The Design Museum has added a motorway sign to its collection. So is British road signage a design classic?

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The road sign as design classic

It’s a curious way to capture Washington’s monuments — shooting from the hip on 120-millimeter film with the kind of rudimentary camera that used to be sold for a few dollars. But the lomography movement — nurtured in European and Asian capitals since the International Lomographic Society was formed in Vienna in 1992 — has established a toehold here on the Mall, where a small number of practitioners choose pinhole Polaroids and Dianas over digital cameras and smartphones to create shots of the nation’s capital. Among them one recent Saturday were Christian Meade, 25, an art handler and assistant in an antiques gallery in Alexandria; Alexis Lodsun, 19, of Arlington, a sophomore photography student at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia; and Brian Mishoe , 42, of Frederick, who works in the marketing department at George Washington University. Read full article > >

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Shooting from and by the hip: Lomography finds a toehold on the Mall

Fifteen years after his death, Saul Bass remains a revered figure in the world of film, where he was known for the opening sequences to movies like “Vertigo,’’ “Psycho,’’ and “West Side Story.”

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Design: Saul Bass Made the Title Sequence Into a Film Star

Steve Jobs, staring down death, had just received a new liver. He lay in a Memphis hospital bed in 2009, floating in and out of consciousness, but he was alert enough — and acting like Steve Jobs, authoritarian design sage — that he pronounced an oxygen mask totally unacceptable. He disapproved of the design. Read full article > >

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Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’ biography shows Apple co-founder’s genius, flaws

Apple’s free-standing stores, many with soaring glass entrances and staircases, are a testament to the design notions of Steve Jobs.

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Steve Jobs, a Genius of Store Design, Too

In 1981, Maya Lin , a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale, won the competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial . The starkness of her design, as well as her ethnicity as an Asian American, fueled controversy over her victory. Politicians, art critics and veterans excoriated her, and she was forced to defend her work before Congress. A little more than two decades later, when a jury convened in New York City to decide which of more than 5,000 submissions would become the winning design for the 9/11 Memorial , Lin ’s presence on the panel served as a reminder of the difficulties of aligning public art, private grief and main street opinion in the wake of a national tragedy. Joining Lin on the jury was a single representative of the victims’ families, along with notable public servants, academics, architects and artists — all charged with the contentious task of memorializing the dead in the void left after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Read full article > >

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Book review: Chris Cleave reviews “The Submission,” by Amy Waldman

Formula 1 teams agree to abandon plans for a dramatic change to the design of cars in 2013.

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Teams vote to drop car revolution

Facebook has announced that it will share the design secrets behind its new data centre with rival companies.

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Facebook shares green technology

Fendi and architects Aranda/Lasch interpret organic algorithms through craftsmanship Technology and craft are common buzzwords these days, but the recent collaboration between Fendi and architecture duo Aranda/Lasch explores the duality with an unusual concept. Dubbed “Modern Primitives,” the project started with Aranda/Lasch’s sculptural installations based on a crystal structure and its “forbidden symmetries”, which debuted at the 2010 Venice Biennale before landing stateside at Design Miami last December. The sculptures, the result of the architects’ obsession with the way the modular shape “programs” the faceted patterns, may look futuristic and high-tech but were dictated by the organic formations of the crystals. Defining the project, this tension between order and looseness sets the stage for an interplay between high and low (the pieces are coated with a truck bed liner called Line-X), as well as craftsmanship and the digital world. In addition to lining one of Fendi’s Peeakaboo bags in Japanese medicinal Washi fabric woven with a design based on the crystals, there’s an iPad app to simulate how the crystals grow. In Modern Primitives’ latest incarnation, “Fatto a Mano for the Future,” Fendi brought the craft side to life in a live demonstration. Using the tetrahedrons and leathers from the Spring collection, Roman craftspeople worked alongside Aranda/Lasch at an event yesterday in their Fifth Avenue Store to meticulously hand-stitch covers. From there, the exhibit will travel to other store locations before becoming part of the Fendi Foundation. Photos by Gregory Stefano

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Fatto a Mano for the Future

London’s book-obsessed design studio shares their top six rare reads As their name implies, London design firm Biblioth

The “Prince of Preschool’s” new book makes magic with little more than dots Parisian art director and illustrator Herv

The world’s 16 most famous art cars come together in one exhibit Honoring the 35th anniversary of the project, an exhibit at the BMW Museum in Munich brings together the complete set of 17 BMW Art Cars (with the exception of Olafur Eliasson’s ice sculpture) for the first time. Seeing them in one place makes for a study of the car as canvas, highlighting both similarities in the artist’s approaches (the majority are splashed with bright colors) as well as each distinct style. While assembling all the cars is an impressive single-subject show, and many of the big names—Calder, Hockney, Lichtenstein—are familiar, there’s plenty of opportunity for discovery with some of the lesser-known works, like the shimmering surface of Matazo Kayama’s 1990 535i that welcomes visitors to the exhibit. On a recent visit there as a guest of BMW, I also picked up a few insights that speak to the rich history of the brand initiative. As a whole, the show speaks to the savvy pairing of culture and sport, supporting the automaker’s values of performance and the joy of driving as they introduce fine art to race car driving. A classic Warhol story, that he took all of 23 minutes to paint his 1979 M1 because he said the design of the car is so great, underlines his accompanying statement that he “tried to portray a sense of speed. When a car is going really fast all the lines and colours become a blur.” The short film on the making of this car and its race is worth checking out on the BMW Art Car microsite . Similarly, Kayama said of his car (pictured above), “it was the attractive basic shape of the car which made my work at all possible in the first place.” The show runs through 30 September 2011 at the BMW Museum in Munich. See more art cars—from Rauschenberg to Stella to Holzer and more—in the gallery below . Take our reader survey and enter to win a CH Edition Jambox!

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Welcome Home BMW Art Cars

Milan’s newest furniture brand launches their utility-driven first collection With strong roots in the Milanese tradition of furniture-making, the new design firm Col

Lo-fi animated music boxes handmade in Switzerland Kathrin Kiener practically grew up her uncle’s timber yard, sweeping floors and in the process falling in love with all things wood—so much so that she founded Kiener Toys . Today, the 30-year-strong Swiss company handcrafts clever wooden toys; from mobiles to dolls that wobble, each charming and sturdily-constructed plaything can be enjoyed by kids and adults alike. We particularly like the Musikw

Colorful geometric mobiles by an iconic ’50s glass studio Happy chic designer Jonathan Adler teamed up with legendary mid-century glass studio Higgins to produce a series of multicolored mobiles that both showcase Higgins’ iconic glass-making technique and reflect Adler’s signature playful aesthetic and bold use of color. Based in the Chicago suburb of Riverside, IL, Higgins Studio was founded in 1948 by husband-and-wife team Michael and Frances Higgins. At a time when glass-creating techniques had largely moved away from fusing in favor of blowing, the two pioneered a rediscovery of the fusing method, which involves layering pieces of glass over a design in order to create a “glass sandwich” of sorts. Mobiles have always been a staple of the Higgins collection, along with an array of various decor items such as lamps, paperweights and mirrors, to name a few. For Adler, the collaboration seemed only natural, saying “I’ve always seen Higgins Studio as a kindred spirit—their work celebrates craft and color and optimism. I’ve loved their stuff for years and I am thrilled and honored that they have created a Higgins for Jonathan Adler range. As we speak, I am looking at the Higgins mobile hanging in the corner of my office and I am smiling.” The Higgins for Jonathan Adler mobiles, crafted with handmade enamel-fused glass and strung together with piano wire, are available in blue ($495) and pink ($895) from Jonathan Adler .

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Higgins for Jonathan Adler