News

• Join us tomorrow evening at the Museum of Arts and Design for a meeting of Superscript’s Architecture and Design Book Club. Up for discussion: design themes in Émile Zola‘s The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames). Arrive early to take advantage of free/pay-what-you-wish Thursday nigh admission and see the current exhibition, After the Museum: The Home Front 2013, which includes a related installation by Superscript, “On Display.”

• You say “tomato,” we say Andrew Kuo is a genius. His solo exhibition of new acrylic paintings opens tomorrow at Marlborough Chelsea.

• As if you needed more reasons to adore Scandinavia, the Streaming Museum has cooked up “Nordic Outbreak,” a series of events and exhibitions taking place throughout NYC through April 6. Saturday’s symposium at Scandinavia House promises a range of perspectives on what “the Nordic” has come to mean in the digital age and illuminate an “outbreak” from conventional aesthetic ideas about the Nordic concept.

• Put down your iPad and head to AIPAD. The megaphotoshow, presented by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, runs Thursday through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory.

• Finally, ’tis the season for…Cambodia? Jaa! This weekend, the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design presents “Living Arts City: Art and Urbanism in Phnom Penh and New York,” a two-day colloquium exploring the interconnectedness of creativity, urban ecology, and community. Speakers include designers, curators, architects, planners, and social researchers from Phnom Penh and New York.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Imagine swimming through your day in an ocean of blue expertly matched to a series of David Hockney pool paintings.

In the latest episode of Cubes, we show you the New York offices of Morris + King public relations. Lead partner and co-principal Judith R. King takes the mediabistroTV crew on a musical journey featuring chairs from the Stella Solaris cruise ship and 1970s French jumbo jets, specially chosen chandeliers and offices painted any color you like as long as its blue.

You can view our other MediabistroTV productions on our YouTube Channel.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In the artistic arms race of Dick Blick versus Utrecht, we’ve always been partial to the one whose jaunty red palette logo implied a connection to the likes of Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld, and Miffy (whose creator, Dick Bruna, is among the Dutch city’s most famous sons) despite its founding in NYC by an artist in search of better canvas. But Mr. Blick is having the last laugh. Galesburg, Illinois-based Blick Art Materials has acquired Utrecht Art Supplies from private equity firm Topspin Partners LBO, which purchased the company in a secondary buyout in 2007. The acquisition adds 45 stores to family-owned Blick’s existing network of 39. “The acquisition of Utrecht gives us a tremendous, well-established brand and greater geographic reach for our brick and mortar channel,” said Blick CEO Robert Buchsbaum in a statement announcing the deal. Financial terms were not disclosed, and no word on Blick’s plans for the Utrecht brand or its lines of paints, canvas, and other art products.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Portfolio Server platform for media management and delivery includes new capabilities that enable worldwide access to digital media....

Last year we skipped April Fools as it landed on a Sunday and the four years before that we had done fake redesigns (Ford, Verizon, Dunkin Donuts, and Home Depot) so doing another one was simply not an option. Too repetitive and expected. What to do though? At least through the first couple of weeks of March I still had no idea. I had noticed Chrome's broken image icon earlier in the year, I filed it on my brain, and as I was trying to think of ideas it hit me that it would be funny to do a full-on Armin http://www.underconsideration.com

Established in 1996, the Miami Dolphins are part of the East Division of the American Football Conference in the National Football League (NFL) and are based in sunny Miami, FL. The Dolphins have won two Super Bowls, both in the early 1970s, and are the only team to have won all games in a single season but are best known for having Dan Marino as a QB for many years. Lately, not much has been noteworthy to the Dolphins until last December when a sketch of their new logo was leaked and then again in early March when another Armin http://www.underconsideration.com

The five-week online workshop will provide a crash course to get beginners up to speed on use of the major social media sites....

We’ve been known to select dining establishments based on their chairs and typefaces, so when the James Beard Foundation announces its annual slate of award nominees, we head straight for the design and graphics categories. Unfortunately, the latter category–won in recent years by the likes of Korn Design, Love and War, and Pandiscio Co.–seems to have lost its seat at the groaning JBF awards table. At the same time, the design category has been expanded to recognize the best restaurant design or renovation in North America (since January 1, 2010) in two categories: establishments of 75 seats or less and those with 76 seats or more.

A historic plantation in Charleston, South Carolina was the setting for the recent announcement of the 2013 award contenders, selected by committees of industry pros in categories spanning chefs, restaurants, and culinary journalism and cookbooks. Duking it out for the chocolate-filled JBF medallion for best restaurant design in the 76-seats-and-over category are David Rockwell (Rockwell Group) and Diego Gronda (Rockwell Group Europe) for José Andrés‘s Jaleo at the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas, Alejandro Barrios Carrero for the breathtaking Juvia in Miami Beach, and Chung and Chuong Q. B. Nguyen of MC2 Architects for Triniti in Houston. The cozier (75 seats and under) contenders are Commune for Farmshop in Santa Monica, Taavo Somer for the quirktastic Isa in Brooklyn’s pro-rustic enclave of Williamsburg, and down in our nation’s capital, Juli Capella and Miquel Garcia of Barcelone-based Capella Garcia Arquitectura for minibar by José Andrés, who evidently has a sharp eye for design. The winners of these and the awards that involved actual food will be announced on May 6 at a Lincoln Center ceremony. Wear your fanciest clogs!

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

First used in 1994 with the beta release of Netscape, the "broken image" icon has become a staple of web browsing. In this Quora question, Netscape's original UI designer gives credit to Marsh Chamberlin of DataGlyph for creating the first, literally-iconic rendition of a shattered frame containing a sphere, pyramid, and cube. Since then, some browsers have used variations of the theme while others, like Safari, have gone with their own idea like a question mark for Apple's own browser. Until earlier this year, Google's Chrome browser had been using its own take on the original but one thing Armin http://www.underconsideration.com

“My own theory about why Picasso agreed to do it [create a sculpture for Chicago's Richard J. Daley Plaza in 1965] after many stops and starts, and despite being a totally unreliable and temperamental character, as all interesting artists are, is–and it’s buried in the Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill correspondence–is that somebody told him that Miró was doing something even bigger in a related space in Chicago. And Picasso really was the Michael Jordan of modern art, not just In the sense of being incredibly accomplished but in the sense of being utterly driven by competitive fire and an unrealized sense of grievance at every turn, that somebody else would outdo him or do better than him. And I suspect that played a significant role in getting him to do it.”

-Writer Adam Gopnik on the Chicago Picasso (pictured), in a recent talk at the Art Institute of Chicago, where “Picasso and Chicago“–the first large-scale Picasso exhibition organized by the museum in almost 30 years–is on view through May 12.
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The latest version of VeptIT's batch image processing utility adds usability improvements, such as a completely redesigned Preview with zoom....

Superior mousetraps have their public health benefits, but they’ve got nothing on condoms. Reinventing the modest but life-saving device (some 15 billion are produced each year) is among the latest round of “Grand Challenges Explorations,” an initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has previously thrown its substantial resources behind design-minded projects such as rethinking the toilet and, in parternship with IDEO, a human-centered approach to poverty-related challenges. Grand Challenges Explorations is ready to award $100,000 grants to anyone–students, scientists, entrepreneurs–with a transformative condom idea:

We are looking for a Next Generation Condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in order to improve uptake and regular use. Additional concepts that might increase uptake include attributes that increase ease-of-use for male and female condoms, for example better packaging or designs that are easier to properly apply. In addition, attributes that address and overcome cultural barriers are also desired. Proposals must (i) have a testable hypothesis, (ii) include an associated plan for how the idea would be tested or validated, and (iii) yield interpretable and unambiguous data in Phase I, in order to be considered for Phase II funding.

The entry process is as streamlined and agile as the grant-making program itself: simply complete the two-page online application. Puzzled by prophylactics? Check out the other new Grand Challenges topics, which include increasing interoperability of social good data and labor-saving innovations for women smallholder farmers.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Admit it. Your seven-year-old nephew could out-HTML tag you any day and you think that a Cascading Style Sheet is something with a thread count. That’s where the Mediabistro mothership comes in. They’ve asked us to tell you about the online course in HTML and CSS that kicks off next week. Over four fun-filled weeks, web designer (and illustrator) Laura Galbraith will guide you through a variety of web page production techniques, from column-based layouts and search engine optimization to semantic markup and advanced CSS styles. And you’re bound to ace the typography sections. The online learning fun begins Tuesday, and before you can say “May flowers,” you’ll have brought a pre-designed webpage to life through the magic of HTML. Preview the course syllabus and register here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Robert Longo, “Capitol” (2013)

Want a good look at our nation’s Capitol? Take a detour from D.C. and head to Ridgefield, Connecticut, where the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum has unveiled Robert Longo‘s monumental charcoal drawing of the United States Capitol building. “The building appears to be moving forward toward the center of the room,” writes curator Kelly Texter in a publication that accompanies the exhibition, on view through August 25. “Varying opacities of black create clouded sky and landscape, which blanket and surround the building executed in tonal grays and chalky whites. A differently shaped moulding adorns the top of each window, with snippets of tapestry unique each opening barely visible through glinting glass.” The 41-foot-long work, which spans seven panels and gets an entire wall of the museum’s South Gallery to itself, is shown with 81 of Longo’s ink and charcoal studies, with subjects ranging from the furniture of Sigmund Freud and Franz Kline‘s 1956 AbEx classic “Mahoning” to the Hollywood Sign and Steve Jobs.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Logo redesign as performance art? Design firm Sagmeister and Walsh will redesign the logo of Adobe MAX 2013: The Creativity Conference live during a 24-hour period using "a single design material, such as strings or pencil." You can tune in at 9 AM ET via Adobe's Create Now Facebook app to witness this design highwire act. A brief interview with Jessica Walsh provides some background on what to expect. Related is something called the Adobe MAX Speaker Challenge Sweepstakes. To participate in this you need to tweet which of two MAX sessions you'd rather attend, for a shot at winning not only a full conference pass and the Creative Cloud subscription that goes with it but also VIP seating at the MAX Bash. You can guess what that is. If you'll be attending this year's Adobe MAX, you can use the promo code MXSM13 when you register and save $300. Note to Art D. Rector: I was not paid by Adobe to post this..

MathMagic is available in several editions, and includes connectivity for use with Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. ...

The Illustrator plugin provides improved export functionality and advanced map-making automation....

Established in 1923, Czech Radio (Český rozhlas) is the public radio broadcaster of the Czech Republic with four national stations — Czech Radio 1 - Radiozurnál (news, current affairs and music); Czech Radio 2 - Praha (entertainment and education); Czech Radio 3 - Vltava (cultural station); and Czech Radio 6 (analytics and current affairs) — as well as four specialized stations — Czech Radio Rádio Česko (news and current affairs), Czech Radio D-dur (classical music), Czech Radio Radio Wave (for young listeners), and Czech Radio Leonardo (popular educational service) — plus thirteen regional stations. In February Czech Radio introduced Armin http://www.underconsideration.com

Detail from Gary Baseman’s “The Celebration of Toby” (2005)

The countdown is on to Gary Baseman‘s first major museum exhibition, which will turn L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center into a fun house full of paintings, photographs, toys, sketchbooks, and videos. More than 300 artworks and objects will be installed in thematic “rooms” of a gallery designed to evoke Baseman’s childhood home, complete with family photos, Super 8 home movies, and furnishings. The creative exuberance of “Gary Baseman: The Door Is Always Open” will be revealed on April 25 with an opening house party at which Baseman will create a “spontaneous artwork” amidst pinata smashing, mask making, a performance by Nightmare and the Cat, and a DJ set by Shepard Fairey. Prepare yourself by taking a virtual trip into Baseman’s world (and studio), thanks to filmmaker Eric Minh Swenson:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Looks legit! ;)