of New York.

Founded in 1937 by Gardner Cowles, Look magazine's mission was to meet "the tremendous unfilled demand for extraordinary news and feature pictures." The hefty lead times of the day—two to three months—took their toll on some of Look's news value (as when the bi-weekly published the results of an opinion poll on the 1964 presidential election three weeks after Kennedy's assassination), but the photos always packed a punch. Des Moines-based Look was particularly enamored with New York City, as captured by photographers including Weegee and a young Stanley Kubrick. An exhibition on view at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) gorgeously reveals the extent of this fascination by showcasing highlights from the museum's vast Look collection. Curated by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, the show looks back at New York life from the mid-1940s until the early 1960s. Admire the trained dobermans once employed as Macy's mascots and many other images at the MCNY through April 10 or in the pages of the accompanying book: Only in New York (Monacelli).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Ammar Eloueini's plastic CoReFab chair, created with digital animation and manufactured using 3D printing technology, is among the objects that go on view today in "Action! Design over Time," a new installation of the contemporary section of the architecture and design galleries at the Musuem of Modern Art.

Today Creative Link for the Arts and the New Museum announced the winners of the Ordway Prize. Named for naturalist, philanthropist, and arts patron Katherine Ordway, the award bestows $100,000 in cash upon both a curator/art writer and an artist "whose work has had significant impact on the field of contemporary art, but who has yet to receive broad public recognition." This year's winners are Hamza Walker, the director of education and associate curator at Chicago's Renaissance Society, and Polish artist Artur Żmijewski. Among the finalists for this, the third Ordway Prize were Sabine Breitwieser, Hou Hanru, Tania Bruguera, and William Pope.L. They were selected from a global slate of nominees by a jury led by Jennifer McSweeney, director of Creative Link for the Arts, and Richard Flood, chief curator at the New Museum.

"I wish I had a grand vision for the award," said Walker in a statement issued today. "But as it stands, the bricks and mortar of my life are in severe need of tuckpointing." For Żmijewski, whose work was recently exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the "quite unexpected" win is particularly thrilling. "My art is important to me, and now it has been recognized by others in a significant way and that pleases me immensely," he said. "The considerable amount of money that comes with this award will surely help to realize my future projects."

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

DTP may have made designers’ lives easier, but it also set us up for the ripple effect.

First to go (in my time) were the phototypesetters.
Next the film strippers and darkroom camera operators.
Next...us?
After us, the printers? Is Kindle just the tip of the iceberg?

We need to learn how to adapt in this new work environment. And we need to learn how to PDQ.

In this lesson you will learn how to set the basics up on your new Drupal site.

All settings for your Drupal site can be set within the Administer menu that can be accessed from the menu in the left. When you click Administer you will get a large menu with many options. These menu points are broken down to 5 parts:

1. Content Management - Manage your site's content.
2. User Management - Manage your site's users, groups and access to site features.
3. Reports - View reports from system logs and other status information.
4. Site building - Control how your site looks and feels.
5. Site configuration - Adjust basic site configuration options.

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When I design logos for clients I present many options. By the time I come up with the ideas, sketch them out on paper and then design them on the screen I get attached to them. As a friend of mine once said your logos become your kids. We want to see them grow, become successful and famous. When the client asks me which logo among the presented I like most I feel as if I'm asked which child of mine I like the most. I can't decide, I love them all.

Yet, if I'm lucky client chooses only one from the many. The rest of the kids don't get any love, they are tossed away as if they weren't good enough to represent a business, not fit enough for the world. This is unfair. These abandoned ideas deserve better.

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If you're having troubles with text jumbled together when copy pasting documents the issue is most likely caused by incorrect use of line breaks and paragraph breaks. This is usually a problem with MS Word documents.

To fix such documents, open them in Pages before copying. Select Edit/ Find/ Find.../ Advanced. From the drop down options select Line break for Find and Paragraph break for Replace. Once you complete the replace operation you copy the text and it will work correctly.

I'm starting a course with a lesson a week for non-programmers who wish to learn Drupal. Here is the first lesson.

Before we start with your first lesson, let me give you a very short background about running Drupal.

Drupal is a content management system designed to run on a web server which is accessible through the internet to anyone interested. To run your Drupal site you will need a hosting provider which can run your website for you. There are many to choose from. One of the biggest and cheapest ones that offer easy Drupal installation is Dreamhost.

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Did you know you can move the file back from trash to the folder it was originally trashed from?

The simplest way to do this is to select the file in the trash and use the same shortcut used to trash files Apple-Backspace (Cmd-Backspace). Alternatively you can Ctrl-Click the file and select the put back command from the contextual menu.

This can be particularly useful if you deleted multiple files from many folders and you need to move them all back at once.

Now that the iPad is out let's think about whether it is a useful tool for us designers. Sure it can serve all the business and entertainment needs we have, but does it have the ability to help us professionally? Can the iPad makes us more creative, more efficient and can it help us with our everyday design tasks? Let's take each activity we do as designers and see if iPad has a place in it.

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Check out more work by Dale Stephanos

Excerpted from Logo Design Love: A Guide to Creating Iconic Brand Identities (New Riders)
By David Airey

Design inspiration is a bit of a cliché. I’m asked time and again where I find the inspiration to do my job, or how I stay inspired, but it’s important to remember that what we do, as designers, doesn’t need inspiration in the true sense of the word. The ability to successfully complete the identity design process comes from the result of years of study, practice, and experience, as well as following a clearly defined set of steps.

However, motivation, not inspiration, can sometimes be an issue. You’d be naive to think that at some point during a long career in design, your motivation won’t wane. A seemingly never-ending project; overly harsh criticism from your peers; the discovery that, after weeks of work, your favorite design concept has already been created by someone else for a different company; or simply being stuck at your computer for hours on end every day — all or any one of these factors can suck the motivation right out of you.

The following provides a range of motivational tips — some from me, and some from other designers — on how to keep your spirits up and the creative juices flowing during tough projects.

Never Stop Learning

You will never know all there is to know about design.

Our profession is constantly evolving, so to stay in the game you need to evolve with it. To get a sense of where our industry is headed, you need to look at where it’s been. There’s an incredible amount we can learn from the great iconic designers that came before us: people like Paul Rand (IBM logo), Paula Scher (Citi logo), and Tom Geismar (Mobil Oil logo). Those who have worked through a lifetime of design have amassed an incredible amount of experience, and I never tire of listening to their stories and anecdotes.

New-York-based Ivan Chermayeff has this to say about design: “To be effective over a reasonably long lifetime, all identities must be simple and appropriate. However, if they are not original or in any way provocative, thought-provoking, and noticeable, they will not accomplish their task.”

Read the full article on Graphics.com