When the news broke yesterday that Google had a brand new logo — the biggest change to its visual identity since its inception in 1998 — the design twitterverse exploded with commentary about the thickness of the new letterforms and their conspicuous lack of serifs. On Tuesday morning, typographers chimed in with praise and scorn, often about the perception that the rounded characters paired with the company’s signature color-block hues seem too childlike for a technology behemoth.
Read MoreFive years from now, on the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage in the U.S., an American woman of distinction will appear on the ten-dollar bill, with Alexander Hamilton retained somewhere on the note. This decision, announced last week by Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, has been met with considerable puzzlement from those who wonder why we would demote Hamilton, the founder of our financial system, instead of Andrew Jackson, who was the architect of the Trail of Tears, an opponent of central banking, and the target of the grassroots campaign to get a woman on the twenty-dollar bill, led by the group Women on 20s.
Read MoreIt’s an illuminating mental exercise to ponder: what if Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the pharmaceutical tycoon and physician who assembled an unmatched collection of Post-Impressionist and early Modern paintings in Philadelphia, was actually an installation artist before his time? This is the central conceit that inspired The Order of Things, now in its final days at the Barnes Foundation. Curated by Drexel University art history professor Martha Lucy, the exhibition comprises three distinct installations by Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff, and Fred Wilson.
Read MoreOne of the greatest pleasures of teaching design history to college students — apart from watching their reactions as I play excerpts from grouchy interviewswith the legendary Braun designer Dieter Rams in class — is time travel. Not the actual temporal kind, but the generational kind, where you realize that you’re the only person in the room who remembers the 1980s, and everyone else in the room is really curious about that.
Read MoreIn the third season of Orange Is the New Black, which premiered on Friday, Piper Chapman is no longer be the central focus of the story. Over the course of the season, characters we haven’t heard much from before, including the soft-spoken Chang, get their backstories revealed, and new characters arrive to offer Litchfield Penitentiary more intrigue. This has long been one of the best things about OITNB: the way it pivots from prison scenes to places on the outside—the homes, apartments, playgrounds, and schools where characters had lives before jail—then back again to the beige halls of Litchfield.
Read MoreChances are, you’re more familiar with Eve Arnold’s photographs than you are with the photographer herself, who died at the age of 99 in 2012. Arnold’s images, published in an array of legendary periodicals including Life and London’s Sunday Times, captured the big personalities of her day in moments of reflection and unguarded repose. Joan Crawford receives spa treatments and gets fitted for a new dress; Malcolm X reclines with his hands cradling the back of his head; Marilyn Monroe applies makeup in a bathroom mirror; Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton relax at a pub in Shepperton, England, enjoying a respite from Burton’s work on the set of “Becket.”
Read MoreNew Yorkers could be forgiven this month for confusing their museum itineraries with the schedule of a vintage film festival, or an Anna May Wong-inspired Netflix binge. Two exhibitions, China: Through the Looking Glass at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men at the Museum of the Museum of the Moving Image each make manifest (if not exactly “real”) cultural phenomena that are likely to be more familiar to visitors from something they’ve seen on TV or in the movies than from something they’ve encountered in a museum or a gallery.
Read MoreIn 2014, Matthew McFeeley and his friends Mary Clare Peate and Alex Baker created an intricate historical diorama depicting the 1963 March on Washington. Evoking the color palette of the photographs that document the real event, the diorama was painted in black, white, and shades of gray. Marchers are shown holding tiny, hand-painted signs that read “we demand voting rights now!” and “we march for jobs for all now!” At the center of the action, the figure of Martin Luther King, Jr., stands at a podium, poised to give his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech.
Read MoreIn February 1961, Carol Hogben, assistant keeper in the circulation department at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), was hard at work preparing for the opening of a major jewelry exhibition. Hogben had thought of a novel way to present innovative jewelry to the museum-going public, inviting contemporary artists working in an array of disciplines to create works in wax for the show, which would then be fabricated by British goldsmiths. These would be presented alongside more traditional, virtuoso pieces by the likes of Georg Jensen and Fabergé.
Read MoreJust a few years ago, terms such as “digital fabrication,” “3-D printing,” and “CAD” began appearing in the news, piquing readers’ interest with visions of Jetsons-style consumer gadgets. Auto enthusiasts began fabricating obscure discontinued car parts with the help of the MakerBot, while Americans concerned about gun control sounded the alarm about the advent of something the writers of the second amendment could never have predicted: 3-D-printed firearms. If computer-aided design (CAD) and 3-D printing haven’t quite transformed the average household into a hotbed of automated convenience, they certainly have altered the studio landscape for artists and designers all over the world.
Read MoreFX’s Cold War spy thriller The Americans, which returns Wednesday for its third season, benefits from the sort of reverse novelty that made early Mad Men so enchanting: It lets us remember (or imagine) what it was like to live in the days of phone booths, cabinet-sized computers, and TVs with rabbit-ear antennae. The Jennings’ studied suburban ordinariness makes all the intrigue of their day jobs seem even more ludicrous. Elizabeth does laundry in their harvest-gold washer and dryer; Philip serves the kids waffles.
Read MoreOne of my favorite holiday memories from my school days on East 91st Street (where I sported a very fashion-forward plaid jumper until age 11) is of browsing the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum‘s gift shop in search of exquisite, handmade Christmas ornaments and educational stocking stuffers. To the delight of design lovers everywhere, the 1902 Carnegie Mansion that the Museum calls it home is now the site of a brand new shop full of inventive and wonderful things just in time for the holidays.
Read MoreOf his extensive collection of ceramics, Oscar Wilde once remarked: “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” What Wilde felt he was increasingly failing to “live up to” was probably the sort of bourgeois respectability that is often symbolized by a set of good porcelain — something, he was surely aware, to which even a spectacularly talented gay man in Victorian Britain could never hope to aspire. It is a sign that Wilde was onto something that most people only deploy “the good china” a few times a year, on major holidays; the rest of the time, we keep it neatly tucked away so that it won’t get broken.
Read MoreAn elegant black envelope arrived in my mailbox last week. Inside is a square, burgundy-colored folder containing a catalogue of 1950 and ’60s snapshots. On the cover, an off-white, hand-lettered logo reads “Casa Susanna.” The photographs reproduced inside appear at first glance to portray a group of women at leisure: posing in the kitchen, dressed smartly for dinner, sporting fashionable bathing suits, sitting in a field of wildflowers. They are to be sold as a single lot by Wright auction house on October 30.
Read MoreNYC Makers: The MAD Biennial is the closest thing you’ll find to a crowd-sourced exhibition on view in New York right now — perhaps anywhere. Conceived during his first weeks on the job last fall by the Museum of Arts and Design’s (MAD) new director, Glenn Adamson, the show was organized at lightning speed, by museum standards: eight months. A brain trust of 300 leaders from New York’s cultural community nominated a pool of artists, designers, and fabricators of various sorts, which was then winnowed to about 100 participants by a jury that included Adamson, the exhibition’s curator, Jake Yuzna, and MAD Chief Curator Lowery Stokes Sims.
Read MoreYou’ve probably heard the one about the guy who raised $75,000 on Kickstarter to fund a nebulous potato salad project with no business plan, no recipe, and no particular sense of what kind of potato salad he was interested in making. I wish him well, but it’s high time the Internet supported a group of savory snack food entrepreneurs with a viable plan for scaling up, and some surprising health and environmental benefits to offer their neighborhood and customers. A new pickle company has emerged in Philadelphia, going by the evocative name Gary Ducket, founded by five guys who love brine and sustainable farming practices.
Read MoreMad Men has trained a generation of TV watchers to become eagle-eyed connoisseurs of Saarinen furniture, IBM Selectric Typewriters, and Western Electric Model 500 telephones, raising the bar for set designers who are acutely aware that accuracy counts. But designers also know that television sets are not museum installations: The verisimilitude of physical details must work in tandem with aesthetic choices that help us understand who characters are.
Read MoreAn historic porcelain factory in the hills of Saxony has its very own collection, invisible to the eye, but richer and more precious than the finished products of its kilns. Though there are rooms here filled with thousands of plaster moulds and centuries worth of subtle variations on a single form from the manufactory’s line of tableware and figurines, the collection that makes the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory irreplaceable comprises the memories, expertise, and skills of the people who work here. Passed down, mastered, and refined in an unbroken chain through political upheaval and social change, the knowledge that permeates this place is more priceless than any object, and more fragile than porcelain itself.
Read MoreTry to imagine Grumpy Cat as a professor of German literature at an Ivy League university, haunted by deep misgivings about his role in academia. Now imagine that he has opposable thumbs, an iPhone and a love of wry German aphorisms, and you might end up with something pretty close in spirit to Eric Jarosinski’s Twitter feed, @NeinQuarterly. Nein’s avatar is a stylized rendering of lovable Frankfurt School misanthrope Theodor W. Adorno, who is depicted sporting a monocle that he didn’t wear in real life, but plausibly could have.
Read MoreThere are two public works on view in the Northeast right now by the Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse. One, in Philadelphia, zips past as you ride a moving train; the other, in Brooklyn, inspires you to stand still and look closely. Both works introduce unexpected bursts of saturated color into ordinary, even dreary urban settings.
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