Before we depart UnBeige HQ for a long weekend of fireworks, nationalistic cupcakes, and multiple viewings of Kieślowski's three colors trilogy, we wanted to leave you with something nice to look at: Fred Tomaselli's "Sept. 15, 2005" (2009), a gouache on printed watercolor paper. Think NYT on LSD. In her excellent feature on Tomaselli in the July issue of W, Julie Belcove describes the artist's recent "hallucinatory treatments of front pages from The New York Times" as "bold juxtapositions of cold reality and formal abstraction." For Tomaselli, they're a way of "talking back at the news."

The talking back began with doodling—on the Times' March 16, 2005 front-page photo of Bernard J. Ebbers, the disgraced former CEO of WorldCom, leaving a New York courthouse with his wife and a string of fraud convictions. "Even though he was a wretched man, I was touched by him holding hands with his wife," explains Tomaselli in W. "This sort of Paradise Lost seemed to have the relationship to paradises involved with taking LSD." The result was "Guilty" (2005), a trippy reimagining of the Ebbers' exodus. See more of Tomaselli's multilayered world next month, when the Aspen Art Museum mounts a mid-career survey of his two-dimensional works that will be on view through October 11 before traveling to Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum in 2010.

(Photo: Erma Estwick)

(Photos: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

What do you get when you combine America's History Channel-stoked fascination with all things World War II (admit it, you're not immune to the charms of grainy Hitler footage) with the burgeoning national pastime known as "scrapbooking"? Nazi Scrapbooks from Hell, a special that airs tomorrow night on the National Geographic channel. They had us at Nazi Scrapbooks. Sandwiched between episodes of The Dog Whisperer, the hour-long special provides a look into the photo album of SS officer Karl Höecker, the adjutant to the commandant at Auschwitz. Taken between May and December 1944, the chilling photos capture quotidian life at the concentration camp for Nazi officers and staff: relaxing on the terrace, eating blueberries, stopped mid-singalong by a sudden downpour. In its monstrous ordinariness, Höecker's scrapbook reveals the snapshot as an ideal medium for capturing the banality of evil.

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Admit it. Your seven-year-old nephew could out-HTML tag you any day and you think that a Cascading Style Sheet is something with a thread count. That's where the Mediabistro mothership comes in. They've asked us to tell you about the upcoming weekend course in HTML Fundamentals. Next month in New York City, artist, designer, and interactive developer David Tristman will teach you the basic structure of HTML and many commonly used tags as well as the role of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in HTML pages and current recommendations such as XHTML. By Sunday night, you'll be creating fully functional web pages and geeky birthday cakes like the one pictured above. Register here to get cooking with HTML.

Staying on celebrities for a minute, Architectural Digest cover model, Brad Pitt, has released a slew of new house designs for his Make It Right project which builds houses to replace those damaged or destroyed by the flooding in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina debacle (you might recall our post from a few years ago about the first round). Each of the new designs were created by 14 different firms ranging from Gehry Partners to a collaborator of Make It Right's from the start, William McDonough + Partners. There's information about each of the plans available on the project's site (though most of the firms just provide their bios, a few of links have information about the actual plans you're looking at), as well as a handful of photos and downloadable renderings and plans, to give you a closer look. Here's a quick description of the new buildings from over at Architectural Record:

Most of the new designs feature pared-down geometries that harmonize with traditional regional expression. Exceptions, such as the schematics created by buildingstudio and Graft, another longtime friend of MIR, take on a sleeker appearance, while MVRDV's splayed houses and the angular asymmetry of Pugh + Scarpa's design are more exuberant. For the most part, the designs sport flexible floor plans, forge a close relationship with street life, and integrate outdoor and landscaped spaces with architecture.

Returning to another story from days past: first, way back at the start of last year, we told you about a rumor that Sarah Jessica Parker's production company was planning a reality show/competition about the contemporary art world. Then, this April, we informed you about the Bravo network's upcoming "fill the void left by the departure of "Project Runway" lineup, which included Parker's then-titled "American Artist." Now, thanks to PSFK, we find that we can continue talking about this show's slow creep into existence with Bravo's release of an official casting call for the show (now without a title, only referred to as "The Untitled Art Project.") Casting starts a week from Saturday (the 11th) in Los Angeles then winds its way through Miami, Chicago, and New York until the middle of the month. With the announcement comes this description of who they're looking for:

How do you go from struggling, emerging or even semi-established artist to selling a complete show for $198 million? It's a big art world out there, but maybe this is one place to start!

...We want contemporary artists. Your medium could be one of many (or several of many) - painting, sculpture, installation, video, photography, mixed-media - we want voices that believe in their art and want the world to know.

This whole thing, as it inches forward, is like driving past a car wreck in super slow motion. We won't pass any serious judgement on the show until we've seen it, but the only way we see this thing being enjoyable is 1) get Damien Hirst to host it (that will help explain the "art is only for the money" angle) and 2) at the very end, when a winner is selected and they're given a big pile of money as their prize, The KLF jumps out from behind a curtain and sets fire to it.

Following up on a story we told you about back in early January, the clothing company Benetton has either picked the worst time or the best time to unveil the shortlist of their Designing in Teheran architecture competition, which will result in two new towers being built in Iran's central city. Three finalists were selected for each of the two buildings (so six in total) and each of the shortlisted design are certainly stunning (Bustler has a huge collection of them all on one page), but given the recent activity in Iran, no matter how much additional press they can syphon of for themselves because of that recent focus on the country, does Benetton really want to a) step into an extremely unstable area where foreigners from the west aren't looked upon very highly at the moment (in at least half the country) or b) be seen as "the company who opened up a shop so Iranians could get right down to what they're desperately wanting right now: expensive shirts"? The whole thing seems a little wonky in the logic department. But hey, we're writing about the company for the second time this year, so good or bad, we guess the PR is working.

The people have spoken, and they liked the old Hartford Courant, before the paper's hasty redesign last summer in the wake of significant staff cuts. And the paper has listened, reverting to the traditional horizontal placement of the nameplate and scrapping the wee ".com" that the redesign had appended. "The horizontal nameplate really gives us more flexibility for story play and more variety from day to day," Melanie Shaffer, design director at the Courant, told Poynter Online's Sara Dickenson Quinn. "(The vertical nameplate) just started to seem a little limited—not a lot of options for how to play the page."

In an online poll described by Jeff Levine, the Courant's new senior vice president and director of content, as "not scientific," readers were asked to weigh in on three possible front-page designs, including one liberally accented with a hue that we'd describe as "USA Today Blue." Almost 95% of readers favored a return to a more traditional layout. Many respondents used the poll to provide additional feedback to the paper, weighing on issues ranging from the positioning of features, local news, and Dilbert (a staple of the business page) to the reformatted TV listings. More than one commenter mentioned the Titanic and deck chairs. "The masthead is the least of your worries!" advised commenter Al. "You should concern yourself about the paper's content—ever since you featured a front-page article on Outhouses, your paper has gone downhill."

"I have always been interested in finding that place where it's not narrative anymore. Narrative tells you what to think. I'm trying to create an image of my truth that other people will look at and say, 'Oh, that looks real. I know that.' I just maybe take it a little further."

-Artist Marilyn Minter

Pictured at left, Minter's "Bubbleface" (2009)

In probing interviews, she reminds the world just how much design matters. She wrote the book on how to think like a great graphic designer. And now, it's official: UnBeige favorite Debbie Millman is the president of AIGA. She replaces outgoing president Sean Adams, who will remain involved in an ex officio role. Millman's three-year term begins today, as do those of four other newly elected AIGA board members: Julie Beeler (Second Story Interactive Studios), AIGA treasurer Zia Khan (Lucid Partners), James Koval (VSA Partners), and Angela Shen-Hsieh (Visual i|o). Additionally, three board members will begin positions to finish the incomplete terms of former directors: Shelley Evenson (Carnegie Mellon University), Louise Sandhaus (California Institute of the Arts), and Lynda Weinman (lynda.com). They'll all be working toward AIGA's new mandate—"to advance designing as a professional craft, strategic tool, and vital cultural force"—as the organization approaches its centennial in 2014. Check out the below video from last month's AIGA Leadership Retreat in Portland, where Adams passed the baton to Millman. Note that the baton was metaphorical, but were it literal, it would be one well-designed baton.

We've covered a little bit of that "video games as art" movement from time to time, that desire in the industry to try to make games more emotionally touching, like films often have the ability to do. Now comes an interesting piece about Jason Rohrer, perhaps one of the most well-known of the movement thanks to Passage, the self-financed game he designed and constructed that deals with life and death (and has made a lot of people cry according to more than one blog post we've run across in our time -- unfortunately, this writer isn't much of a gamer, so he just found the whole thing a little boring, much like real life, we suppose). After remaining fiercely independent for years, living a very pastoral existence, Rohrer has announced that he's signed on with an ad agency to make interactive campaigns. Again, as we aren't really gamers, we wonder if this is like your favorite band selling out and appearing in a Noxzema commercial and all the die-hard fans suddenly turn away. Though with the gaming industry, isn't 99.9% of it commercial and the weird thing was to turn away from that? We suppose it's something for the collective who live and breathe games to discuss and ultimately pass judgement on. Fortunately, for the rest of us, there's this great interview with Rohrer at Edge Online about his decisions and what exactly it means for him. Here's a bit about the chief reasons:

I was saying "no" to most of the offers that came along, finding some ethical grounds to say that in each case. But I got to this point where I’m now thirty and I have two children. Over the past year I've had a patron, but he only supports people for two years, so I've been thinking: how am I going to pay for my children's college and things? So I've switched my policy, and started saying "yes" to everything.

All in all, from an outsider looking in, it's all very interesting and we're curious to follow how it will all play out.

Some fun bits of funny from our sister blog Agency Spy who found this series of very humorous reactions to the Cannes Grand Prix-winning campaign for Wrangler by the agency Fred & Farid and photographer Ryan McGinley. The campaign itself features half-naked attractive people in nighttime, woodsy locations, looking like they were captured by a Nature camera crew, with a small tag running on both the print ads and their commercials, "We Are Animals." It's certainly not the worst pieces of advertising we've ever seen, and some of the photographs are stellar, but we have to agree with the Grand Prix-winning-reaction images Agency Spy posted, which features one heading on Flickr to cover all of the subtly altered photos: "Seriously?" To make things worse, we found this quote by one of the jurors:

David Lubars, the president of the Cannes Lions press jury, said the campaign had won because the idea could work globally to change the US-centric view of the Wrangler brand.

"It is a very emotional campaign, you can see how it can go into all kinds of areas," added Lubars. "The theme is we are animals, a very primal, sexual approach. Before the brand was about middle-aged cowboy jeans from America. Now it takes a whole different look overnight."

Thanks for explaining the theme for us. Otherwise we would have had to read the explanatory tag line and the main thrust of the whole campaign to understand it. Did the jury of this "best of the best in advertising" award also like that the pictures were in color? And maybe we're stepping out of bounds here, but no matter how many slithery, sexy teens you throw at it, how does a company like Wrangler move away from its "middle-aged cowboy" roots while closing their spots and tagging their print ads with a very "middle-aged cowboy" logo?

Perhaps as a way of gloating in front of Prince Charles by essentially saying there's nothing he can do to touch the 2012 London Olympics' architecture plans, or maybe just to try and patch up some of the "Does the UK have an architectural future?" talk after all the bad blood from that same fiasco, a large group of architects, including the recently-angry Richard Rogers, took a tour of the ongoing construction on the Olympic grounds, resulting in this video and lots of comments about how great architecture in England is right now:

Lord Richard Rogers said: 'The new Olympic Park will be a fantastic place and will help to regenerate east London. The designs show exciting sculptural form and will enhance the landscape.'

Joanna Averley, Deputy Chief Executive of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment said: 'Seeing the project at this stage is an amazing celebration of British engineering, as well as British architecture -- particularly the Olympic Stadium, Aquatics Centre and Velodrome, which will provide a lasting legacy for London.'

Starbucks, the ubiquitous coffee chain who has struggled this past little while now that not as many people find spending five dollars every morning on coffee mixed with milk, have decided, along with their recent moves to make their offerings more healthy, to update their image a bit on the aesthetics and ethics fronts by heading in the LEED-certified direction. They'll be redoing many of their company-owned shops with all sorts of green initiatives and building new ones from here on out using these new approaches from the start. We think it's great that they're moving toward being more green and that local contractors will be getting new work, but is a massively expensive undertaking like this the thing for a company during a major financial crisis? We're not economists, so we don't know how to answer our own questions, of course, so while we sit back and try to do the math, here's a bit about the new shops:

While the new store designs are highly interpretive, they share several core characteristics, including use of local materials and craftsmanship, a focus on reused and recycled elements, exposure of structural integrity and authentic roots, a focus on coffee and removal of unnecessary distractions, customer engagement through all five senses, and flexibility to meet the needs of many customer types -- individual readers and computer users, as well as work, study and social groups.

She travels the globe with a massive library of art books and translates fashion designers' eclectic seasonal inspirations ("Blade Runner meets Lord Byron!" "Diana Vreeland on safari!") into influential catwalk makeup, but who knew Pat McGrath was a video game fan? The renowned makeup artist helped to conceptualize Fashion Week Live, a video game franchise now being developed by 505 Games in partnership with entertainment and media company IMG. Slated to debut next year on platforms ranging from the Nintendo Wii to the iPhone, the games will allow players "to enter the world of high fashion at Fashion Week, with a true insider's point of view," according to an IMG press release. "Games will feature world-class industry gurus, top models, and the star-studded runways of Fashion Week events worldwide." And 505 knows something about playing dress-up. Among a new line of games the company developed for the Discovery Kids network is Pony Paradise, which allows kids to "Get stylin' in the stable! Wash and groom your pet pony—add accessories, too!" Where were innovations like this during our childhood, when we had to try out equine smoky eye and nude lip combos on real ponies?

While we can't be sure that our Diet Coke purchasing experience would be significantly improved by a 46-inch LCD touch screen, Flash technology, motion graphics, high-definition video, and Bluetooth capabilities, the thusly enhanced Coca-Cola vending machine (at right) won a Gold Lion in the design/point of sale category at the 2009 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. The souped-up machine, which debuted last year at the Beijing Olympics, was designed by Miami-based Sapient Interactive. Here's hoping that as the machines are rolled out, they'll be manufactured in a hue other than the bland, industrial gray we associate with shady ATM machines and old-school Casio graphing calculators. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola also picked up a Gold Lion in the viral advertising category, for the YouTube hit Signs, a short film for Schweppes directed by Patrick Hughes for Publicis Mojo of New Zealand. We've posted the charming video, which makes us crave a fresh Sharpie Magnum 44, after the jump.

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