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The University of California Athletic Department manages the 29 varsity athletic programs and various club teams of the University of California, Berkeley, that compete in the NCAA Division I in the Pac-12 Conference. The California Golden Bears (or just "Cal") have won 82 national team titles in 15 different sports over its history and are consistently one of the winningest teams across all universities in the U.S., and its students have accrued 159 Olympic medals, 91 of which are gold, as participants in the Games. Last week, Cal introduced a new identity and uniforms designed by Nike's Graphic Identity Armin http://www.underconsideration.com

How can technology reinvent and deepen the museum experience? New York’s 92Y recently convened a panel of forward-thinking museum pros to tackle the question, and we sent writer Nancy Lazarus to report back on what the future of museums may look–and sound and feel–like.

A visitor gets in touch with the Cleveland Museum of Art’s “Collection Wall,” a 40-foot, interactive, microtile wall featuring over 3,500 works of art from the permanent collection.

King Tut may finally have met his match: interactive technology. “Digital technology is as much a game-changer now for museums as blockbuster shows” were in the late 1970s, said Cara McCarty, curatorial director of New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The Metropolitan Museum’s 1976 Tutankhamen exhibit was a pioneer of the blockbuster, and now many of the Met’s ancient treasures are also viewable on interactive touchscreens.

McCarty moderated a recent 92Y panel about technology trends and the future of museums. When she said, “Technology is hitting us all like a tidal wave,” she wasn’t lamenting, but referring to the overwhelming options. The panelists agreed, including Mark Robbins, director at New York’s International Center of Photography. “Nineteenth-century museums were comprised of a privileged set of objects,” he said. “Now museums offer more immersive experiences without walls.”

“Technology is a tool shaping museums’ future,” added Seb Chan, Cooper-Hewitt’s director of digital and emerging media. Interactive options enrich visitors’ experience, especially for storytelling. Chan described the mobile app at Australia’s Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. \It senses where gallery visitors are and delivers custom content, thereby eliminating wall labels. London’s Tate Museum has a similar app, the Magic Tate Ball, which promises, “It’s like having the Tate in your pocket.”

Another proponent of technology’s narrative power is Jake Barton, founder of Local Projects, a firm that designs media installations for museums. One client is New York’s 9/11 Memorial Museum, slated to open next year. He previewed an exhibit where visitors will use interactive maps to pinpoint their locations when they learned of the 9/11 news. Then they record messages about that moment, and their voices will play in the background as visitors view the exhibit.
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Established in 2009, Quirky brings inventors' ideas to life and to market through an open process where community members provide ideas, which are then voted on, and each week the top five are discussed by the Quirky team to see which ones they'll develop. They have launched over 300 products — from flexible power strips to egg yolk separators — that are sold online and across nearly 200 retail partners. A little over two years ago, Quirky redesigned its logo and last week it announced a new logo and identity designed in-house. Armin http://www.underconsideration.com

Twenty years on, Andre the Giant still Has a Posse, and now the subversive sticker campaign that ignited Shepard Fairey‘s worldwide propaganda delivery system gets its cinematic due in Obey the Giant, a narrative film that makes it online debut today (watch it above). Director Julian Marshall is fresh out of the Rhode Island School of Design, Fairey’s alma mater and the setting for the 23-minute film. Based on the true story of Fairey’s first act of street art, Obey the Giant is something of a portrait of the artist as a young skate punk–challenging a big-city mayor (the oleaginous Buddy Cianci, played by Keith Jochim) and the powers that be at art school.

“We moved heaven and earth to make this film,” Marshall (pictured below) told us of the ambitious project, for which he raised $65,000 through Kickstarter last spring. “Pre-production was about six weeks. We had to build an army of people, elaborate sets, a 27,000-pound billboard, and pull together an insane amount of props from the 1990s. It was an amazing time though. My crew and I truly became a family.” The Washington, D.C. native, now based in NYC and at the helm of his own film production company, told us more about how Obey the Giant came to be and the hot-button issue he’s planning to tackle next.

How and when did you first encounter Shepard Fairey’s work?
I first encountered Shep’s work on my first skateboard back in the 90s. I had just bought a World Industries deck and the shop owner slapped an “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” sticker on it.

What compelled you to make a film about him?
One morning, I was lying in bed, staring at the OBEY icon poster on my wall that Shep had given me when I interned for him, and I thought: Well, what better story to tell as a RISD student than a story of a RISD student? I had the connection to Shep having worked for him, so I emailed his wife, Amanda, pitched her the project, and a week later I heard back and she said, “Okay, Shepard’s really excited about the project, come out to L.A. and let’s talk about it.”

How did you decide on the format of this project, in terms of making it a narrative film rather than a documentary?
Documentaries don’t particularly interest me from a directorial standpoint. I love the intensity and edginess of the process of making motion pictures. So naturally, when I first thought of this story, I conceived of it in narrative terms.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The latest PBS Off Book episode, dubbed Photoshop Has Changed the World, takes a look at several aspects of the impact of digital image editing on illustration, retouching and online popular culture. It's a brief but worthy effort, although there's more to all this than simply Photoshop. For example, one can agree with the claim that, "With the ability to alter any image in the media landscape, everyday people now have the means to critically comment on culture and spread their ideas virally, leveling the playing field between traditional media creators and consumers." But those "everyday people" are for the most part not creating wacky cat photos with a product that sells for $1,299.

(Photo: Erik Smits)

“Ten years of slow days / ten years of wakeful nights / till what was to come would be disclosed,” wrote Remco Campert in a poem commissioned as part of today’s reopening of the Rijksmuseum, the national art museum of the Netherlands. The long-awaited occasion was celebrated with a spectacular opening ceremony during which the soon-to-abdicate Queen Beatrix, wearing a large black chapeau that made her resemble a Playmobil figure or one of Rembrandt‘s beloved gang of Staalmeesters, followed her private preview of the renovated museum with a trip down the orange carpet to turn a giant golden key before an audience of thousands. Fireworks and free admission (’til midnight) followed.

Designed by Renaissance revivalist Pierre Cuypers and completed in 1885, the Rijksmuseum has been closed since 2003. “It’s a kind of Harry Potter castle. It’s a crazy building, a sort of neo-gothic Arts and Crafts building covered in images. It’s a comic strip,” said director Wim Pijbes in a recent interview with Apollo magazine. “It’s the last hooray for neo-gothic–just a year later, the Eiffel Tower was built, welcoming a new age.” The decade-long overhaul, which cost nearly $500 million, half of which was supplied by the Dutch government, includes the integrative building renovation of Cruz y Ortiz, who burrowed underground to link the museum’s two separate halves and add an atrium, a fresh installation (of some 8,000 objects) masterminded by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, and Copijn’s redesign of the surrounding garden. “What is the new Rijksmuseum about in one word? It is time, time embodied in taste or fashion, however you like,” said Pijbes. “We are a time machine.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Spring has finally sprung, and so it’s possibly to gaze upon snowflakes–or at least images of snowflakes–without shivering. These fine specimens were photographed in 3-D as they fell by a high-speed camera system developed by researchers at the University of Utah and its spinoff company, Fallgatter Technologies. “Until our device, there was no good instrument for automatically photographing the shapes and sizes of snowflakes in free-fall,” says Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences. “We are photographing these snowflakes completely untouched by any device, as they exist naturally in the air.” In addition to taking the first automated, high-resolution photos of snowflakes, Fallgatter’s Multi Angle Snowflake Camera measures how fast the flakes fall and according to Garrett, “collects vast amounts of data that can be used to come up with more accurate and more representative characterizations of snow in clouds” for improved weather forecasting.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Get your sketch on with Trace, a simple and beautiful yet incredibly useful iPad app created by the architects of the Morpholio Project. Free to download, the sketch utility allows users to instantly draw on top of imported images or background templates, layering comments or ideas to generate immediate, intelligent sketches that are easy to circulate. “Tracing over something is absolutely the foundation of the app,” says co-creator Toru Hasegawa. “Layers of trace paper are not the same as ‘layers’ in Photoshop or other tools. Here, they are the stacking of ideas, as opposed to the organizing of files.”

Got an app we should know about? Drop us a line at unbeige [at] mediabistro.com

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This set of set of progressive Lightroom presets and brushes is designed to convert color photos to Black & White, while keeping the tonal range as wide as possible....

The new application makes it possible to create 3D images simply by typing text....

Today we are going pattern crazy all up in here with extremely different clients and projects from Switzerland, Singapore, and Africa. Armin http://www.underconsideration.com

• Visit St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai without leaving your home in journalist Daniel Brook‘s A History of Future Cities, new from Norton. Stop by Brooklyn’s powerHouse Arena on Thursday, April 18, for a discussion with Brook.

• Elsewhere in far-flung reading material, don’t miss the dreamy (if envy-inducing) Designers Abroad, in which Michele Keith peeks inside the vacation homes of the likes of Mica Ertegun, Juan Pablo Molyneux, and Juan Montoya. The envy-inducing tome, a follow-up to Keith’s 2010 Designers Here and There, is out next week from Monacelli.

• When in doubt, ask yourself: What would Jacques Derrida do? Deconstruct the possibilities with the help of a recently translated biography by Benoît Peeters.

• “Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place,” Banksy has said. “Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.” Steep yourself in the street art superstar with reporter Will Ellsworth-Jones‘s Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall (St. Martin’s Press), an unauthorized biography that tries to piece together Banksy’s path from vandalism to international stardom and an Oscar nomination.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“It used to be that design was all about industry and it was very geographically anchored to the means of production. Then it became more dependent on the tertiary sector of design, on showrooms and fairs. In my opinion, the geography of design is now set by schools. You can’t talk about Italian design or British design—it’s old-fashioned. It really is about whether someone comes from [the Design Academy of] Eindhoven or the Royal College of Art in London. In this kind of scenario, meetings like the Salone are still very important because they are great business opportunities. The problem is that design has spread out in many directions and I think it’s important for the Salone to attract corollary events that are about interaction design and interface design.”

-Paola Antonelli, director of research and development and senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, in an interview with Ermanno Rivetti for The Art Newspaper

Watch Antonelli’s recent appearance on The Colbert Report:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Adobe is still offering a discounted rate of $29.99 for the first year of Creative Cloud (regular $49.99) for registered users of CS3 apps or suites. But in the run-up to its Adobe MAX Creativity Conference in the first week of May, the firm seems to be relentlessly expanding its subscriber base. The latest initiative to boost the subscriber count is a limited-time offer that extends the $29.99 rate to anybody and everybody — no need to be a registered user of any Adobe product. The objective would seem to be to snag not only users of ancient versions of Adobe apps but those who have, for whatever reason, never used them. Or at least, never used a legal version. This offer is available until April 19.

First chewed and later puffed in 1871, Lucky Strike is a brand of cigarettes originally produced by the R.A. Patterson Tobacco Company and now owned by British American Tobacco. At one point in 1930, Lucky Strike was the leading cigarette brand, selling 40 billion of the little suckers. A success in part attributed to Lucky Strike's aggressive targeting towards women in the 1920s and later when Raymond Lowey turned the package from green to white to make it more female friendly. Today, well, you can barely find Lucky Strike anywhere except online, in specialty smoking stores, and, apparently, in Armin http://www.underconsideration.com

This earlier version of Xara's flagship illustration application for Windows can be downloaded at no charge until the end of April....

The free Mac utility is said to help users find and disable QuickTime components that are incompatible with OS X sandboxing....

These days, fashion designers rarely align on seasonal trends such as hemlines and skirt shapes, but runway watchers remain abuzz over statement shoes, even if they are all but invisible to those without front-row seats. Even Celine’s minimaluxe ready-to-wear and steady stream of hit handbags was recently outshined by the house’s furry stilettos and sandals, including a Meret Oppenheim-gone-grandpa style that is flying off store shelves. The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York has seized the moment to present an exhibition that highlights the extreme, lavish, and imaginative styles that have made shoes central to fashion. We asked writer Nancy Lazarus to put on her reporting shoes and size up the show, on view through Saturday.

Roger Vivier’s Eyelash Heel pump, designed by Bruno Frisoni for the fall 2012 “Rendez-Vous” limited edition collection. (Photo: Stephane Garrigues, courtesy Roger Vivier)

“Everything here is wearable, it’s just not walkable”, said Colleen Hill, co-curator of the Museum at FIT’s “Shoe Obsession” exhibit. Leading a tour of the show during its final week on display, she explained that the focus was extreme, extravagant 21st-century shoes and boots. Hill and co-curator Valerie Steele included not only fan favorites like Blahnik and Louboutin, but also the latest experimental prototypes.

The exhibit’s selections represent a commentary on an era rather than a reflection on wearability, Hill noted. “The inspiration for these shoes is sculpture and architecture. Some are shoe objects, one-of-a-kind or limited editions,” Hill said. Three styles are on display: single-sole stilettos, platforms, and more avant-garde heel-less shoes favored by the likes of Daphne Guinness and Lady Gaga.

Recent shoe designs tend to rely more on manmade materials. A few prototypes utilized 3-D printing processes. One experimental design was made of resin, while a pair of slippers was glass. A pair of Pierre Hardy heels sported neoprene, more often associated with athletic wear.

“Women now are building their shoe wardrobes, and the average number of shoes women own has doubled to twenty,” according to Hill. And even designer flats come with high price tags. “$458 now is the cost of just one pair on sale,” she noted. Of course, not everyone shops at Saks (an exhibit sponsor that lent the museum several pairs of shoes), where shoppers can speed to the eighth-floor footwear paradise–the famously expansive 10022-SHOE–via a designated express elevator.

While some designers’ attitudes toward shoes remain static, others are evolving. Hill credits Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin as the two most important shoe designers of this century. Blahnik, the stiletto master whose name is linked with the democratization of high-fashion shoes thanks to Sex and the City, considers platforms “inelegant.” Louboutin, famous for his red soles, was inspired by showgirls and fetish shoes. “He’s unapologetic that his shoes aren’t more comfortable,” Hill said. On a positive note, the increase in female designers means that more are wearing their own shoes, so they’re making them more comfortable–in other words, walking the talk.

Nancy Lazarus has covered media and marketing for mediabistro.com’s PRNewser. Her last contribution to UnBeige explored terraces in Manhattan. Learn more about her at www.NL3Media.com.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This week, Shutterstock is hiring an illustration/vector reviewer, while Spontaneous needs a creative director. Landor is seeking a senior designer, and RedNova Learning is on the hunt for a managing designer. Get the scoop on these openings and more below, and find additional just-posted gigs on Mediabistro.

Illustration/Vector Reviewer Shutterstock (New York, NY) Creative Director Spontaneous (New York, NY) Senior Designer Landor (Cincinnati, OH) Managing Designer RedNova Learning (Miami, FL) Junior Designer Tor Books (New York, NY)

Find more great design jobs on the UnBeige job board. Looking to hire? Tap into our network of talented UnBeige pros and post a risk-free job listing. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Users of the free Extension can browse, purchase and install Creative Market assets from within Photoshop....