The New York Times Magazine’s “Design, Everywhere” issue is stuffed with fascinating articles about design in current society. I’ve been reading for two days and I’m still poring through it. Among the best pieces:
A New Poland, No Joke. “In the case of Poland, rebranding is different because the idea came from the government. After years of Communist rule, Poland, rushing to emulate what it sees as modern Western ways, has put itself in the hands of DDB Corporate Profiles, an ad agency whose greatest local success to date has been a beer campaign.”
Not Fade Away. “Sun Choe, a Levi’s designer from San Francisco, comes by the company’s Selvedge store on Mulberry Street, where Troy works. Choe likes the look of the grimy life contained in Troy’s jeans so much that she wants to make a copy of them, distressed in exactly the same way that his jeans are — with identical 3-D ‘whisker’ folds below the front pockets, fades along the thighs and that shredded back pocket.”
The $19,450 Phone. “If you look at watches, pens and eyewear, those are technological products that are essential personal items. I thought that a communications device was ready to mature into something exquisite.”
Driven to Distraction. “We had just spent 45 minutes in a cul-de-sac going over the car’s features, and I still did not know enough to operate the radio by myself. Such is the state of the modern dashboard: in order to fit in every last comfort drivers could possibly want, car manufacturers have made the mere task of getting from one place to the next an ever more complicated feat.”
Irrational Exuberance. “Piecing together its aesthetic lexicon from morsels of Bauhaus rigor and midcentury formalism, with a dash of 60’s Op Art and 70’s shag-pile thrown in for fun, Wallpaper created a hermetically sealed, self-referential world that spun endlessly, glossily around on itself.”