AIGA/NY 30th Anniversary posters designed by SpotCo, Bobby C. Martin Jr., and Paula Scher.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of AIGA/NY, tireless uniter of the New York City design community and booster of the design profession nationwide. The organization is marking the milestone with a series of jumbo birthday cards: commemorative posters created by design stars. Michael Bierut, Ivan Chermayeff, and Matteo Bologna are among the 30 designers who were up to the task. Debbie Millman contributed one of her signature text paintings that features the names of AIGA/NY board members—all 30 years worth of them. Meanwhile, Paula Scher was thinking pink in an Empire State of mind, Ken Carbone serves up a New York pizza slice with AIGA in pepperoni, and for dessert, there’s delicious cookies from SpotCo (mind the cookie rat). Check out of all of the 30th Anniversary Series posters on Etsy, where they are for sale in limited editions of 100. We suggest ponying up some birthday money to own of ten signed pieces per artist.

Create a social media strategy and learn from the biggest names in social media in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Jen Brown (TODAY.com), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

In this episode of “Cubes,” we tour the worldwide headquarters of IPG Mediabrands, the media holding company responsible for $34 billion in global revenue from advertising agencies such as Universal McCann. IPG’s work includes the Geico Gecko and Volkswagen’s pint-sized Darth Vader.

The IPG headquarters is home to a cutting edge media lab full of “Minority Report”-esque marketing technology, and the office includes a high-tech workspace dubbed “the desk of the future” and a skyway stretching 10 stories above the street that was once used by the Gimbels department story, the building’s previous tenant.

For more mediabistroTV videos, check out our YouTube channel, and be sure to follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV

Sure, UnBeige is published online, but we actually compose all of our posts on a pair of candy apple red Olivetti typewriters before turning them over to Eero, our technology-savvy web monkey, who somehow beams them into cyberspace (he also handles all of our links). Now Eero tells us that UnBeige and the rest of the mediabistro.com blog family have joined the future with mobile-optimized sites that are easily browsable on your iPhone, Blackberry, or other smartphone. Should you routinely carry one of these gizmos on your person, you need only type unbeige.com into the browser to be automatically redirected to our mobile-friendly page. Problems reading UnBeige on the go? Drop us an e-mail.

This week, Boston.com is hiring an interactive graphic designer, while Meredith needs an assistant art director. Financial Times is looking for a senior web designer, and Norma Jean Roy is on the hunt for a senior retoucher. Get the scoop below, and find more just-posted gigs on mediabistro.com.

• Interactive Graphic Designer Boston.com (Boston, MA)
• Assistant Art Director Meredith (New York, NY)
• Senior Web Designer Financial Times (New York, NY)
• Senior Retoucher Norma Jean Roy (New York, NY)
• Senior Mobile Design/Art Director avVenta (New York, NY)

For more job listings, go to the Mediabistro job board, and to post a job, visit our employer page. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

Can you hear me, Major Tom? The instructions that greet visitors to Tom Sachs’ “Space Program: Mars,” which lifts off today at the Park Avenue Armory. (Photo: UnBeige)

• Design Hunting is now on newsstands, just in time for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair. The new stand-alone home design title from the publishers of New York magazine and tireless design huntress (and New York design editor) Wendy Goodman is stuffed with lush photos of eye-popping dwellings—from a dentist’s office-turned-studio to an indoor treehouse—as well as advice from industry experts and a handy-dandy guide to NYC design resources. Three versions of the cover (red, yellow, and blue), photographed by Hannah Whitaker, are being randomly distributed.

• The Society of Illustrators will add eight members to its illustrious (ha!) hall of fame this year. The eight artists to be recognized for their “distinguished achievement in the art of illustration” are contemporary illustrators R.O. Blechman, John Collier, and Nancy Stahl, along with posthumous honorees Ludwig Bemelmans, Edward Gorey, and John Sloan. Elected by former presidents of the Society, the hall of fame recipients will be honored at a dinner and induction ceremony on June 22.

• The New York Photo Festival kicks off this evening with a opening preview and a reception featuring a guest set by DJ Spooky, who is contributing “Dumbo ice floes” to the festival as part of his Book of Ice-themed project (in October, he starts a year-long residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Other must-see exhibitions include curator Glenn Ruga‘s “On the Razor’s Edge: Between Documentary and Fine Art Photography,” which features the work of Bruce Davidson, Reza, Platon, Rina Castelnuovo, and Eugene Richards. The festival opens to the public tomorrow.

As the go-to guide for seven-day snapshots of local arts and events listings, Time Out Chicago boasts service-oriented stories that help urban explorers find the best ways to spend their free time.

And if you’re a freelance photographer, TimeOutChicago.com is wide open for those looking to add to their portfolios. The site gets over 3 million page views a month and features lots of photo galleries that speak to the mag’s cultural core.

“We have the broadest, most in-depth cultural coverage of Chicago of any media outlet and the largest cultural reporting team in the city, so if it’s about Chicago culture, we’d like to hear about it,” said editor-in-chief Frank Sennett. “Our target readership is anybody who actively consumes culture in the city of Chicago, people who are going out and doing things. They tend to be people in the city, but it could be anybody who wants to go out and do something fun.”

For editor contacts and more details on breaking in, read How To Pitch: Time Out Chicago.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, you can register for as little as $55 a year and get access to these articles, discounts on seminars and workshops, and more.

Marina Abramović and OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu with a model of the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (Photo: OMA / Loren Wohl)

Artist Marina Abramović began her Met Gala Monday in Queens, inside MoMA PS1′s geodesic Performance Dome, where she detailed her plans to transform a crumbling old theater in Hudson, New York into the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation for Performance Art (MAI for short). Hours later, having sharpened up her all-black ensemble, she was striding up the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of the Art on the arm of James Franco. “Today is a big day for me,” she told the morning assembly of press, curators, critics, and friends after a warm introduction by PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach. “In the life of an artist, it’s very important to think of the future. When you die, you can’t leave anything physical—that doesn’t make any sense—but a good idea can last a long, long time.”

Her good idea is to channel 40 years worth of pioneering performance art into a living archive-cum-laboratory that will explore “time-based and immaterial art,” including performance, dance, theater, film, video, opera, and music. The focus will be on “long-duration” performances, those lasting for between six hours and…forever. “Only long-duration works of art have a serious potential to change the viewer looking at it and also the performer in doing it, because the performance that is long becomes more and more like life itself,” she said. “There’s no division between normal daily activity and the performance. This is what I experienced especially at my [2010] performance at MoMA, which was three months long. That really changed me mentally, physically, in many other ways.”

(Rendering: OMA)

Abramović commissioned OMA to transform the crumbling theatre that she acquired in 2007 into a space for training artists and audiences alike. “It has an interesting level of decay,” said OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu, pointing out a rotted column and ghostly baselines from the building’s post-theater incarnation as an indoor tennis court. “The project has to house a very specific program of long-duration performance, so the first thing we decided to do was insert a very monastic box inside that can house many things. It’s actually slightly bigger than the tennis court, so you can still play tennis if you wanted to.”
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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.com mothership comes in. They’ve asked us to tell you about the upcoming online course in HTML fundamentals. Over four fun-filled weeks, web design design guru Laura Galbraith will guide you through a variety of web page production techniques, from column-based layouts and search engine optimization to semantic markup and advanced CSS styles. The online learning fun begins Thursday, May 31, and by Independence Day you’ll have brought a pre-designed webpage to life through the magic of HTML. Preview the course syllabus and register here.

Remember those commercials featuring Zack the Legomaniac? His real-world, adult equivalents are known as LEGO Certified Professionals, a designation that only a dozen people worldwide have achieved. One of them is Adam Reed Tucker, a Chicago architect-turned-“architectural artist” that now builds exclusively with tiny plastic bricks. “Working with my hands, creating art and sculpture, the freedom to create and explore my own vision of design without computer reliance, and to share architecture with the world all made this a natural move for me,” he says. “I wanted to work on ways to inspire and motivate those familiar with architectural elements and those with no design knowledge at all.”

Tucker is to thank for the LEGO Architecture product line, launched in 2008 with kits devoted to the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center. He’s also the tireless brickbuilder behind “LEGO Architecture: Towering Ambition,” on view through September 3 at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Tucker’s 15 globe-spanning LEGO landmarks (including the Empire State Building, Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Fallingwater, and the Burj Khalifa) recently got some new neighbors, as the museum welcomed LEGO versions of 15 Central Park West (downsized by its original designers, Robert A.M. Stern Architects) and a couple of hometown favorites: a Metro station (ZGF Architects) and a traditional center hall colonial home (Gulick Group). Total brick count on the three models? 77,000. This weekend, Tucker returns to the museum to put the finishing touches on his LEGO White House. Stop by between noon and 4 p.m. on Saturday or Sunday to join in the architectural fun. Can’t make it to Our Nation’s Capital? Build your own LEGO White House (considerably smaller than the museum version) with this 560-piece kit. No word as to whether the gift shop also sells a LEGObama figure to place inside.

“Calvin actually once said to me that he never looked back. I think it’s probably the genius about him. I try not to look back. I try not to look in the archives or at stuff I’ve done. I think it’s so much more interesting what’s to come. I never consider myself a minimalist. But another word is reductionist, and that’s something I’m beginning to understand….What bothers me about the term minimalist is that it is so connected with a distinct period. It links me to the past. But I design for today. I’m a book freak. I’m buying five, six, seven books a week. I just want to feed myself. So I start with a lot—millions of pictures, millions of fabrics, millions of colors. Then as I work, it starts to be reduced and I pin the things that are relevant up. So, yes, those words carry a lot of weight and I don’t want them to be misrepresented, but I try not to associate myself with terminology. I want to be free to some extent.”

-Francisco Costa, women’s creative director at Calvin Klein Collection, interviewed by art photographer Ryan McGinley in this month’s issue of Interview with a stunning portfolio by Patrick Demarchelier. Click below to watch the fall 2012 Calvin Klein Collection runway show.
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