Colors, "a magazine about the rest of the world," specializes in breaking down vast, global issues into people-sized stories powered by stunning imagery and design. Published by Benetton-owned Fabrica in four languages and sold in more than 40 countries, the magazine is helmed by editorial director Enrico Bossan (pictured above, at center) and creative director Erik Ravelo (at right, in a photo by Davide Bernardi). We asked Bossan and Ravelo about the production of their colorful quarterly, how they approach designing its three bilingual editions, and whether life at Fabrica's Tadao Ando-designed headquarters is as utopian as it appears.

1. What is a typical day like at the Colors office?
Enrico Bossan: Colors is a quarterly magazine and therefore, every three months, we must face different phases and approaches: The first month is usually dedicated to the research of ideas, themes, news, photos, stories. The second phase is an executive one: the editorial team begins to write stories, take pictures, make interviews, travel all over the world. The third and final phase is dedicated to production: translations (three languages: Italian, French, and Spanish) and printing. At the same time, the research team starts to look for information for the following issue.

Erik Ravelo: It depends on the moment. Sometimes it can be a very quite day, sometimes it is a crazy and chaotic day, with people from different countries and cultures discussing together, exchanging ideas, and sometimes also fighting...

2. How do you come up with issue themes and story ideas?
ER: Everybody at Colors can propose themes and ideas. Sometimes the choice is contingent to a particular historic or social moment or it follows Benetton's corporate communication strategies. For example, the money issue is one of the expressions of Africa Works, the new Benetton global communication campaign promoting the micro-credit programme of Birima, a Senegalese co-operative credit society founded by the singer Youssou N'Dour.

3. Colors is one of the few bilingual publications in which both languages feel fully integrated into the design (rather than one language seeming to function as the primary language and the other one as an afterthought). How do you achieve the magazine's global look, feel, and content?
ER: Colors speaks a universal language, promoting the idea of a multiracial world where the meeting of different opinions, cultures and races generates richness. For this reason design must be in function of diversity, making the two languages be at the same level.

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While other crafty magazines may give you step-by-step instructions for making a fetching windbreaker out of discarded FedEx envelopes or creating a kitschy fishbowl out of that Apple IIe monitor sitting idle in the basement, American Craft puts down the Mod Podge and focuses on the creators themselves. The magazine "celebrates the modern makers who shape the world around us" and in doing so, aims to connect the worlds of art, industry, fashion, architecture, and design.

Under the leadership of editor-in-chief Andrew Wagner (a founding editor of Dwell), the 65-year-old, New York City-based magazine has been reborn. The October/November 2007 issue marked the publication's relaunch and full-scale redesign, right down to the new satin 60-pound paper stock on which it is printed. In answering our seven questions, below, Wagner discusses the American Craft of today, his forthcoming book of writings by the late Ettore Sottsass, and a recent scuffle with goldsmiths.

1. You're the editor-in-chief of American Craft. How do you define "craft"?
I like to think of craft as the root of all creative endeavors -- the very thing that gives life to ideas and techniques of making. To steal a few lines from a story by writer Marc Kristal from our last issue ("The Hand Meets High Tech," April/May 2008), "craft has less to do with the tools of making than with the sensibility that controls them. Or, as [fashion designer] Natalie Chanin puts it, 'Craft is a state of mind.'"

2. What were the goals for the magazine's fall '07 relaunch and how did you go about achieving them?
American Craft is one of the longest running, continually published magazines in the United States. In it's 65 years of publishing it has had seven editors. The last editor, Lois Moran, had been with the magazine for nearly 30 years and the last creative director, Kiyoshi Kanai, had been with the magazine nearly as long. When they retired I was brought in to take a fresh look at the magazine and to reexamine the how, what, when, where, and why of craft in the current global context.

Not surprisingly, craft was everywhere and on the tips of everyone's tongues across artistic disciplines and professional boundaries. From food to fashion to art, architecture and design, people were really starting to gravitate towards the "making" of cultural output. How are things put together? Where do they come from? What are the materials? Essentially, it's the question 'how does what we consume end up in our hands?' that becomes interesting when we have been so removed from that process for years now. To keep things short and sweet, I went about incorporating this very large idea into the magazine by being able to work with incredible people (writers, photographers, editors, etc.) who truly can "see the forest for the trees." Also, I've been able to work with one of the most talented design teams out there, creative director Jeanette Abbink and senior designer Emily CM Anderson.

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It's practically spring, that time when a nation's fancy turns to gubernatorial sins. So what better time for us to turn our inquiring minds to Ju$t Another Rich Kid, also known as New York-based artist and designer Ken Courtney, whose latest project is based on the seven deadly sins?

A follow-up to the 2004 "Indulgences" series that he created with Tobias Wong (featuring a gold-dipped McDonald's coffee stir-cum-"cokespoon" that raised the legal hackles of the fast food giant), the new Indulgences collection (pictured below) is comprised of seven gold-dipped pendants on chains--that's one pendant per deadly sin. For greed, there's a pair of dice, while anger gets a thumbnail-sized grenade. Courtney took time away from selling indulgences to tell us his about favorite mortal sin, a phone call he received from Chloe Sevigny, and his dreams of retail space.

1. Your Ju$t Another Rich Kid collection for fall 2008 includes a new series of Indulgences based on the 7 Deadly Sins. Which of the sins is your favorite (if you had to choose just one)?
In terms of the charms and which is my favorite to wear: Pride/Death Metal Cross. Which deadly sin do I like? Sloth. I wish I were better at that one.

2. Best/most memorable design-related encounter?
A phone call from Chloe Sevigny yelling at me for the "I Fucked Chloe Sevigny" shirts I made. It was a short call. I didn't even get to say anything before she hung up.

3. Proudest design moment?
Having two pieces from the original Indulgences series accepted into the permanent collection at SFMoMA.

4. Last book you read?
The last book I started to read: Getting Things Done by David Allen. I got to page 47 about a year ago and that was that. The first chapter should really tell you how to make time to at least finish the book!!

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Writer Phil Patton is The New York Times' go-to journalist for automotive design and has written books on the Volkswagen Bug and the work of Michael Graves. And although we haven't driven a car since the Clinton administration, we would brush up on our parallel parking for a chance to get behind the wheel of a Stout Scarab, the eccentric ancestral minivan (pictured below) that Patton wrote about recently and aptly described as "shaped like a loaf of home-baked bread."

Next Monday evening, on the eve of the New York Auto Show, Patton will moderate a Times-sponsored discussion entitled "Designing the Car of the Future," featuring speakers Franz von Holzhausen, director of design at Mazda North America; Joel Piaskowski, chief designer at Hyundai Kia; and Edward T. Welburn, Jr., GM vice president of global design. But before he could work on his questions for that gang, we asked Patton some of our own. Below, he tells us about the state of automotive design, what he considers to be "the bolo tie of cars," and why the time is right to reread the zooming similes of F. T. Marinetti.

1. On March 17th, you're moderating a panel on "Designing the Car of the Future." What do you see as the most significant trend in car design today?
Energy crises and oil shocks change the way car companies operate. New technologies change the ways cars look. We are in a period of rapid tech change: Hybrids, fuel cells, all the new motive technologies are likely to change the basics of auto design. It happened with smaller engines and front wheel drive, it is happening again.

The early results during such periods are often gawky--think of the first "downsized" cars of the 1970s--but then the changes produce clever and fresh solutions, esthetically as well as practically. Good designers know that constraints spur creativity.

2. You're the author of Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile. What was the most surprising Bug-related story/fact that you encountered in the process of writing the book?
My favorite Bug is the two-foot metal toy one I own, made in Africa mostly of Coca-Cola cans. The VW bug shapes and the Coke bottle shape are both global icons, which seem to have fallen from the sky, as in The Gods Must Be Crazy. Now Volkswagen wants to create another global icon with the up!

3. What kind of car do you drive? / What is your dream car?
I often drive new models, such as, recently, the Smart For Two and Audi R8. I still dream of showing up places in some sort of vintage El Camino SS, the bolo tie of cars, or a Porsche 914 (the unmacho VW one) or Studebaker Hawk or a 1934 LaSalle.

4. Last film you saw?
I'm still recovering from Eastern Promises and the steam bath scene, which raises the design question: do gangsters from the 'stans really use what appear to be linoleum knives and if so, why?

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It's Valentine's Day! You may have spent the morning attempting to devise a gentle way to inform your spouse/officemate/favorite store clerk that red and pink aren't two colors that look better together (yes, even today), but we can't get our mind off of another interesting V-Day combination: designer Yves Behar and condoms.

[pregnant pause for effect]

Behar, you see, has just designed the packaging and dispenser for the new New York City condom, distributed gratis by the city's department of health. Lovely pictures of all of that will follow this post, but first, our little Valentine's Day gift to you, UnBeige readers: our Seven Questions for the man himself, Yves Behar. Below he tells us about why a condom dispenser is like a fire hydrant, his sartorial preferences, and spending time with Marvin Gaye. [cue "Sexual Healing"]

1. You've just designed a new package and dispenser for the city of New York's "NYC Condoms." Can you tell us about how you approached the project and the resulting designs?
We started working with the city of NY in early 2007 when they realized how much positive impact design could have on this important health initiative. For me, designing a condom dispenser for free NYC branded condoms is like designing a fire hydrant: it needs to be immediately recognizable, suggest condom use without being preachy, be a positive experience, and be able to live in tough environments (such as bars, homeless shelters, and health clinics) and also live in high-end restaurants and hotels.

By using a single external hydro-formed cover that is condom container, dispenser opening, and visual signage, the experience and visual impact is simple and iconic. The shape is reminiscent of a condom creating a relief in a surface (like a condom in a wallet) referencing the item inside, but without being too literal. This slight abstraction makes it clear: you get a condom there, it's friendly and smiling back at you. From a practical standpoint, the smooth surface is easy to clean, it is gravity-fed from the top for easy refills (the city of NY will refill for free), and it is fast to install (also for free).

2. Speaking of New York, Fashion Week just ended in the city. Do you have any favorite fashion houses/designers? If we could peek in your closet, what would we see?
Besides a few skeletons, you will find small favorite local labels such as Nice Collective and Generic Man, as well as the art-design world uniformer Margiela and Costume National, and cheap Target T's.

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Some of you may been lucky enough to hear Jakob Trollback, president and creative director of Trollback + Company, discuss the changing landscape of design last week at the Apple Store in Soho. Like any good speaker, he left us wanting more, so we gave him the 'ol UnBeige Seven Questions treatment. Below he tells us about everything from the challenges of 18x HD resolution and a new documentary about Julius Shulman to reading Murakami (Haruki not Takashi) and why he can go on worry-free vacations.

1. Your firm designed the displays for the massive video walls of the IAC headquarters. What was the most challenging aspect of that project?
It was actually something as mundane as technology. It is very heavy to create animations for 18x HD resolution. Some individual frames took hours to render. Then there was the challenge of strange and idiosyncratic file formats. The whole wall is running on Windows machines. Still, it was a very tangible problem, it is much worse to have creative problems. On that front, we had ideas for at least three buildings.

2. What's a new/recent project of your firm that you're particularly excited about?
We just finished work on the documentary Visual Acoustics, a film about Julius Shulman and his photography of modernist buildings. It is beautiful.

We have recently finished some really great branding assignments and have a few more in progress - ESPNews, TV Land, and a few History Channel spots are among them. A Swiss network too, and we are just launching a major network rebrand. There are also a few TV commercials coming up, and we're working on a project with Maya Lin.

3. Your firm creates movie titles, short films, and trailers (among other things). Besides those you have designed, what recent film's trailer or titles have you found particularly memorable and/or well-designed?
Not sure if it's the titles or that I so rarely watch Hollywood fare these days, but I have a hard time remembering anything really good from the last year. But then again, it might just be my memory. It is possible that I'm running out of RAM. I was pleasantly surprised by the end credits for Bee Movie, I didn't see the opening though.

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Think games are fun? Think again. Such is the disclaimer-cum-slogan of Atlanta-based Persuasive Games, the four-year-old company behind such videogames as Points of Entry (in which players compete to award green cards under the merit-based evaluation system included in legislation recently debated in Congress) and Food Import Folly (in which players work as FDA inspectors to protect the country from contaminants in foreign food imports using extremely limited resources). Launching later this month is a game about the politics of nutrition ("Fit or Fat? Live or Die? You Decide.") funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To get the skinny on the design process at Persuasive Games--not to mention a peek inside the brain of its head art director--we posed seven questions to Nicolas Massi, a former freelance graphic designer who now oversees art direction, creative, and production departments as a partner at Persuasive Games.

1. Can you tell us a little about the design process at Persuasive Games? How do you go about creating and shaping a game's aesthetic?
Creating a visual aesthetic for videogames is much different than art directing for other forms of media. The interactive nature of games allows the player to become the art, therefore careful attention to both the game design and message we are trying to convey in the game. The unique nature of our work at Persuasive Games also allows us to experiment with the visuals to enhance the message.

2. What are you working on now?
We are about to release Fatworld, "a videogame about the politics of nutrition exploring the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S." This game will be available this month at www.fatworld.org.

3. What's the first thing(s) you read in the morning?
As every morning, the first thing I do is turn on my Mac and read my Netvibes (my RSS Feed), blogs like Kotaku, Design Observer, Guardian, to name a few--then email.

4. Last movie you saw?
XXY (Argentinean movie)

5. Last book you read?
The Pilars of the Earth by Ken Follett.

6. Best/most memorable design-related encounter?
This last summer I spent three months in Europe. I was able to experience the old and new world through architecture, art galleries, exhibitions, and events. As a visual professional, it was an invaluable experience.

7. Proudest design moment?
When a game we did, Disaffected! [a videogame parody of Kinko's, a source of frustration from its patrons], was named finalist at the Slamdance Independent Games Festival in 2006.

His store has been compared to a musem (and copied by MoMA's design galleries), a theater with live performance, and heaven, but design tastemaker Murray Moss just wants shoppers to be ready for an experience--an invigorating one. "This is why we keep the temperature freezing cold," he told Vanity Fair last spring. "I don't want it to be comfortable. I want you to be awake. If you want to just find out where the candlesticks are, the store doesn't work."

Just back from Miami, Moss took a break from minding the store to answer our seven questions. An extra special shout-out of gratitude to Moss Special Projects Guru Bret Pittman for helping to make this UnBeige Seven Questions dream a reality. We're off to send them both a thank you fruitcake!

1. What's the first thing(s) you read in the morning?
First: the exchange rate (Euro/Dollar) in the Financial Times, and then the NY Times.

2. Last movie you saw?
No Country for Old Men

3. Last book you read?
The Edifice Complex (How the Rich and Powerful - and their Architects - Shape the World), by Deyan Sudjic

4. Best/most memorable design-related encounter?
Visiting with the late, GREAT Achille Castiglioni in his studio in Milan, where he gave me a private tour and we talked for a very long time.

5. Proudest design moment?
The first day I opened Moss, on Sept. 20, 1994, and my two sisters gave me a 'signed' dollar bill to put 'over the register'.

6. This holiday season, I'm giving...
The Political Candidate Finger Puppets we especially commissioned: a set of five Presidential Election '08 Candidates finger puppets: on the Left: Hillary and Obama; on the Right: Thompson and Giuliani. In the middle, in a Dunce hat: Bush. An attached label reads: "Have your own debates!"

7. This holiday season, I'm hoping to get...
Believe it or not, my favorite food item of all time: the dark, gorgeous Fruitcake - made by (drunken?) monks, that my sister sends me each year...

As the UnBeige snowbirds migrate south into the Miami cacophony of art and design this week, we'll be looking to local museum The Wolfsonian - Florida International University to be our home away from home. This oasis of design in the heart of South Beach has become a formidable institution and research center on the international stage, mostly due to the tireless leadership of one Cathy Leff, who has served as the museum's director since 1998. Leff stepped away from her 18-hour workdays dusting off the collection in anticipation of Art Basel and wrapping chocolate bars on behalf of Stefan Sagmeister to answer our questions:

1. What's the first thing(s) you read in the morning?
Email, then New York Times--for the national/ global view--and Miami Herald for the local picture.

2. Last book you read?
What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics.

3. Best/most memorable design/designer-related encounter?
Hosting Zaha Hadid as a guest speaker for The Wolfsonian-Florida International University and accompanying her with then-NY Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp to see the space where she would deliver her lecture. I had tried very hard to locate a venue that would excite Zaha as opposed to the typical anonymous auditorium. I was so excited when the Fontainebleau Hotel agreed to let us use the Bam-Bam Room, one of the only rooms--well, cabaret theater--that was still in its original Morris Lapidus-designed condition (though a bit run down). When Zaha saw the red and blue lights and this over-the top cabaret theater, I think Zaha freaked out, saying she could not give a lecture in that space, but Herbert came to the rescue and calmed her down when he reminded her that she invented bling and this was the perfect venue in which to deliver a lecture.

4. How would you describe Miami's design scene?
HOT and getting hotter--from high to low--and there's certainly a growing audience that both appreciates and consumes design. I think there has been a lot going on in Miami for many years--it's all been cumulative--from the work of Judith Arango and the Kassamalis, to the schools of architecture--to what we, The Wolfsonian, aim to do: promote the study and appreciate of how design affects human behavior.

5. Why is this Art Basel Miami/Design Miami thing such a big deal?
Because it brings together during a few-day period a critical mass--approximately 100,000--of international designers, institutions (museums), design manufacturers, press, luxury brand promoters, cultural consumers, dealers, and artists. And that encounter is quite spectacular.

6. This holiday season, I'm giving...
...my friends and family a break from the silly gifts, and I will make a donation in their honor to the Sundari Foundation, which provides shelter to homeless women in Miami, some of whom have infants.

7. This holiday season, I'm hoping to get...
...a holiday. I am heading off with friends for two weeks in Japan (Tokyo and Kyoto) and southeast China, ending it all with five days in Beijing.

Forget a chicken in every pot. Today Herbert Hoover would be pleased if everyone just had a wishbone--one cast in pewter, that is. Of course, this Herbert Hoover is not the one pined for by a warbling Edith Bunker, and he had nothing to do with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. This Hoover is the New York-based artist and designer who has made a name for himself by casting quotidian objects in metal, instantly transforming them into shiny morsels of pure joy.

It all started with pewter Saltines, which owners worldwide can keep tabs on via Hoover's online Cracker Tracker. His metal-dipped oeuvre now encompasses Oreos (their white lard filling swapped out for a dollop of Epoxy), ice cream sandwiches, fortune cookies, and just added pewter wishbones, a perfect gift for whomever toiled over your turkey last week. Hoover stepped away from the vats of molten metal to answer our seven questions:

1. What's the first thing(s) you read in the morning?
My email, I love hearing from folks who have my work or want my work -- I especially love when they send me a picture of themselves with a cracker!

2. Last movie you saw?
Wings of Desire. It had been years since I last saw the movie and it reminded me how much this one movie inspired my thinking. The movie is a long improvisation on how messy and beautiful life is -- and it has Peter Falk in a cameo laughing at how much Germans like him as Colombo.

3. Last book you read?
How to Cheat at Everything. It's the other side of every hustle you've ever witnessed walking on the streets of the Big Apple. It's like a book of magic tricks that only make sense in your imagination until the book reveals the simple and practiced cheating.

4. Best/most memorable design/designer-related encounter?
I did a project with M&Co when I was in school. One of my fellow students arranged for our class to go to New York for a project critique with Tibor Kalman. Tibor singled my work out and ask "What is this?" incredulously because I had intentionally broken the rules. I was so embarrassed that I stammered through a an incomprehensible explanation. I later sent a large painting of a hand mixer to Maira Kalman for Tibor when he was ill, but unfortunately he never got it.

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