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Karim Rashid
KARIM RASH
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Karim Rash
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ar
First Edition
MOMA
New Photography 2010: Roe Ethrige, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager, Amanda Ross-Ho
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Pictoplasma
Contemporary character design and art.
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Kidrobot
Concept Becomes Culture
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Karim Rashid
“I want to change the world”
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PUMA
To Become the World´s First Carbon Neutral Sportwear Company
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Water and Oil
Vogue courts disaster as Water and Oil shoot show model playing dead on shoreline.
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We present our first edition of, which we like to refer to as “The wild side of design” meaning having a more adventurous look, emotion, taste for design. Our pourpose is to reveal all of these in the pages of these magazine. The persuation by elements like typographic design are vital in the construction of these magazine. Colors, movement, are also components of these publication. The passion and inspiration, that we feel and find unstoppable, towards design is what we mean to transmit.
Editorial Nowadays, life is uncertain, we need answers and solutions,
we want new horoizons and we review our attitudes and postures.
Talking
in one global sense, our design here in
walkabout ara a clear manifestation of it.
In this first edi-
tion we have examples of a new mentality; where it seemed to
be nothing we discover a richness, what used to be terribly complicated is now simpler.
Walkabout es un Proyecto Academico Sin Fines de Lucro
Diana Viera : Portada Publicidad Reportaje (Karim Rashid) Fotoreportaje (Water and Oil)
10 November 2010
Laura Sánchez : Sección “All Artículo doble página (PUMA)
on
Active”
Publicidad
oMA
All on Active
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New Photography 2010: Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry,Alex Prager,Amanda Ross-Ho September29,2010–January10,2011 The Edward Steichen Photography G a z l l e r i e s , t h i r d f l o o r.
ew Photography 2010 presents four artists—Roe Ethridge, Elad Lassry, Alex Prager, and Amanda Ross-Ho—whose photographs mine the inexhaustible reservoir of images found in print media and cinema. Ethridge takes his pictures in “editorial mode,” directly borrowing from commercial images already in circulation, including outtakes from his own illustrational magazine work. Lassry defines his practice as one consumed with pictures, meaning with generic images lifted from consumer society, such as Hollywood publicity stills and design illustrations. Ross-Ho’s hand-drilled sheetrock panels lined up with found pictures and mural-scale images of studio residues renegotiate the various stages of the creative process. Prager takes her cues from pulp fiction and the fashion images of Guy Bourdin to construct filmic narratives starring women disguised under synthetic wigs, dramatic makeup, and retro polyester attire. Infusing the seductive language of film and advertising with a touch of sly conceptualism, the artists included in New Photography 2010 explore the relationship between straight and constructed photograph, image and picture.
The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography. The exhibition is made possible by the Carl Jacobs Foundation.
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Pictoplasma Project
Candy! Pure candy! What could be more jouyful? In piece after piece you don´t know wether to drool over the design or the technique or both. Just magical little wonderful short piece after short piece, a treat!
Contemporary character design and art.
All on Active a w e s o m n e s s
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PICTOPLASMA ON TOUR An evening with inspirif artist, lectures and new, outstanding character design on the big screen! The inmitable Pictoplasma Festival format is on tour around the world and brings selected screenings, live artist, lectures and presentations of the very best contemporary character design and art in an evening session to your city. After events in Germany, from Munich to Hamburg, Pictoplasma will be in Dundee, Scotland, making an appearance in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, head on to New York and return to Duesseldort. More tour stops will be announced shortly, so make sure to check this page regularly, as our growing carbon footprint gradually finds its way to your neighbourhood.
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CHARACTERS IN MOTION Especially curated animation programmes bring freshly hatched characters in motion to the big screen. In an ongoing process, Pictoplasma hunts for the very best contemporary short films, music videos, motion graphics and experimental work. The program include style defying all-time classics and the fresh and recent work by the world`s most talented studios, animators and designers. The result is presented in jewelsonly screening sessions such as Characters in Rhythm, Motion or Narration.
13 November 2010 3.00-10 PM Parsons The New School for Design. Part of New York Illustration Week Tishmas Auditorium 66 West 12 Street. Pictoplasma returns to New York with selected screenings, artist lectures, panels, and presentations of the very best in international character design art. Featuring: Nathan Jurevicius, Peter de Sève, Craig Redman, Rilla Alexander, Aaron Stewart, Motomichi Nakamura and Andy Kehoe. Pictoplasma NYC is kindly presented and hosted by Parsons The New School of Design as part of the New York Illistration Week. ENTRANCE IS FREE BUT LIMITED!! Please kindly announce your attendance: Pictoplasmaparsons@gmail.comThe Pictoplasma Festival is on tour and brings selecte-d screenings, live artist lectures and inspiring presentations of the very best contemporary character design and art in an evening session to your city. After events in Germany, from Hamburg to Munich, we´ll be passing by Dundee, Scotland, before heading to New York City, and returning to Dusseldorf on December 3.
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Emily Heyward
A long line of adults stretches around the corner and down the block in Manhattan’s SOHO. They are waiting for something. Concert Tickets? The DMV? Food rations? No. They are waiting to purchase a limited edition, just-released toy. This is Kidrobot - creator and retailer of designer vinyl toys, fashion label, curator of cool, and all-around phenomenon. Behance sat down with founder and president Paul Budnitz to learn more about how a far-out idea became a full-blown culture.
idrobot
Concept Becomes Culture
All on Active a w e s o m n e s s
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a w e s o m n e s s
Budnitz’s incredible ability to write his own rules stems from trusting his instincts.
that has not been done before, you are bound to face your share of discouragement. When Budnitz set out to form Kidrobot, he was met with incredulity and doubt. But he countered with an unshakeable belief in his own concept. He explains, “It was pretty tough at the beginning explaining to people what my company actually was going to do. ‘I am creating a company called Kidrobot, which will sell limited edition vinyl toys, designed by graffiti artists, poster artists, and fashion designers, to adults for inordinate sums of money.’ Try bringing that to a bank for a loan! Until we got rolling there were a lot of money troubles. Luckily, I found some investors that believed in me. One of the early investors said, ‘I have no idea what I’m investing in, Paul. But you’re really, really convincing so here’s a check.’”
his approach to marketing moves beyond innovative into revolutionary, setting a new course for how to sell products. He tells us, “I decided to take the opposite marketing approach from most other successful companies. Generally, in order to buy something that you really, really want from Kidrobot, we make you jump through a very high hoop. For example, we’ve forced people to take a picture of themselves holding their favorite junk food in a convenience store, and send that in to Kidrobot, and if the photo was good enough, we’d let that customer buy a toy. We’ve also had toys that were only sold in a Dim Sum parlor on the Lower East Side, or in a Laundromat in Seoul, Korea. Rather miraculously, this suicidal marketing strategy has served us well, as we’re still in business.”
Words he never listens to: “‘That’s a bad idea, and it’s expensive. Can we please do a marketing study before you spend all that money Paul?’” What does propel him forward is an undeniable passion for his work. “I don’t have any specific sources of inspiration. I love what I do and the things I make. So if the things we make start sucking, or even if our office gets too messy, I get really upset. It’s sort of a self-regulating system. Like breathing and eating.” And crucial to his success as founder of the company, he also knows when to let go. He explains, “Personally, I do everything I can to give away as much work as I can to someone else. If I don’t have anything to do, and everything seems to get done anyway, then I know I’m being effective…I see my role as guiding collaboration. It’s up to me to know what’s good, what isn’t, and who to ask to work on what.”
“
If you seek to make an idea happen
Budnitz’s trailblazing didn’t end with his idea
As for what’s next for Budnitz, what he’s hoping to accomplish? “I really, really like bright colors.”
I see my role as guiding collaboration. It’s up to me to know what’s good, what isn’t, and who to ask to work on what.
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He designs hotels, board games and even fountain pens. But Karim Rashid’s greatest creation is himself he tells Marcus Fairs
KOUCH 2009
for Casamania Italia
arim Rashid lopes across the hotel lobby, extends a hand and starts talking. And boy, can he talk: Rashid, America’s most successful designer, has the biggest mouth in the business. “I tell you, before I opened my practice in New York, design was almost a nonsubject,” he says, speaking at about 100 miles an hour and sounding like a superhero who has single-handedly saved Americans from bad design. “I’ve made it a popular subject. I’ve gone through every shopping mall in America and I’ve spoken to everybody. And I’ve produced a lot of things that are incredibly successful. So I have changed America to a certain extent.” Now Rashid is aiming to do the same over here. He has just started working on his first UK projects - a hotel in Brighton and another at Paddington in London, both for the MyHotel boutique chain and the way he tells it, they’ll pretty much be the best hotels ever designed.
22 November 2010
“I’ve stayed in several thousand hotels,” he says, “and I have to say that 90% of them don’t work. But I have a kind of hyper-sensitivity to the way people move and behave and experience space, so the projects I’ve done have become pheno-menally successful.” Rashid’s prolific output almost matches the hyperbole. Karim Rashid Inc, his New York-based design practice, has churned out hundreds of objects, including perfume bottles for Issey Miyake, furniture for leading Italian manufacturers, electrical goods and even board games, clothes and fountain pens. His work - all sensual curves and bright colours - is instantly recognisable and has been variously described (by Rashid himself) as “sensual minimalism” and “blobjects”. Garbo, the voluptuous polypropylene wastepaper bin he designed in 1996, is one of the most successful designer objects of all time, with sales of over 2m. It seems Rashid can do anything: he recently released a CD and his website (karimrashid.com) informs that he can
be booked to DJ at parties. Recently he has branched into architecture, working on restaurants and buildings as well as hotels. But his greatest creation is himself: he’s 6ft 4ins and as slim as a basketball player, with the jewellery and tattoos of a hip-hop artist, Ali G sunglasses and a playboy’s white suit. (He has worn white every day since the year 2000 when, on a millennial whim, he gave his black wardrobe to charity; he now carries a bottle of stain remover at all times to keep his outfit pristine). Rashid was born in Cairo in 1960
A large conference and banquet hotel for nH Hoteles at the “Osthafen” in Berlin which holds 309 rooms, a conference centre, restaurants, and wellness areas. Architecture and design was created by Karim Rashid
and raised in Canada; his father is Egyptian and his mother from Yorkshire. Yet, despite his English roots, he is still largely unknown in this country. The design cognoscenti here tend to view his highly stylised design vocabulary and rampant ego with distaste. Rashid further irritated his critics a couple of years ago by producing a self-celebratory book titled I Want to Change the World. Rashid concedes that the title smacks of arrogance but reacts angrily to the accusation that he is a posturing stylist. “The design community itself has an inherent problem and that is a
thing called jealousy,” he says, insisting that his agenda is deeply serious: he believes that design is a tool than can improve the world. “Now if I was Eminem and I said, ‘I want to change the world’, then nobody would have a problem, but, in actual fact, the artist’s agenda is to change the world. A lot of the products I’ve designed have sold in millions, meaning that people like my work. So I don’t really need to be judged by the design community.” Last year in America, Rashid says, sales of home furnishings reached $220bn and outstripped sales of cloth-
ing for the first time in history, indicating the huge public appetite for design. He says he once calculated that, on average, each person interacts with around 520 designed objects each day. Yet he is frustrated at the lack of thought that goes into many of these objects and the lack of public debate on the importance of design. Bad design is letting society down, he believes. “Look, you know why I want to change the world? Look at that phone sitting in the corner there,” he says, pointing to the bog-standard telephone in the hotel lobby. “It’s a piece of shit. And not only is
23
it a piece of shit but, roughly since I was born, the line phone has not evolved. The handset still doesn’t fit properly into the cradle. Figure that one out. I was just in my room and every time, I realised my phone was off the hook because the handset didn’t wanna sit in the cradle. We should be seamless at this stuff by now, don’t you think? And that’s what I’m going to do, that’s my agenda. I’m trying to do something better.” Hotels seem to be a particular bugbear for Rashid. While in London, he’s staying at the Bloomsbury MyHotel and he’s not impressed. “You know, from the moment I wake up and I’m lying on a bed which has a stupid headboard, and I get up and go to the bathroom and brush my teeth and go through all the banalities of life, I think to myself, ‘We’re living in a world where people just accept what’s been designed for them; they accept conformity’.” He continues: “I’m 6ft 4ins and I’ve spent my whole life bumping into things and scarring myself. There’s a gym right next door to here and I was on the treadmill yesterday. When I ran I smacked my head on the ceiling. I can’t even have a good experience in the gym. So I want those things to be seamless.” In his new hotels, which are due to open late next year, Rashid promises to rethink everything from scratch. Most architects and interior designers, he says, treat hotel design as exercises in cladding. “They tend to think, ‘What shall I put on the walls?’ or ‘What should I use on the floor?’” Instead, Rashid, approaches it from the user’s point of view.
Gold Wedge 2009 for Melissa Shoes
Self-Heating Baby Bottle for iiamo
“When I design a room, I work from lying in the bed and moving outward, rather than architecturally considering the physicality of the building and the skin first then moving in. So I think there’s a big difference there. You’re putting somebody in a space - a pretty contrived and tight space - for a certain period of time. So you gotta bring something more to their lives.” Like what? “If I tell you that then someone is going to design and put out a hotel before me, so I won’t go into all the details. But a very obvious thing is that the space around you is not just about cool furniture, or about the right colour or the right carpet. The whole physical experience will be at ease. So, for example, there will be automated things in the bathroom; lights that are controlled via voice recognition; no sharp corners anywhere.” Rashid believes the boutique hotel phenomenon of the past few years is a reaction against the standardisation of experience that is the product of globalisation: hotels, shops and coffee bars are becoming the same around the world. “I drink the same Starbucks around the world; we’re becoming more desperate to have new experiences. The success of boutique hotels is about having a new experience.” But given his phenomenal output, Rashid is fast becoming a ubiquitous global brand himself. How long before every major city has a Karim Rashid hotel? “Yeah, that’s a good question, I don’t know,” he says. “We have to remember we have a big world - we have 6 billion people. So even if tomorrow we had 30 Karim Rashid interiors around the world, that’s only 30 interiors for 6 billion people.”
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26 Noviembre 2010
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Etiqueta
VOGUE magazine’s Italian edition is drawing criticism for its August photo shoot featuring models reclining on an oil-covered beach. The spread, entitled “Water and Oil” and shot by American photographer Steven Meisel, shows 24-year-old model Kristen McMenamy dressed in black designer gear, coated in oil and apparently playing dead. Other images show oil-covered feathered gloves designed to evoke images of real dead birds. The reaction on the magazine’s own website was mixed, with many disgusted by what they saw as a misguided attempt to draw attention to the major BP oil spill that
28 November 2010
devastated the Gulf of Mexico. One reader wrote, “Sick! Ask what the people in New Orleans think, and then you’ll have your answer.” Others, though, supported Vogue’s controversial photo spread. “I think anything that reminds us of what has happened in the Gulf is important. I LOVE this spread ... It arouses emotion and thoght and reminders of what we humans are doing to our earth ... Great Job by Vogue,” wrote one.
Artí PÁG. 5