Above: Rendering of JetBlue's new Terminal 5 at JFK. Courtesy Gensler.

What do you get when you combine JetBlue, Eero Saarinen's landmark TWA flight center, and $750 million? Find out on Wednesday, July 30, when the Museum of the City of New York sponsors "Spotlight on Design: New York's Airports," a discussion that promises a sneak preview of JetBlue's new terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport—and its dazzling incorporation into Saarinen's landmark building—weeks before it opens to beleaguered air travelers. Hear about the challenges and creative potential for redesigning New York City's airports from speakers Richard Smyth, vice president of JetBlue, who is in charge of the new JFK JetBlue terminal; David Z. Plavin, consultant and former president of Airports Council International-North America; William R. DeCota, director of aviation for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; and Jeff Zupan, a senior fellow for transportation at the Regional Plan Association. While we can't promise that there will be blue tortilla chips, we can offer free admission to the event when you make advance reservations and mention UnBeige. To reserve your spot, call (212)534-1672, ext. 3395, or e-mail programs@mcny.org.

The iPhone continues its sweep of design laurels, adding a 2008 International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) to its sleek, milky white trophy case. BusinessWeek and the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) have announced the 34 other Gold award winners along with 77 Silver and 93 Bronze award winners chosen from 1,517 entries received. For the first time in the competition's history, 389 finalists have been named in addition to the winners, and the eseteemed jury named two designs "Best in Show": the iPhone (natch) and SizeChina, a design research project that created the first-ever digital database of Chinese head and face shapes. Something tells us that a SizeChina iPhone application is in the works.

Other IDEA08 Gold winners include the National World War I Museum designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, noted by juror Barbara Flanagan for its use of "emotional drama—theatrical lighting, poignant artifacts, plenty of dirt—to elicit the ethical questions we keep forgetting to ask." The sole Gold winner in the personal acccessories category was the SENZ XL storm umbrella, an asymmetrical golf umbrella that is windproof up to 70 MPH. Other Gold winners included a welding helmet that automatically darkens to protect the wearer's eyes, the ingenious but difficult to describe EVA Solo trash bin, and the book Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design.

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We've always thought of artist and writer Steve Ditko as the Brit Hadden to Stan Lee's Henry Luce. Now a new book spotlights the reclusive co-creator of Spider-Man who abandoned Spidey, Doctor Strange, and mainstream success to chronicle the adventures of such characters as Mr. A, an Ayn Rand-inspired character of his own creation. Blake Bell's Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Fantagraphics) is a coffee table book retrospective of Ditko's career in 14 chapters, from his youth in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and 1950 arrival in New York City through his time at Marvel and subsequent fallings out with both Marvel and DC Comics and ultimate dedication to work fueled by Objectivism.

Ken Tucker's review of Strange and Stranger in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly highlights the unique style Ditko established in the early 1960s with The Amazing Spider-Man: "expressive, shoebox-shaped faces; long, tapered fingers with meticulously penciled knuckles; rubbery arms and legs. These visual tics gave Spider-Man a distinctive look. Where other superheroes were chunks of muscle, Spidey was an elegantly elastic figure." And hard-core comics fans still can't get enough. Comic-Con International, which opened today in San Diego, on Saturday evening features both a "World of Steve Ditko" panel and a screening of the 2007 documentary In Search of Steve Ditko. Bell will be on hand to sign copies of his book at the Fantagraphics booth throughout the convention.

Maybe it's because it's been a very long week thus far, or we're picking up that you've been enjoying this string of moving pictures we've been offering up lately, but here's another clip we ran across and enjoyed (albeit on a far more "just for fun" basis). It's a local, Chicago-made clip (we believe) in the vein of those other "What if..." films that have circulated around from time to time, making designers everywhere groan and say, as if in some 1980s comedy club, "Oh, it's so true! It's so true!"

Ordinarily, this writer could care less about what Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are naming their children (because clearly this writer is an elitist, anti-American snob). But occasionally Pitt somehow slips his head into the UnBeige venn diagram and we are all but helpless to avoid including him. So the story this time around is that one of their new kids, a boy named Knox, is apparently named after "an obscure designer called Archibald Knox," who worked in making products out of silver and pewter and who Pitt got really into over a decade ago. Huh. This proves, once again, what a big design nerd Brad Pitt truly is (and also provides impetus for this writer to say that again because it makes him feel better about himself).

Last week, when Stephanie was rounding up all the talk over the New Yorker's controversial Obama cover, for which we're sure you're beyond familiar with by now, we assumed correctly that that noise off in the distance was people revving their engines to come up with parodies. And by now, you've likely seen the dozen or so that have been passed around over and over again. But none have come from from a source so close to the New Yorker, than that from their building neighbor, Vanity Fair, who offered up this parody showing an geriatric McCain and a drug-addicted Cindy. The reviews have been mixed, from "eh" to "hilarious!" but the commentary we enjoyed the most came from Daniel Larson who clearly has a polished satire radar and complained that Vanity Fair just wasn't understanding the original piece at all, because everything in the Obama cover was poking at falsehoods, whereas everything in the fake McCain version is almost completely true:

As a caricature, it works quite well. As a parody of an image that is supposed to be mocking absurd claims about the Obamas, it completely fails...

Can a bunch of birthday cake-smeared five-year-olds distinguish between the "real" SpongeBob SquarePants and a convincing lookalike, say, AbsorBert AngularTrousers? Probably not, but intellectual property lawyers can, and that's a real problem for parents seeking favorite—and trademark-protected—cartoon characters to entertain at their children's birthday parties. The Wall Street Journal devoted yesterday's A-Hed to the story, focusing on the costume industry's strategies to avoid lawsuits.

"I try to make my costumes look 40% different," Florida costume company owner Leslie Ann Hooker told the WSJ. "I don't have SpongeBob. I have SquishyGuy." Alas, Hooker recently threw in the towel (we're betting it was yellow and affixed with giant googly eyes). Fearful of lawsuits, she renamed her company and is now exclusively focused on marketing "her self-created band of environmentally conscious super heroes." Other companies are hanging in there, but capturing the essence of a trademarked character with a homemade costume is not easy:

Miriam Sorkin, an office manager in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., threw a fourth-birthday party for her daughter in May and arranged for a costumed impersonator of Dora the Explorer. Though the walk-about "Dora" had the expected pageboy haircut and backpack, her expression was blank and her legs appeared out of proportion to the rest of her body. "When Dora came out," Mrs. Sorkin says, "none of the kids would go to Dora, including my daughter, and a few of the kids started crying."

Concerned about the fate of the art market? What about the art collectors market? We'll be better able to assess the latter after tomorrow evening, when the SCOPE Hamptons art fair kicks off with an auction not of paintings or prints but of art collectors themselves. The first ever "Collector Mentorship Auction" will put up for bid an hour of art mentorship from seasoned collectors, including Beth Rudin DeWoody, Melva Bucksbaum, Adam Lindemann, and Bob Colacello. All of the collectors are donating their time to mentor less experienced art enthusiasts, and the proceeds will benefit the two projects currently backed by the SCOPE Foundation: The Girl Project and The Arctic Circle Project.

The Ho-Am Prize is kind of like the Nobel Prize, if the Nobel Prize was funded by Samsung and exclusively for Koreans. Established in 1990 and named for Samsung's founder, Ho-Am Prizes are awarded annually to high-achieving Koreans in five fields: science, engineering, medicine, the arts, and community service. For the first time, the Ho Am Prize in the arts has been awarded to an architect, Kyu Sung Woo, principal of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Kyu Sung Woo Architects.

Woo's completed projects in the United States include the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas; the Heller School at Brandeis University; and the Arts of Korea Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among his current projects is the new 1.4 million-square-foot Asian Culture Complex in Gwangju, Korea. At a ceremony last month in Seoul, Woo was presented with a gold medal, laureate diploma, and check for 200 million Korean won (about $200,000), joining the ranks of Ho-Am arts laureates past, including painter Lee Ufan and video artist Nam-June Paik.

In case you're boycotting the business section to stave off recession depression, we wanted to relay the glad tidings that led off Richard Pérez-Peña's recent New York Times profile of Condé Nast chairman Samuel I. "Si" Newhouse (pictured at right, pixellated by Lacie Argyle into hundreds of tiny magazine covers): the magazine magnate knows his kerning!

When the wizards at Condé Nast Publications recently marched a pre-press issue of Brides magazine through an in-house review, Si Newhouse...wondered aloud whether a few of the letters on the cover were a tad too close together.

As it turned out, they were.

A meeting of the minds in this one, as we combine soon-to-be Mr. RISD John Maeda, Philip Johnson's Glass House, and the always cool Cool Hunting, all in just a single video. Maeda was out there in rural Connecticut visiting the famous architecture spot for a conference and there happened to be a crew following him, tracking his every move as he talked about the house. But we need say no more. Enjoy:

We are not in the business of passing judgment on people, but there is nothing to stop us from enjoying it from afar. Such is the case with this short post over on Airbag, which we were pointed to by way of Andy Rutledge. It's about the failing of PodTech, an internet startup who was given oodles of venture capital money, but spent hardly anything on design or branding, which their celebrity employee, one Mr. Robert Scobble, said wasn't a very important thing to care about at all. So the Airbag piece is something of a "oh really?!" sort of response to this lack of design understanding, which we enjoyed mightily and hope you will too.

Elsewhere in the world of big projects over in the UK, things still aren't going so hot for Wolff Olins' controversial 2012 Olympics logo. According to Brand Republic, the Chartered Institute of Marketing has conducting a survey of advertising and marketing people about the branding, 57% of whom found that it "is not an effective design" and among those there were 30% who "feel strongly that it is ineffective." Granted, these people are in the industry, not members of the general public, so they automatically feel like they're experts on what they're talking about, and, like the reason you sequester juries, they were all undoubtedly highly familiar with all of the uproar last year when the logo was unveiled, so take the beating of an already-injured horse for what it's worth. Still, if you're at Wolff Olins, as well as on the Olympic planning board, you have to be pretty sick of this constant negative press. But don't worry too badly, dear Wolff people. It'll all be over in four years.

Checking in for one last time on the London Festival of Architecture, which packed up and finished off this past Sunday, the event's planners are apparently pretty pleased with the turnout. According to Building, more than 250,000 people attended the hundreds of events associated with the festival, from the outdoor, temporary structures, to the exhibitions, to the conferences and lectures, making it, by far, both the largest and most popular architecture fest on the planet (assuming, of course, that there aren't any merpeople celebrating feats of building deep within the sea). Here's a bit from the guy who put it all together, Peter Murray:

"Architecture is now at the forefront of the cultural agenda, and the festival has show that it is an essential consideration for the many rather than a specialist interest for the few," said festival director Murray.

He added that many areas within London and organisations not included this year have been asking to be involved in the next of the biennial festivals in 2010.

It's the "Summer of the Bicycle" in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, but no way was the hometown of the design academies of design academies going to settle for pedaling drowsily up and down the Lichtplein. Instead, they erected a roller-coaster for bikes, out of used wooden scaffolding no less (watch out for splinters...and imminent death!). The "sensational roller coaster for daring bikers" was conceptualized and nailed together by artist Lagombra (a.k.a. Anders Jakobsen) and is a project of the MU Art Center, which is sponsoring its exhibit amidst office buildings through July 27, which overlaps with Friday's European Championship for bike couriers, also in Eindhoven. MU invites helmet-wearing and "experienced mountain bikers and BMXers to come and master the track," at your own risk, of course. And that's just the beginning of the dangerous fun! Also on view is "Fundamentals," an exhibition about the "legal and less legal ways of using our playgrounds." And to think we've always considered jumping off of moving swings daring!