MAY 2014
THE NEW EDITION TECNOLOGY
4 Myths About Apple Design p.2
MUSIC
Rick Springfield’s guide to writing p.6
CULTURE
7 Ukrainian Fashion designers p.8
SPECIAL
How everyone can be creative p.12
Designers Code Why Designers Really Should Learn to Code | by Cap Watkins |
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here’s been a lot of discussion over the years about whether or not designers should be obligated to learn how to implement what they design. This obviously causes a bit of angst amongst the design community because, of course, not every designer has been in a position to learn to write their own front-end code (and that being a requirement is scary). And, hey, some people just aren’t interested in that part of the product process. That’s what engineers are for, right? At Etsy, like many companies these days, product designers are responsible for staying active and involved throughout the entire development process. From product definition to user flows to wireframes to visual design to, yes, writing and deploying their own HTML and CSS, designers are tasked with staying involved from start to finish. However, we expect the same of our engineers and product managers - we push everyone on a team to be involved in every step of creating great products. When we brainstorm and blue sky ideas, we do it together. When we talk about findings or data or how to best accomplish a goal through design or engineering, we do so as a team. We not only rely on each other’s expertise, but also a shared understanding of our focus areas in order to conceive, design and implement our roadmaps.
Don’t know how to write HTML and CSS? Ask to pair with the engineer who usually implements your designs. Find small parts of your design you want to tweak and work through the problem together. Start a bug rotation specifically geared toward design inconsistencies (a couple designers at Etsy, Jason and Magera, self-started this). Put your entire design team on the rotation along with a few willing engineer pals to guide folks along. Not allowed to touch the code as a designer? Find a place that values and believes in tight collaboration across disciplines (Etsy is certainly not the only company out there with this viewpoint, but yes, we’re definitely hiring!). That’s what collaboration really is - crossing boundaries and finding common ground so that we can work together and share a mutual understanding. If designers want their partners in product and engineering to understand and participate in the design process, we need to be ready to stretch the other way as well. We need to be willing to leave the comfort of our specialty, to understand what our collaborators are dealing with every day. Learning to code isn’t about independence. It’s about embracing our codependence and discovering the strength that comes from true partnership. Subscribe · Follow
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4 Myths About Apple Design From An Ex-Apple Designer | by Mark Wilson |
Experience Evangelist, guiding third-party app iOS developers to create software that felt right on Apple's platforms. Kawano was with the company during a critical moment, as Apple released the iPhone and created the wide world of apps. In an interview with Co.Design, Kawano spoke frankly about his time at Apple--and especially wanted to address all the myths the industry has about the company and about its people, That have been sorrounded the company since it’s early beggining in 1980, with Steve Jobs in charge.
Mark Kawano
“I think the biggest misconception is this belief that the reason Apple products turn out to be designed better, and have a better user experience, or are sexier, or whatever . . . is that they have the best design team in the world, or the best process in the world,” Kawano says. But in his role as user experience evangelist, meeting with design teams from Fortune 500 companies on a daily basis, he absorbed a deeper truth.v “It’s not this thing where you get some special wings or superpowers when you enter Cupertino. It’s that you now have an organization where you can spend your time designing products, instead of having to fight for your seat at the table, or get frustrated when the better design is passed over by an engineering manager who just wants to optimize for bug fixing. At Apple, it’s kind of expected that experience is really important."
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Facebook has hundreds of designers. Google may have 1,000 or more. But when Kawano was at Apple, its core software products were designed by a relatively small group of roughly 100 people. “I knew every one of them by face and name,” Kawano says. For the most part, Apple didn’t employ specialist designers. Every designer could hold their own in both creating icons and new interfaces, for instance. And thanks to the fact that Apple hires design-centric engineers, the relatively skeleton design team could rely on engineers to begin the build process on a new app interface, rather than having to initiate their own mock-up first.
S.V.P Apple Jonathan Ive
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pple is synonymous with upper echelon design, but very little is known about the company's design process. Most of Apple’s own employees aren’t allowed inside Apple’s fabled design studios. So we’re left piecing together interviews, or outright speculating about how Apple does it and what it’s really like to be a designer at the company. Enter Mark Kawano. Before founding Storehouse, Kawano was a senior designer at Apple for seven years, where he worked on Aperture and iPhoto. Later, Kawano became Apple's User
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Apple products are often defined by small details, especially those around interaction. Case in point: When you type a wrong password, the password box shakes in response. These kinds of details are packed with meaningful delight. They're moments that seem tough to explain logically but which make sense on a gut level. IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO COME UP WITH INNOVATIVE THINGS WHEN YOU HAVE A DEADLINE.
But if you're imagining some giant vault of animation ideas hiding inside Apple and waiting to be discovered, you'd be wrong. The reality, Kawano explains, was far more bohemian. It was more having a small team and knowing what people had worked on, and the culture of being comfortable sharing.”
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TECNOLOGY
Steve Jobs
There was a commonly shared piece of advice inside Apple--maybe you've heard it before--that a designer should always take the stairs, because if you met Steve Jobs in the elevator, he’d ask what you were up to. And one of two things would happen: 1. He’d hate it, and you might be fired, and 2. He’d love it, the detail would gain his attention, and you’d lose every foreseeable night, weekend, and vacation to the project. Kawano laughs when he tells it to me, but the conclusion he draws is more nuanced than the obvious Catch 22 punchline. As for Kawano, did he ever get an amazing piece of advice, or an incredible compliment from Jobs? “Nothing personally,” he admits, and then laughs. PEOPLE WHO THRIVED AT APPLE WELCOMED THAT PASSION FROM WORKING WITH STEVE.
“The only thing that was really positive was, in the cafeteria one time, when he told me that the salmon I took looked really great, and he was going to go get that."
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5 FACTS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT APPLE
The very first apple computer ever built cost $666.66. Scientist Carl Sagan sued Apple for defamation, but lost. Apple has the patent for ‘slide-to-unlock’. Fake Apple stores in China were so convincing that even their employees thought they were real.
Steve Jobs eliminated all corporate charity programs in 1997. REDEF
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TECNOLOGY
How is the Google Can’t Forget You
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No More Commercials, Says Netflix Chief Product Officer.
But It Should Make You Hard to Find
As soon as news spread that the European Court of Justice now requires search engines like Google to allow people to “be ‘forgotten’ after a certain time by erasing links to web pages,” critics in the U.S. worried that the decision would break the internet. Getting Google to forget isn’t the same thing as getting people to forget. We get it. “The Right to Be Forgotten” sounds catchy. And, yes, the language of “erasure” laws and “disappearing” messages is captivating. Unfortunately, these popular words are fatally inaccurate in the privacy context. As a result, critics risk tackling irrelevant arguments about unattainable perfection while advocates and consumers are invited to place their hopes in a technology that is doomed never to be fully successful. For example, how easy should it be to find personal information about you? Does it matter what kind of personal information it is? Which obscurity strategies are acceptable and which ones are problematic? Most people don’t have a problem with privacy settings, delete buttons for user profiles, robot.txt files, scraping prohibitions in terms of use agreements, and other similar commonly deployed technologies Yet the European Court of Justice’s recent decision providing for a right to have information removed from certain search results has struck many as going too far. Could obscurity be leveraged to carve out a “right to fail?”
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Fu t u r e o f T V ?
Netflix Chief-Product Officer Neil Hunt predicted Monday that the future of TV will see the unbundling of cable packages, more personalization of content and an end to TV commercials as we know them. In contrast, internet TV allows audiences to aggregate over time and space, and can afford to-curate content that has smaller ll of this means that traditional channels a u d i e n ce s at any one will become irrelevant. time. Netflix-is using its massive collection of consumer data t o learn what users want to see and generate personalized recommendations for everyone. Mr. Hunt expects those technological capabilities to go further, eventually allowing Netflix will be able to make recommendations based on your mood, time of day and who is watching alongside you. But Mr. Hunt stressed that those types of-personalization-won't feel intrusive on viewers' privacy or even necessarily be visible to them. All of this means that traditional channels will become irrelevant. Marketers will "need to find a different place to advertise," Mr. Hunt said. While one of his predictions of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is that-the Nature is inspiring the design of the next generation of company has no plans to drones, or flying robots, that could eventually be used introduce commercials. for everything from military surveillance to search and Netflix will ever break rescue. In the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, 14 into live programming, like research teams reveal their latest experimental drones; sports,? Mr. Hunt said Netflix they include a robot with bird-like grasping appendages, doesn't have a competitive advantage in this area and it and some that form a robo-swarm or flock. isn't something it is currently Prof. Graham Taylor from the University of focused on. Oxford’s animal flight group added that engineers still
The developments are inspired by birds, bats, insects and even flying snakes; Aerial robotics expert Prof David Lentink, from Stanford University in California, says that this bio-inspiration is sort of a pushing drone technology forward, because evolution has solved challenges that drone engineers arejust beginning to address. Dr. Kovac commented: “It’s important that the applications benefit humanity”.
had a long way to go before they were able to achieve the feats that animals were capable of.
| by Victoria Gill |
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The admitted weakness of couching privacy protection in terms of the probability of obscurity is that you’re forced to recognize the inevitability of some information slipping through the cracks of obscurity and going viral. This admission is necessary, however, because it not only allows those who are disclosing information to better tailor their expectations, but it also encourages the public and policy makers to demand an elevated response when mere probabilities won’t do. | by Evan Selinger |
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| by Jeanine Poggi |
Photo : Debi D
el Grande
Fly i n g R o b o t s : n at u r e i n s p i r e s n e x t g e n e r at i o n d e s i g n
www.mediaredefined.com TECNOLOGY
Twitter Experiments With a New Video-Sharing Feature
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So it doesn’t look like Twitter is going to get into the audio business, after all. But Twitter has liked video for quite a while. And it looks like it’s experimenting with a new product that could encourage more people to use it as a video platform - a feature that makes it easy to embed, display and play clips on phones. The best way to play with the feature pointed out to me by a helpful tipster is to pick up an iPhone, open the Twitter app and start composing a new message with the “#amillionwaystodieinthewest” hashtag. But if you don’t have an iPhone handy, I’m happy to illustrate what happens: As you type in the hashtag, you’ll notice.
The results that pop up in the automatic results field include a video “provided by” “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” Universal’s new Seth MacFarlane comedy. This doesn’t appear to be a paid ad — note that Twitter is telling users that the video is “provided by” the movie, not “promoted by” — but it’s easy enough to imagine how Twitter could offer the feature to advertisers. Or it could simply provide it to publishers/distributors it wants to encourage to send more video through its system, the way it already does with Web publishers that use its “cards” system. I suppose it’s also possible for Twitter to open up the feature to all of its 255 million unique users and create a YouTube-like video-sharing platform that’s open to the public. But I doubt that, since storing and serving all that video is enormously expensive and hard to monetize. Also, YouTube already exists. I asked Twitter’s PR team for comment on the experiment, and they offered up their boilerplate “We experiment all the time” line. But they’ve been quite clear that they want more video in your timeline, one way or another. Maybe it will be this way. | by Peter Kafka |
Photo : Debi Del Grande
Futuristic NYC Hotel : Citizen Where Practically Everything Is Controlled By Tablet CitizenM, a new hotel in New York City's Times Square, is a beautiful combination of high tech and high design. Guests check in using a station of touchscreen computers, and each room can be customized using a sleek Samsung Galaxy tablet. Artwork by Andy Warhol and David LaChapelle line the walls. CitizenM operates branches in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, London, Glasgow, and Paris. In April, the boutique hotel chain opened the new location in Times Square, its first in the United States. The brand's emphasis is on affordable luxury. Each of the 230 rooms has the same layout, and rates start at $199 a night. The hotel is both artistic and futuristic, with some stunning design details and impressive technology. | by Madeline Stone |
Wearable devices could be out of fashion by 2016 Photo : Debi Del Grande
The wearables market is riding the crest of a wave at the moment and as many as 48 million devices, from smartwatches and headsets to activity trackers could be snapped up by consumers excited by the hype by the end of this year. However, that wave could be in danger of crashing and wiping out demand as early as 2016, according to a new report. This is because, according to NPD DisplaySearch, the hype around the gadgets is beginning to fade, and unless prices drop or a wearable launches that becomes an essential tech gadget like a smartphone, smartwatches and smartglasses are in danger of being seen as a fashion fad. “We expect that the dynamics of the wearables market will be similar to DVD, LCD TV, smartphones, and other digital consumer markets with commoditized hardware,” |by AFP | REDEF
YouTube's hurting indie music labels The video site uses bullying to force down royalty rates And now it is attempting to do the same with audio streaming YouTube is threatening to block independent music videos on its site unless the labels that own the copyright to those videos sign a “template licensing contract” for its upcoming music streaming subscription service, claims the World Independent Network – and the independent music community is up in arms about it.
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| by Helienne Lindvall |
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F O R YO U R E A R S At least, according to guitarist Joe Perry.
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Aerosmith may never release another fulllength record again—at least, according to guitarist Joe Perry. He tells Rolling Stone that the tepid reception to the group’s last record, 2012’s Music From Another Dimension!, negatively impacted the group’s confidence, and that from now on it might “just release an EP every six months” (which could arguably be worse). Perry says that Music fulfilled the band’s Sony contract, meaning the group is a free agent for the moment. He also blames the record’s failure on several factors beyond the band’s control, and beyond the fact that people don’t
songs they know well—some inspired by a weekly theme and some not, but always songs worth hearing. This week, because there are new Coldplay and Conor Oberst records, songs we put on when we want to mope. At the risk of having this week’s most obvious entry for this topic, there is no music more perfectly suited to the practice of moping than that of The Cure, a band that, despite common belief, doesn’t actually use chorus or delay pedals, instead running its guitars directly through the warping tears of its fans. Pick a stage in the life of an overly sensitive young man, and there’s a Cure song to mope to about it everything from pining for love so hard you want to die, to getting that love and realizing you want to die, to losing that love and wanting desperately to get it back and/or die. I’ve written before about my time among the new-new wave scene around the turn of the millennium, tired of the archness of indie rock, returned to the gloom and disaffection of postpunk—and also went to a lot of ’80s dance nights. And while I was a Cure fan all through my teenage
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| by Marah Eakin |
years, it was during my Sunday evenings in the dryice rooms of borrowed cool that “Open” most spoke to me. On those nights, my roommate had a ritual of getting ready by listening to Real Life’s cheesy synth-jam “Send Me An Angel,” a song that was all pulsing, single-man optimism. But sad, determinedly dark horse that I was, I used to put on my CD of, where I let “Open” put me in the proper mindset to be the mysteriously brooding, black-clad stranger in the corner… ladies. | by Sean O’Neal |
Rick Springfield’s guide to writing The musician talks about the difference between novels and music
really love Aerosmith as much as they used to. He says the band’s biggest advocate, former Columbia Records chair Steve Barnett “left the label three weeks before the album came out,” something that could have hurt its performance. He also said the band made the decision to tie its single “Legendary Child” to the G.I. Joe movie, which was then subsequently delayed for nine months—either because it didn’t have enough Channing Tatum or it wasn’t filmed in 3-D, depending on who you ask. Of course, another problem could be the waning powers of Aerosmith itself, especially considering frontman Steven Tyler’s antics in recent years. Just this week, Tyler was filmed trying to jump in with some Lithuanian street musicians playing “Crazy;” the video offers a pretty good example of what Aerosmith fans can expect these days.
Photo by Debi Del Grande
Aer osmith may The Cure finds reasons to mope on never r elease the dance floor a new album In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of
Now that I am officially a novelist as well as a musician, people ask me the difference between writing a song versus writing a book. I can sum it up in one word: Girls. Although one clears the sinuses better than the other, both provide some degree of satisfaction and sense of a job well done. Too obtuse? I’m embarrassed to admit the “girl” thing is actually true. When I was a little tyke of about 10, I was obsessed with writing stories, most had to do with the more impossible aspects of space travel and the prospect that there were some serious and gelatinous monsters on nearby planets – mainly the Moon or Mars. And, yes I know the Moon isn’t a planet, it’s a moon, but at 10, I didn’t care. I still don’t. Some of the stories featured earthbound monsters. Unpublished gems like “Scab-man” ideas that borrowed heavily from all the books I was reading at the time — TV not being the entertainment orgy it is today.
Photo : Debi Del Grande
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MUSIC
In novels you can lie and people expect you to lie because it’s fiction, whereas with songwriting you’re kind of pigeonholed into the autobiographical thing. Everyone assumes if you sing about something, then it actually happened to you — and of course interviewers will ask you about the most embarrassingly personal song. Now that I’m a mature novelist, I may be one of the few people who can write authoritatively on these subjects . | by Victoria Gill |
www.mediaredefined.com MUSIC
Coldplay’s “X&Y” was its first very bad album—and its first no. 1 modern, and haunting; it brought an electronic sound to radio that felt fresh. (It has its obvious rock ancestors, Radiohead, to thank for that.) It’s a touch more edgy than the music that otherwise populates pop music—there’s some synth, some piano, and some complicated guitar. It’s not blurring itself by running the sound through a machine. It is the machine—a very empathetic machine—but one that produces a reliable, big sound that thrums and vibrates and pounds with earnest sensitivity to one thudding bass line, drawing up to a crescendo or fading out poignantly. So here’s this sad, pessimistic music, that is in part pessimistic about the very things that make it possible. It’s beautiful, and it hates itself. The contradiction is at the core of the band’s success— it’s something the band members themselves seem to feel. Martin often sounds insecure, striving, and self-deprecating in interviews—when he’s not striking notes of false humility,
How new artists can be empower ed by distribution
| by Sonia Saraiya |
Dave Grohl working on his own HBO show
spending their precious time on their musical creativity. This is where a modern distributor comes into the picture; here’s where we can get our extra hours. Let’s have a closer look at how a distributor can help artists. The artist saves precious hours by letting a distributor take care of marketing and sales.
On the heels of Nirvana’s Hall Of Fame induction and a bunch of surprise Foo Fighters shows, Dave Grohl has also set out to produce and host a documentaryravel the country style show for HBO due to air this winter. to tell the stories This won’t be Grohl’s first time of historic studios. behind the camera. In 2013, he directed Soundgarden’s “By Crooked Steps” video, as well as the feature-length documentary Sound City, about the legendary Los Angeles studio where Nevermind was recorded. Stops so far have included Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio in Chicago, Inner Ear Studios in Washington D.C., and more. Grohl, to travel the country, stopping at other historic studios to tell their stories. Grohl is also traveling with the entire Foo Fighters crew in tow, so it’s probably safe to assume the guys are concurrently working on the band’s eighth album—a record expected to drop this fall, according to producer Butch Vig.
| by Bas Kruijssen |
| by Becca James |
Why music distributors are more relevant today than ever
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Photo: Debi Del Grande
Just the other day, I was flicking through countless TV channels. I settled on a daily talk show from my home country, the Netherlands, where a (still not very well-known) rap artist was explaining how releasing music these days works, according to him. I decided to keep watching and hear him out. His story was a solid one, it all made sense. He was talking about how he spent his days monitoring social media, uploading his music, finding ways to get his music more widespread and gathering attention for his musical creations. Listening to the story, I was wondering This young man aside, most of us don’t have the luxury of too many hours in a day. I think most artists would prefer
as evidenced by the following quote from his 2008 interview with Rolling Stone: “I know that we’ll be ridiculed for this,” says Martin, one of the most successful musicians of the present day, who has scored this era’s transition from analog to digital, from rock to pop. It is that self-hatred again—and it’s the selfhatred of an entire generation, a self-hatred that went right to No. 1.
Photo : Debi Del Grande
In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines an album that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in pop music, and how that concept has changed over the years. In this installment, we cover Coldplay’s X&Y, which went to No. 1 on June 25, 2005, where it stayed for three weeks. Fact: Everyone loves Coldplay. Another fact: Everyone hates Coldplay. Coldplay is the closest thing to a musical monoculture that exists anymore—a global, softrock phenomenon providing a score for the world, from coffee shops to HBO shows. It is loved, despised, ubiquitous, and tolerated—much like the status quo it caters to. The band’s sound reflects its normalcy. Coldplay’s music is not about esoteric struggles or marginalized concerns; it always points toward universality. It can be quite moving—and is always highly consumable. At some point, everyone who has ever listened to a Coldplay song got a hook lodged into their head— whether it’s the opening strings of “Viva La Vida” or the guitar solo in “Fix You” . It happened, and it will continue to happen. Hitting No. 1 is just what Coldplay does at this point. Coldplay’s sound is also atmospheric,
Photo: Pablo Porcar
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CULTURE
| by Daria Shapovalova |
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he first hints of the new wave of patriotism struck Ukrainian designers over a year ago, when Ksenia Schnaider used Trident, a national emblem of Ukraine, as a motif on her sweatshirts. Then the Kiev Fashion Days campaign featured Ukrainian top model Alla Kostromichova wearing a cape made of the yellow and blue national flag in March 2013, and designer Anton Belinsky used a huge flag to adorn the backdrop of his runway, dedicating his collection to the same colors—a sunny yellow and a deep blue. A month after his show, the revolution in Ukraine began.
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ena Ivanova’s most recent collection was dedicated to the idea of the introvert—her models’ faces were covered in black veils; some of the looks featured aprons. Her dedicated clientele are regulars at her studio in Vozdvizhenka, one of the most beautiful areas of Kiev, and she’s just launched her second line, which will enable her to further widen her audience.
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How did the fashion community react? Many designers were at Maidan Square, protesting by night, working by day, creating fashion stories on the streets of revolutionary Kiev and declaring their desire to live in a European country. When things started to heat up in early February, the majority of the country’s designers were preparing for their showcases in Europe—the Kiev Fashion Days show in London, the Fashion Scout showroom in Paris. Anna October and Julie Paskal, who were shortlisted for the LVMH prize, were trying to finish their collections on time despite the fact that their seamstresses were afraid to go outside.
rina Krasilnikova is an expert at handwork—she masterfully weaves, cuts, and shapes all the intricate garments produced in her studio in the Kiev’s center. Her 3-D printed shoes were the talk of the Kiev Fashion Days showcase when they appeared on the runways in London in February, where it became clear that this designer needs to think seriously about the selling power of her one-ofa-kind creations.
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ara Quint, a fresh name on the Ukrainian fashion scene, has only two collections under her sleeve. The first was dedicated to the oeuvre of Van Gogh, and the second one to the art of origami. Though Quint is just starting out in the industry, her keen attention to detail in her work should serve her well.
www.mediaredefined.com CULTURE
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asya Khomenko Artistslash-designer is shown here holding a swatch of vintage fabric, the likes of which she frequently uses in creating her collections. Often they consist of a select few looks, with her shows staged as performances rather than being mounted on a traditional runway. Khomenko shares a studio with her artist sister, clearly someone with whom she has much in common: The designer’s themes center on connections between naive art and fashion as a medium of creative self-expression.
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asha Kanevski is one of the few men on the Ukrainian fashion map who is keen on menswear (though he also creates clothes for women). His latest collection was very much inspired by the revolutions happening all over the world, but was conceived long before the recent events in Ukraine. Uniforms, clear cuts, a dark palette, and inventive prints—these are the staples of Kanevski’s collections.
Leaving those scary times behind, designers from Ukraine are ready for the new future of their country And continue to respond in full, creative force. “Fashion can also be a weapon of hope,” wrote Vanessa Friedman in a Financial Times article about a recent showcase of six young Ukrainian designers in Paris, and she was right: For the majority of the designers who represent the new generation of
Photos: Debi Del Grande
nna Kolomoets with only eighteen-years-old is possibly the youngest working designer in Ukraine, made her name familiar to the world when she created a collection of T-shirts inspired by an article by Suzy Menkes on the streetstyle circus of Fashion Week. Soon her tees and sweatshirts, emblazoned with phrases like Uncross Your Legs, I Am On the List, Front Row Only, I Am Not a Blogger, and I Don’t Give Interviews were being ordered from Paris and Tokyo; this led to a collaboration with Italian retailer Luisa ViaRoma, the first to snap up the shirts. In addition to the Fashion Circus tees, Kolomoets has begun creating full collections each season.
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nton Belinskiy’s collections, which strike an edgy balance between sport and modern femininity, are embraced by the most forward-thinking fashion girls in Kiev, like the supercool avantgarde singer Iya, pictured here with Belinskiy. Naturally she modeled his recent show at the State Polytechnic Museum which was one of the standout moments in recent Kiev Fashion Days.
independent Ukraine, their work is their means of survival. No matter what the news headlines are, they continue to work and promote national identity, an issue that never had more urgency than it does now. Here, seven designers who are shaping the face of Ukrainian fashion now.
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I am thrilled to announce that Robin Givhan will return to the Post in early June as a fashion critic and writer. Robin will bring her tremendous reporting and writing abilities to Style in covering fashion as a business, as a cultural institution and as pure pleasure. Her tremendous body of work is filled with unforgettable stories: Dick Cheney and his parka in Poland, the new Wizards uniform (not so nice) and Condoleezza Rice’s Matrix coat and knee-high boots, just to name three great ones. Last month, we called Robin to write a quick story about the suicide of designer L’Wren Scott. An hour later we published a story that had more detail and authority than any other account I read. Returning to the Post, Robin will take this coverage into a new era; she has great ideas for how fashion as cultural currency can become an important Web presence.A 2006 Pulitzer winner for fashion criticism, she is writing a book, “The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History.” In addition to the Post, Robin has worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press. During her most recent tenure at the Post, in addition to fashion, Robin covered Michelle Obama during the first year of the administration. Robin has been freelancing for us for more than a year. A look at how the femenine half of the famous husband and wife team After her fashion coverage of the State Dinner in February, a reader shaped the eamesian principles of design. e-mailed to say: “It’s so nice to see Robin Givhan in the paper again.” Charles a n d R a y Eames were partners in life and in work. Yet throughout | by Washpostpr | their joined careers, Charles often served as the mouthpiece for all things Eames. For example, in the 1972 documentary Design Q & A, a curator asks five acclaimed designers a set of questions. “For Eames, the person answering the questions is Charles,” says Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles and Ray. Photo: Helayne Seidman
Helayne Seidman
Why Is Pepsi Getting Into Fashion?
Coca-Cola (KO) has made it to the catwalk through such designers as Marc Jacobs. Now PepsiCo (PEP) is launching a limited-edition line of apparel, accessories, electronics, and skateboards designed by fashion labels. They feature patterns created by street artists in a Pepsi-inspired, redwhite-and-blue color scheme, though the Pepsi logo itself is not featured prominently. Pepsi’s marketing campaign is called The Art of Football and seemingly timed to coincide with the World Cup. The fashion collection was unveiled today by Bloomingdale’s (M) and includes mostly men’s products by apparel brands Original Penguin, Gents, Goodlife, and Del Toro, audio gear brand B&O Play, and skateboard company Shut. Prices from $49 to $399. “First and foremost, we wanted to create covetable product that was high quality and well designed,” says Kristin Patrick, Pepsi’s global chief marketing officer. ”We did not want the product emblazoned with logos, as this generation of consumers is not interested in branding that is too heavy handed.”
Helayne Seidman
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Robin Givhan returns to 3 E a m e s ' s I n f lu e n c e s The Washington Post O n M o d e r n D e s i g n
|by Venessa Wong|
1ITERATIVE DESIGN
When Ray was as young as three years old, she was making her own paper dolls with different outfits and accessories. That childhood hobby would influence how Charles and Ray created their catalogs.
2 A CROSS-DISCIPLINE APPROACH
One myth that’s been perpetuated about Ray is that she was the painting half of the duo and that she preferred 2-D work. (The title of the 2011 documentary, Eames: The Architect and the Painter, might be to blame.)
3THE HOME IS AN EXPRESSION OF THE SELF
In the 1940s and 1950s--while Charles and Ray were designing for the home--Emily Post was the authority-at-large when it came to hosting etiquette. In some ways they invented the modern design practice. In the end, Ray and Charles both espoused an approach of curated independence. "It's about what you want and making it work for you,” Demetrio says. You can experiment and not get caught up in ‘doing it right. It was about that people like different houses. | Jackson Pollock |
“ Pe o p l e
i g n o re d e s i g n t h a t i g n o re s p e o p l e ” |Frank Chimero|
www.mediaredefined.com CULTURE New York based Joseph Altuzarra is the next designer to collaborate with Target
Photo: Helayne Seidman
Target's last designer collaboration with British brand Peter Pilotto was a resounding success, a fact that was helped greatly by the American budget retailer's partnership with Net-A-Porter. com, which made it the first Target collaboration available to customers outside the US. When the collection first went live on the luxury e-tailer's site on February 9 three orders were placed every second, with that extraordinary number levelling out to one order every second after the initial rush. It's little surprise, then, that Target have once again turned to Net-A-Porter to take their next collaboration global, and this one is set to be just as sought after. Altuzarra is the next name to carry the gauntlet, and its eponymous founder is one the world's brightest young design talents. "As a designer, I believe firmly in the transformative power of fashion. It has the ability to not only change how you look, but also how you feel," said Joseph Altuzarra, the brand's designer and creative director. "I've admired the elegance that Target brings to fast fashion. By working together on this capsule collection, we hope to instill a sense of power, confidence and beauty in women everywhere."
“ Empowering
Imagination ” Competition Finalist
Meet the student finalist in Parsons and Kering’s third annual competition “Merging tennis and fashion design enabled me to create a collection that would illustrate the physical and mental challenges of being a professional athlete, along with design vision and perseverance.” Carlota Salvadores Calero is from Madrid. Since moving to New York, she has interned at Alexander Wang, DKNY, and Zac Posen. "My thesis collection, Deucce Passing, is derived from a tennis term describing a winning ball played at the net during match point and illustrates the collection's ethos of movement and mind-set, the daily regimen that inspires long-term success and the constant quest to improve. Shape and form were explored by sliding images across a photocopier to create extended and distorted reproductions. Images were then pleated back together and translated into directional, random pleating applied to traditional sportswear silhouettes. Merging tennis and fashion design enabled me to create a collection that would illustrate the physical and mental challenges of being a professional athlete, along with design vision and perseverance." Photo:Helayne Seidman
Altuzarra’s designs on Target
| by Daria Shapovalova |
| by Bibby Sowray |
Wa r h o l I n t e r v i e w s Alfred Hitchcock
Photo: Supplied
The amazing interview take place in 1974
Few midcentury cultural figures would at first seem to have as little in common as Andy Warhol and Alfred Hitchcock. Sure, they both made films, but how straight a line can even the farthest-reaching cinema theorists draw between, say, Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Warhol’s Vinyl (1965)? Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Warhol’s Empire (1964)? Yet not only did both of them direct many motion pictures, each began as a visual artist: “Warhol had started his career working as a commercial illustrator, Hitchcock had started out creating illustrations for title cards in silent movies,” says Filmmaker IQ’s post on their encounter in the September 1974 issue of Warhol’s Interview magazine. Yet in the brief conversation printed, they discuss not drawing, and not filmmaking, but murder: Andy Warhol: Since you know all these cases, did you ever figure out why people really murder? It’s always bothered me. Why. Alfred Hitchcock: Well I’ll tell you. Years ago, it was economic, really. Especially in England. First of all, divorce was very hard to get, and it cost a lot of money. Andy Warhol: But what about a mass murderer. Alfred Hitchcock: Well, they are psychotics, you see. They’re absolutely psychotic. They’re very often impotent. As I showed in “Frenzy.” The man was completely impotent until he murdered and that’s how he got his kicks. But today of course, with the Age of the Revolver, as one might call it, I think there is more use of guns in the home than there is in the streets, you know? And men lose their heads? Andy Warhol: Well I was shot by a gun, and it just seems like a movie. I can’t see it as being anything real. The whole thing is still like a movie to me. It happened to me, but it’s like watching TV. If you’re watching TV, it’s the same thing as having it done to yourself. | Filmmaker IQ |
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Everyday Inspiration: How Everyone Can Be Creative
I
| by Jeff James |
n the recent article, “4 Ways to Find Inspiration Everywhere,” Fast Company shared this quote from Christina E. Shalley, Ph.D., organizational behavior professor at Georgia Institute of Technology: “Everybody can be creative in certain ways. You need to find that outlet that brings it out in you.” At Disney Institute, we, too, believe that everyone is creative. Inspired by Dr. Shalley, we thought we’d share our perspective on the keys to mining inspiration.
Challenge your preconceived notions We are all creative…the problem is that we spend a great deal of time fostering the left hand side of our brains with things like words and language, logic, numbers, reality-based ideas, and paying strong attention to the details. If we spend some time also fostering the right side of our brain, we move to whole brain thinking which is ultimately more creative. Spend some time with your imagination, using symbols and images rather than language, taking risks, and looking at the “big picture” to nurture your right brain. The two sides together are a pretty powerful tool because they were designed to work together.
Remember that creativity is not always about the “big idea.” The majority of the creative work you can do today just may around incremental improvements that arise from the creativity surrounding the projects you are working on daily. When you are developing new ideas, there are some conditions that must be met in order to achieve the best results. You have to have great raw ingredients, and these include the people that you invite to a creativity session (maybe it’s the unlikely folks who attend) and the information that is provided about the session itself. You must also have great tools to utilize in the creative process. Look for new ways to brainstorm, like “pass the paper” and “pick a card.”
Change up routine regularly Don’t always invite the same people to ideation sessions. Mix it up! In fact, if you allow people in your organization to self-opt in and out of the creative process, you’ll get ideation sessions where everyone in the room is excited to give ideas. Bring people into your creative process that you’ve never included before; it really builds your organization. Suddenly, you find you have a big group of people who have worked in creative sessions in a cross-functional way learning more about other parts of the organization. When they get back to your department, they are more knowledgeable about what everyone in the organization does and can bring that new expertise to your part of the organization.
Find what creates your “mind” space
Ideas from external sources to your organization will provide an environment where you are open to ideas coming from anywhere. This includes social media, other organizations like yours, other industries or trade publications that might not be in your vertical or segment. Sometimes, it might be talking to people. Talk to your customers to get raw feedback about your products and services to inspire you to think differently about what you do every day. Artist Pablo Porcar