Martha Stewart recently sat down with Bravo’s Andy Cohen for an on-stage chat at New York’s 92nd Street Y. We sent Nancy Lazarus to glean lifestyle lessons from the indefatigable 71-year-old, whose latest book, Living the Good Long Life (Clarkson Potter), is “a practical guide to caring for yourself and others.”

Martha Stewart has been called a lifestyle mogul, domestic guru, and design maven. Whether making a stylish court appearance to testify in the contentious Macy’s-versus-JCPenney case or dishing about her recent foray into online dating, she creates intrigue wherever she goes.

She didn’t disappoint her devotees attending New York’s 92Y event last week. Andy Cohen, Bravo’s development and talent EVP, interviewed Stewart on assorted topics and fielded several audience queries. Below are selected “mottos” that Martha lives and works by. Since she’s so organized, we’ve outlined them as a numbered list (print, laminate, and save!). While the principles are straightforward, adopting them for one’s everyday life might be another matter entirely.

1. “Use your homes as your laboratories.” She brought back hanging nasturtiums from the Himalayas to reproduce in her greenhouse. Her favorite residence is Skylands, a 1925 Mission-style granite house in Maine.

2. For decorating, “edit and put together a home that reflects your own style.” Conversely, she warned not to “over-reach and copy others’ designs, or you may miss the point.”

3. When entertaining, “plan ahead and stay in your comfort zone.” Make place cards and menu cards with unique typefaces for guests to take home. Ask about food intolerances and serve familiar recipes. Her favorite is borscht made with beets from her garden.

4. Be conscious of the environment. For example, she uses white birch logs when making a fire, since they burn cleanly.

5. Embrace social media, which means updating Facebook pages, Instagram photos, Pinterest pins, and tweets. Not that anyone’s counting, but she has 2.8 million Twitter followers to Cohen’s 1.1 million.

6. Have multiple electronic devices, and be adept at using them. How does she define multiple? She has two Blackberries, one iPhone, two iPads, and a Sony tablet.
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Code and Theory is a creative agency behind publishing websites like “The Verge,” and “Interview” magazine. They also have an odd fondness for the Dewey Decimal System.

Managing partners Steve Baer and Mike Treff took the mediabistroTV crew on an Olde Timey New York meets modern design tour of their fifth floor offices on the corner of Prince and Broadway. The guys showed how they added wide open spaces, planned randomness and hip wood floors to the windows, the wood and the brick that originally came with the building built by the Astor family in 1886. Then there were the books, the many, many, many books.

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Susan Sellers, founding partner and creative director of New York-based design consultancy 2×4, is moving on up, to the East Side, where on Monday, June 24, she’ll begin her new role as head of design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In overseeing the museum’s department of design, Sellers will lead a cadre of specialists–in installation, graphic, and lighting design–that attend to everything from signage and printed materials to exhibitions and gallery installations.

Sellers, who is also senior critic in graphic design at Yale School of Art, comes to the Met with extensive experience working with museums. 2×4 has developed graphic identities for the likes of PS1 and the Brooklyn Museum, and Sellers has cultivated the studio’s approach to brand identity for museums and public institutions including the Guggenheim, Longwood Gardens, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She has also designed exhibitions for clients such the Guggenheim and the Storefront for Art and Architecture–as well as Nike and Prada. “Her design work is both elegant and strategic,” noted Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Campbell in a statement announcing Sellers’ appointment, “and I look forward to having her develop a design vision for the Met that speaks to the museum’s diverse collections and audiences.”

The UnBeige summer cottage lacks a proximal beach, pool, swimming hole, pond, or water feature of any sort, and yet we’ve long craved this inner tube in the form of a donut (complete with sprinkles and a notched “bite”) for its resemblance to a work by Kenny Scharf. And so imagine our delight upon learning that the Whitney Museum was cooking up some summer treats with the artist himself. With this pair of exclusive-to-the-Whitney-Shop products, art lovers can float their cares away on a whimsical yet possibly demonic inflatable pool toy–inspired by a Scharfian scheme for an unrealized public art project–and then dry off with the beach towel, nearly six feet of colorful cotton printed with Scharf’s 2008 painting “Introducing…. The Hot Dog.”

Don’t mess with a man who has cyclonic suction on his side. James Dyson‘s global empire of highly engineered, sleekly designed sucking and blowing devices is taking on its chief competitor for the U.S. marketplace–in court. Dyson Inc. claims that Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Bissell Homecare Inc. has been falsely advertising its range of (less expensive) upright vacuums as containing technology that “captures over 99.9 percent” of allergens. Dyson has long boasted that its machines are singular in their “constant powerful suction, high dust removal, the ability to capture allergens, expel cleaner air, do not have dusty bags to empty and are certified asthma & allergy friendly by the Asthma & Allergy Foundation of America.” The company has gone so far as to trademark the phrase “asthma & allergy friendly.”

Dyson commissioned independent lab testing of the rival vacs and surveyed watery-eyed, sniffling consumers, while Bissell tried to clear the air by affixing stickers to its machines in an attempt to clarify that the ragweed and pollen trapping was actually done by filters, not the machines themselves. Dyson didn’t blink (or sneeze, for that matter) and is pressing its case in U.S. district court in Illinois. Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan cleared the way for the case to proceed in a summary judgment issued Friday. Will Dyson’s lawyers blow away the defense team? Will Bissell choke on its promises of wallet-friendly vacuums that improve respiratory health? Will the arguments of both sides suck? Stay tuned, floorcare fans.

This week, Medallion Retail is hiring an art director, while KTVU needs a design director. Agora, Inc. is seeking a graphic designer, and the Children’s Tumor Foundation is on the hunt for a graphic designer, as well. Get the scoop on these openings and more below, and find additional just-posted gigs on Mediabistro.

• Art Director Medallion Retail (New York, NY)
• Design Director KTVU (Oakland, CA)
• Graphic Designer Agora, Inc. (Delray Beach, FL)
• Graphic Designer Children’s Tumor Foundation (New York, NY)
• Photography Producer Wonderful Machine (Conshohocken, PA)

Find more great design jobs on the UnBeige job board. Looking to hire? Tap into our network of talented UnBeige pros and post a risk-free job listing. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

The competition that spotted Stefan Sagmeister, James Victore, and Mike Mills when they were but wee design/art powerhouses-to-be is back. Behold Young Guns 11, the Art Directors Club’s international, cross-disciplinary, portfolio-based competition to identify the young creative vanguard. By “young,” they mean 30 or under, and by “creatives,” they mean those doing great things in graphic design, photography, illustration, advertising and art direction, environmental design, film, animation, video, interactive design, object design, and/or typography.
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(Photo: NYC Department of Transportation)

• How can design of the built environment create opportunities for increasing physical activity and access to healthier food and beverages? Find out on June 24th as architects, planners, designers, landscape architects, developers, and public health professionals come together for the eighth annual Fit City conference at the Center for Architecture. Not in NYC? Watch the livestream (while jogging in place).

• MJ is getting into the makeup game with Marc Jacobs Beauty. The color cosmetics collection, created in collaboration with Sephora, is set to launch in September with 122 products, including a blush called “Shameless” (a nod to one of the designer’s many tattoos). So how does it compare to working on a fragrance? “I think color is easier,” he told WWD. “Fragrance is even more like, sort of ephemeral in a way. But [color] is closer to the process of making a collection. Formulas are like fabrics, fibers, each fiber, whether silk or cashmere or whatever, they have natural properties. They have a certain look, they give you a certain feeling.”

• Martha Stewart‘s latest redesign goes beyond the pages of Living (look for the overhauled magazine to hit newsstands next week), according to an article in today’s New York Times. A new Martha website will be geared toward visitors with shorter attention spans–a two-minute glitter tutorial? How to frost a cake in 60 seconds or less?
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Taking a good photo of a great building is no easy task, as Flickr or Instagram can demonstrate. Meanwhile, even the most expansive Pinterest page of stunning architectural images is likely to feature the work of a relatively small group of photographers–those who have mastered the tricky art and science of capturing the utility, spirit, and beauty of the designed environment. Many of those names are followed by “Esto,” the firm built on the image collection of Ezra Stoller. Esto assignment photographer Albert Vecerka was on hand last week at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Center for the latest in the museum’s “Harlem Focus” series. “I look to tell a story about a place; a neighborhood, a building, a room,” Vecerka has said. “Looking for the right light, right day, or right time of day is a part of that narrative, and it is no different for commercial assignments than for personal projects.” Watch the event below and then mark your calendar for June 26, when architectural historian John Reddick will be joined by curators and gardeners from the Central Park Conservatory Gardens to talk “Garden Design: The Art of Color, Variety, and Form.”

Famed literary critic Lionel Trilling once described Henry James as a “social twitterer.” Sure, he meant it as an insult, but it makes us feel better about having signed up to twitter ourselves. Look to the UnBeige Twitter feed for up-to-the-minute newsbites, event snippets, links of interest, design trivia, and our exclusive photo of Rem Koolhaas in mid-ponder (it makes for smashing smartphone wallpaper). The mediabistro.com tech wizards have added to the sidebar at right a handful of our most recent word bursts, but you can sign up to follow all of our twittering, and start twittering yourself at twitter.com.