simples

Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives archivist, Beth Kleber, and the Pan Am Portugal poster

My research project on Ivan Chermayeff’s posters for Pan Am has just had its fourth incarnation: after presenting my findings in an in-class presentation and on a poster (after the jump) for Steven Heller’s D-Crit course, I later pitched the story (on Heller’s and Alice Twemlow’s reccomendation) to John L. Walters, eye magazine’s editor-in-chief. My article, Flight of the Imagination, came out on issue #73 of the magazine in October. This week, the follow-up post I wrote on the process was published and fully linked on the eye blog. This has been a truly exciting project to work on, and I am looking forward to future incarnations and encounters that may happen.

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Konstantin Grcic’s 360ºC chair for Magis is a product that defies classification. It’s a chair that doesn’t look like anything we have around us these days. It’s a bit like stool, but it has a sort of a small back. It looks hard, but it’s actually much softer to the touch than one would thing. As with other of Grcic’s creations, it doesn’t look pretty, luxurious or particularly comfortable.

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Metropolis magazine, September 2009

The printed version of Metropolis magazine has shrunk as of last September. The result of a publishing crisis-induced redesign (in corner-cutting times, every inch counts), the magazine’s new size did not resolve its two other most pressing ills: an unclear international ambition and an art direction that doesn’t seem to know its place.

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From today, and for a month, follow me at Alvorada. Até já!

Committee of the Regions’ Plenary Session, European Parliament Hemicycle © Katja Ilner

Creativity, innovation, regions, clusters, mobility, funding, education, risk, opportunity, competitiveness, sustainability, networks, integration, culture, fertile grounds, Europe, America. This simultaneously-translated, multilingual bureaucratic litany, this Powerpoint-generated “tag cloud” of policy buzzwords shaped my two-day visit to Brussels last month. But I did manage to find creative, innovative life beyond the “eurospeak” of the European Union and its institutions.

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