News

Times Square is awash in hearts this month. Tracey Emin‘s “I Promise To Love You” neonworks are now playing nightly on screens throughout the NYC hub in what is the largest coordinated effort in history by Times Square sign operators. And today the Times Square Alliance debuts Situ Studio‘s “Heartwalk,” the winner of its annual Valentine Heart Design competition (conducted this year in collaboration with Design Trust for Public Space). The Brooklyn-based design firm looked to the collective experience of Hurricane Sandy and “the love that binds people together during trying times” as inspiration for their installation, made from hundreds of boards salvaged from storm-ravaged boardwalks in areas such as the Rockaways and Atlantic City. The heart-shaped enclosure, located opposite the TKTS booth, is illuminated from within. Visitors can prowl the perimeter, peering inside through the slats or step inside. Notes Situ Studio, “At the base of the heart, a flattened area allows visitors to enter the installation itself–alone together for a moment at the center of the world’s greatest city.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Back in the day, the not-yet-slickly-professionalized New York fashion scene “could support somebody who didn’t get into the business with a business plan and a backer,” said New York Times style scribe Guy Trebay in a recent interview. “You can no longer do that–that’s out. You better arrive with a business plan and maybe an MBA…” Enter the NYC Economic Development Corporation and the Fashion Institute of Technology, the partners behind Design Entrepreneurs NYC, an intensive, classroom-style, and FREE “mini-MBA” program. Fashion designers whose businesses are based in one of NYC’s five boroughs and have been open for at least one year are eligible to apply for the program, which includes weekend courses on fashion business marketing, operations, and financial management, and culminates in a business plan honed by feedback from industry pros. Applications, available here, are due by March 31.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the color purple. That’s the cardinal rule….Purple is a color compromise. You could do a presentation to a group of executives for a new brand, and you could go the very forceful hot, glossy red route and then you could maybe show them the more matte, conservative deep navy route. Weak agencies or a weak chairman will then just end up with a mélange of the two, and you get purple, a color of compromise.”

-Monocle editor-in-chief and Financial Times columnist Tyler Brûlé in an interview with The New York Times Magazine

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Now in its second year, the competition encourages youth to creatively express their vision for driving positive change in local communities....

Founded in 1682, Philadelphia is "one of the leading cities in the world. Located in between New York City and Washington D.C., 40% of the U.S. population is within a day's drive." This succinct description — more facts here — comes from the Philadephia Convention & Visitors Bureau (PHLCVB), the official Tourism Promotion Agency for the city and the primary sales/marketing agency for the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Its mission is to "generate economic impact and job growth by increasing the region's hotel occupancy and revenues" as well as doing "whatever it takes to attract ethnically diverse regional, national and Armin http://www.underconsideration.com

Whether you’re looking to wow your Valentine, wish yourself a happy Chinese New Year, or find the perfect birthday gift for Mayor Bloomberg (who turns 70 on Thursday), we present ten lovely ways to do so:

1. MZ Wallace Valentine’s Day Hamish pouch and card ($35, available from MZ Wallace). It’s impossible to go wrong with a gift from MZ Wallace–particularly when the NYC-based company is in collaboration mode. This cheerful coated linen pouch comes with a valentine printed by the letterpress wizards at Swayspace.

2. Framed John Rawlings print ($139, available from One Kings Lane). Skip the perishable blooms in favor of this enduringly rosy vision by Rawlings, whose haunting brand of glamour has aged remarkably well. Plucked from the Condé Nast archive, the photo originally appeared in the June 1952 issue of House & Garden.

3. Keith Haring iPhone 5 Case ($35, available from Urban Outfitters). Shield your Valentine from heartbreak–or at least a shattered smartphone–with the help of a Haring illustration.

4. Julia Chiang’s “Because of You” edition for The Standard ($300, available from The Standard). Get a piece of Brooklyn-based artist Chiang, whose handmade ceramic links are stamped “Because of You” along with her initials, date, and edition number.

5. Lisa Black Butterfly Dome ($288, available from Fab). “Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man,” said novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov. You’re halfway there with Black’s pair of Ulysses butterfly specimens.

6. The Missing Ink by Phillip Hensher (published by Faber & Faber). Do you know what the handwriting of your closest friends looks like? Probably not. Hensher considers this endangered art.

7. Vintage pencils from Italy ($28 per packet of five, available from Terrain). Ready to preserve handwriting? Stock up on utensils with personality. We like these 1940s pencils, found amdist a cache of vintage art supplies in Rome’s Antica Cartotecnica stationery shop.

8. Robert Longo skateboard ($975, available from AHALife). Who wouldn’t fall for the Sk8room’s signed, limited edition plywood skateboard silkscreened with Longo’s “Eric”? And 20% of the proceeds go to Skateistan, a non-profit organization for kids.
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The latest version of the Mac application adds a number of improvements, notably in the area of user-defined image area adjustments....

Photos: Canstruction New York and Kevin Wick Photography

Create a Jeff Koons-style balloon dog out of 3,500 tins of crab meat? Can do! The team fielded by Gensler and WSP Flack + Kurtz created this canine, “Can’s Best Friend,” who perches atop some 400 cans of veggies, for Canstruction, the international charity competition that returned to New York City this month to challenge teams of architects, engineers, and students they mentor to design and build giant structures made entirely from unopened cans of food.

“We wanted the focus of this sculpture to be on the children of New York, who make up one-third of our city’s hungry population,” said Gensler’s Joseph Fulco, one of the team’s co-captains. Alas, a rule-breaking Masonite board support took the puppy out of the running for the top honor, which went to “Topping Hunger” by the team from Leslie E. Robertson Associates. All of the Canstruction projects are on view through Monday at Brookfield Place World Financial Center Complex. Admission is free, but be sure to bring a can or two of food to donate–it will join the rest in going to City Harvest.
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The common theme in this week's Friday Likes is that some thinking has gone into them — not that past Friday Likes didn't have any thinking, but these have a stronger bent on concept than usual. Armin http://www.underconsideration.com

If you enjoyed games like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope or Hundreds you will like Tapforss. The idea is simple. You have to navigate a crystal ball from nest to nest in a cave by tapping the three navigation buttons that allow you push your ball upwards against gravity and sideways against air friction. The game starts simple and becomes gradually more complicated by adding various dynamic obstacles. Be careful, it's addictive!

You can download it for free for your iPhone and iPad from iTunes for a limited time.

The Science Channel, our source for the highly unscientific adventures of misanthropic savant Karl Pilkington, has marshaled the forces of CGI animation for Strip the City. The new six-part series aims to “strip major cities naked of their steel, concrete, air, ocean, and bedrock–layer by layer, act by act–to explore their hidden infrastructure and solve key mysteries surrounding their origins, geology, archaeology, industry, weather, and engineering.” First up on the stripping block (pole?) is San Francisco, where thare’s fire-fighting water in them thar valleys. Take a sip of your urbane beverage every time someone says “plate tectonics.” Watch a clip below and tune in to Science on Tuesday nights for new episodes that will dramatically dislodge the infrastructure of the likes of Sydney, London, and Toronto.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The open competition once again invites the global creative community to create posters, this time on the 2013 theme of the right to housing....

Is crowdfunding the answer to giving stalled architecture projects a much-needed…kickstart? A report issued this week by the American Institute of Architects takes a closer look, highlighting crowdfunded projects such as Colombia’s 66-story BD Bacatá building and the “I Make Rotterdam” bridge-building project.

According to massolution, which compiled the white paper for the AIA, crowdfunding generated around $1.5 billion in 2011, of which almost half was raised via donation-based crowdfunding (distinct from Kickstarter-style reward-based crowdfunding, in which donors receive something tangible in return). In addition to its potential as a financing tool for beleaguered developers and architects, crowdfunding can provide architects with a way to work with local communities to discuss, develop, and implement design ideas–or simply to generate support for “passion projects” that may be tough to fund through conventional avenues, notes the report. The Italian government is all over this idea–to raise cash to fund the Italian pavilion at the this year’s Venice Biennale.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Founded in 1977 in New York City, The Vitamin Shoppe has grown to be one of the largest purveyors of nutritional supplements in North America with over 500 stores and 20,000 unique SKUs. According to their website, The Vitamin Shoppe is the "first and only choice of people seeking to fulfill their health and wellness needs." Sam Becker

Today in unreal estate news, Barbie is looking to sell her Malibu dreamhouse. The listing of the fictional pink palace–a bargain at $25 million–is Mattel’s way of launching “a year-long global brand campaign” that will follow Barbie on a worldwide hunt for new digs (may we suggest Vilnius?). “It wasn’t an easy decision for Barbie to put her Dreamhouse on the market, but this move marks an unprecedented opportunity for her fans to get an inside look at her dreamy home,” said Lori Pantel, VP of global marketing for Barbie, in a statement issued today.

Mattel tapped L.A. broker Josh Altman, who you may recall from Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing, to handle the fictional sale. Despite the abundance of hot pink scrollwork and Victorian flourishes, the listing describes the three-story manse as “clean-line[d]” and “contemporary.” Elsewhere the description excels in euphemisms, touting the Dreamhouse as “innovatively scaled” and with “a truly unobstructed view of the ocean” (it helps that it has only three walls). And while $25 million is steep for just one bedroom, where else are you going to find custom Pantone 219C hardwood floors? Adds Altman, “This is the only home in Malibu with a self-flushing toilet and fireplace that crackles even when it’s not on.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Are we living in the golden age of typography, or what? Whether for print or digital, we now have incredible control over how we can create with type. And as for the fonts themselves, the OpenType format continues to surprise with the creative possibilities it brings. When it comes to choice, the selection is now so wide, thanks to an apparently unstoppable flood of new offerings, that it's easy to get lost in the delightful task of finding the perfect font for a project. But beyond new font designs, there are of course more than a few reinterpretations of the classics. And even the occasional discovery of "lost" typefaces.

It's no surprise that one of the latest of these forgotten faces comes to us from P22, which has a long track record of digitizing obscure fonts. In this case the firm was able to work from the original drawings for Athena, designed for the Baltotype company in the 1950s. The drawings included a full upper and lower case set, numerals, basic punctuation and alternate forms of some letters. Miranda Roth digitized and expanded this for P22 to over 340 characters, including ligatures and a full Pan-European character set. The result is a rather curious font with a certain retro charm, best set large to show off its lack of straight lines in the stems and main strokes. The LTC Athena font will be on sale for $10.18 (regular $29.95) until February 15, 2013, and can be purchased on the P22 site.

LTC Athena

LTC Athena

“I read the sports section very, very avidly. It’s one of the few places left where you find human interest. It’s very narrative, not to say novelistic, to follow sports teams and sports in play. Fashion is a bit like that, because the personnel set is not that changeable. It’s one of the weirdest and most contradictory things about fashion. It’s based on novelty, but in many ways very little is new. It’s such a stable population. All the editors have been the same forever. All the designers have been more or less the same forever. The only thing that changed was when Anna Wintour saw that nobody was developing a farm team, and got in gear. Because everybody was aging out and there was nobody to replace them. Because she’s a great HR person, she literally made it her business to make another generation to cultivate and anoint.”

-Guy Trebay of The New York Times, interviewed by Jay Ruttenberg in Fashion Projects

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Neither snow nor rain nor a ferocious hurricane (nor Saturdays) can keep Pictoplasma from New York City. Postponed in the wake of Sandy, the character design conference returns to Gotham on Friday for Pictoplasma NYC at Parsons The New School for Design. Organized by Pictoplasma “brain-fathers” Lars Denicke and Peter Thaler with Parsons Illustration chair Steven Guarnaccia, the two-day confab will celebrate contemporary character visualization–illustration, animation, installation, street art, fine art, and more–with lectures, panel discussions, and screenings. Kicking off the proceedings will be lectures by newly Brooklyn-based Buff Monster and toy designer/fiber artist Anna Hrachovec, followed by insights from Argentinean animator and graphic designer Adrian Sonni and self-proclaimed plastic surgeon Jason Freeny. Stick around for Characters in Motion screenings and a Saturday morning “Parson’s Pitch” pecha kucha. New to Pictoplasma? Watch clips from previous talks here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The app is designed to make it easier for designers to explore and experiment when working with web fonts, with close ties to Monotype's Fonts.com library. ...

The third annual competition taps both designers and clients to judge and reward identity design submissions. ...