7 Questions

Simple. Good. Designed to last a lifetime. That's three ways to describe the products of Sausalito-based Heath Ceramics, the pottery founded in 1948 by Edith Heath, but "beautiful" is usually the first word that comes to mind. One of the few remaining mid-century American potteries (and the last one left in California), Heath Ceramics handcrafts tile and tableware in its original factory and recently opened a Los Angeles outpost with a storefront that looks plucked from an Ed Ruscha painting. The company is still going strong thanks to a dedicated team of artisans and Robin Petravic and Catherine Bailey (pictured above), the husband and wife team who purchased Heath in 2003 after careers designing products for the likes of Motorola and Nike. In answering our seven questions, Bailey, Heath's creative director, tells us how she discovered Heath, why eBay isn't the best place to buy ceramics, and the oddest custom order the company has received so far.

1. How and when did you first encounter Heath Ceramics?
I've always been interested in pottery from the early to mid century. When I was in college (in the late 80's), I found a few pieces of Russel Wright's—this represented great American industrial design to me. Later, I was collecting Eva Zeisel and came across some Heath at vintage stores and also on eBay in the mid-to-late 90's. The interesting thing is that I don't think I really understood Heath until I entered the factory store in 2002. Unlike Zeisel's distinctive and expressive forms that are evident even in a poor photograph on eBay, Heath's beauty and uniqueness is understood once you pick up a piece, or at least when photographed in a way that the materials and textures can be understood.

2. How has your previous career as an industrial design consultant affected your approach/work at Heath?
It made me appreciate the holistic nature of Heath. As a consultant, I was focused on a specific design need of my clients. At Heath, I get to design the whole company and not just the brand and products, but I can steer the direction of the company based on my values and beliefs.

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What do you get when you mix hand-tufted New Zealand wool, a former cartoonist, and morphine? Dan Golden's top selling rug design ("Morphine," pictured below). Golden has made a name for himself with whimsical, art-infused rugs that replace symmetrical designs and staid color combinations with cartoony characters like the froggy green alien who bids our planet "So long, Suckahs!" from a lush ground of magenta wool. As Golden expands with a range of new projects—including a collaboration with Odegard, a lighting collection with Swarovski, and a range of pillows—he took time to answer our seven questions. Read on to learn how he made the leap from the wall to the floor, what inspires him, and why people love morphine—the rug, not the drug.

1. How did you transition from making art on canvas/paper to rugs?
It was actually my business partner, Ford Lininger's idea. I had been looking for ways to expand the size and scope of my work for a while, and Ford had the vision to see how my drawings could translate into super high-end rugs. It was kind of one of those, "It's so crazy, it just might work!" ideas that did work! I had been waiting for someone like Ford to see the potential in what I was doing, and help channel it in the right directions. For me, it was like YES! someone else shares/believes in my work/me, and let's go for it—that's a wonderful feeling.

2. What do you think makes one of your artworks particularly suitable for use on a rug?
I think with the first series, the cartoons, they are all banners or statements of attitude—morphine is the best medicine, so long, suckahs!, same old shit/crazy new shit, god wants me to be financially abundant—they are all very identifiable positions someone might take, relate to. They are—not to try to be all philosophical—basically, ruminations on bigger, deeper things, put in a way that most everyone can get into—simple, clean cartoons drawn in an earnest, slightly sloppy, real hand kind of way.

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Yesterday we told you about designer Edward Leida's new website and provided a peek into his to-do list for 2009. Today we present the W design director's wonderfully detailed answers to our seven questions. Read on to learn what beverage Leida (at right, in a photo by Art Streiber) begins his work days with, how he snagged a meeting with and subsequent job offer from Wilburn Bonnell, and what he's giving this holiday season (someone special is getting a vintage model poodle kit). As if the Paul Rand anecdote he shares below wasn't gift enough.

1. You're trained as both an industrial graphic and graphic designer. How does this unique background affect your perspective/design work?
For as long as I can remember, I was interested in knowing how
things worked. I took apart almost every small appliance in our home and then proceeded to try to put them back together—I drove my parents crazy. This natural curiosity spilled over into graphic design, so over the course of my education and career, I guess you could say that I've been trying to get inside of a letter.

My first jobs out of school were for design firms that worked on
projects in collaboration with architects, and this allowed me the ability to work in two dimensions as well as three. I was afforded an opportunity to see how things were made beyond the realm of print. Over the years, I met great craftsmen and artisans, and their passion for their work was a tremendous source of inspiration and envy. These guys deeply influenced my life and career—functionality, innovation, and craft are the building blocks to each and every design endeavor I embrace now because of my exposure to both worlds. I'm very blessed.

2. Describe a typical day at work as design director of W.
There really is no such thing as a typical day at W, but I can tell you that my day begins with a large green tea that I get from our cafeteria and a morning visit to our "wall," where all the layouts that are in the current issue are posted. I'll probably look at the wall at least five to six times during the course of the day and try to think of ways of shaking up the look of the pages. I never want things to get stale.

There will be chats with my editor-in-chief, visits with my art
director, and plenty of music listened to during the course of my day. Levity is also a big part of our office routine, and imitations of the staff—including myself and interns—are encouraged. No one is off limits! Our creative director has been my collaborator for 23 years, and we meet often during the day to discuss the current and future issues of the magazine as well as story ideas. Fortunately for the both of us, we share similar interests and tastes, so our vision for W is a singular one.

3. How do you divide and conquer the task of designing W?
The fashion layouts are the pages that I design myself, but I oversee the design of the entire magazine. My able-bodied staff designs the front of the book as well as the features and special sections. The mantra I instill is "Go crazy. Have fun. Or else, why bother?"

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Award-winning landscape architect David Font (at right) is the head of seven-year-old Font Designs, and so when presented with the opportunity to interview him on the eve of Design Miami, we had to begin with the obvious question: Does Font Designs ever get mistaken for a type foundry? "Yes, on occasion. Not very often though," he told us. "When we first opened the firm we also had several inquiries from people thinking we were graphic designers." That settled, we move on to the big news: Font's extraordinary exhibition design for "Beyond Organic: Design in the State of Nature," a themed satellite exhibition that is Design Miami's first foray into mixing contemporary and historical design.

Showcased in a 6,000-square-foot space inside The Collins Building, "Beyond Organic" is meant to be an "an exuberant, witty, and inspiring celebration of the natural world reflected through objects" contributed by the likes of Moss, Richard Wright + Arik Levy, and Demisch Danant. Font's exhibition design integrates the objects—here a Swarovski chandelier resembling cherry blossoms, there a pair of Max Lamb chairs sculpted from stone—into an organic environment that includes 50 pick-up trucks full of topsoil, more than 700 pieces of native and exotic plant material, and a large wall covered with patches of grass and slices of tree trunks. Below, Font tells us about how he approached the project, some of his favorite objects in the exhibition, and how he brings a little bit of the Italian Renaissance into the spaces of today.

1. How did you approach the assignment to create the interior environment for Design Miami's "Beyond Organic: Design in the State of Nature" exhibition? What were your inspirations?
I researched natural indoor environments as they related to the art world and tried to do something that hasn't been done. I didn't want the landscape design or the art pieces to overpower, outweigh, or compete with each other. I wanted to create a cohesive and integral environment that flowed while avoiding certain pitfalls of making it too manicured. I wanted to achieve an unstructured, natural environment.

In terms of inspirations, one was one of the design objects that I was creating the exhibit to showcase: the Michele Oka Doner "Tara" chandelier (pictured at left), which is a candelabra made out of bronze that is in the form of a cut down tree stump. That piece, in particular, was inspiring because it really depicted what the aesthetics and overall theme should reflect. One of the challenges in organizing the space within the Collins Building was taking a rectilinear box and giving it a free-flowing design to mimic what the landscape is doing. We accomplished this by creating a curvilinear stage and carrying it throughout, having that pattern radiate out from that center stage.

2. "Beyond Organic" includes 50 design objects. Any favorites?
I have so many favorites, but there are two that stood out in particular; the candelabra that I explained was also a source for inspiration of the exhibit and the eight-foot Zaha Hadid "Iceberg" bench (pictured at left), which I appreciate because I understand the work behind the intricate design that it requires to create something that appears to be unstructured and free-flowing. It was one of the challenges I faced in designing the space.

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It's been an exciting year for Print. The magazine took home a National Magazine Award for general excellence and a Magazine of the Year silver medal from the Society of Publication Designers. Now it has a new editor-in-chief. Former managing editor and Emdashes founder Emily Gordon (pictured at right) has replaced Joyce Rutter Kaye in Print's top editorial post, and amidst the whirl of new responsibilities, she made time to tell us about her plans for the magazine, which is "just a few years younger than John McCain and a heck of a lot hipper," and how her path to Print was paved by an eccentric Victorian-era literary superstar.

1. What led you to Print?
A keenly eccentric Victorian named Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer led me to Print. The magazine's then-managing editor, Todd Pruzan, published a piece in 2005 in The New Yorker about Mortimer's bestselling 1850s-era travel books, and the paradoxically provincial life that went along with them. (One of my favorite details is that she washed her pet parrot with soap and water, and tried to teach her donkey to swim in the ocean.)

I was so dazzled by Todd's writing and his story of being so irresistibly drawn to a vintage book that he ended up scouring a British graveyard for the author's headstone, and eventually republishing bits of her books into an anthology, that I wrote a post on Emdashes—a blog about The New Yorker I've done for nearly four years—raving about it. Todd and I began corresponding, and he sent me some issues of Print. I was struck by the gorgeous layout and the excellent writing and criticism—and by the fact that I, a hopeless magazine addict, had never read it before. Eventually, I contributed a review of the Complete New Yorker DVDs. The following year, my editor Jeremy Lehrer left the magazine to freelance, and I was hired to replace him as senior editor. Shortly thereafter, Todd went off to other things, and I became managing editor.

Read on for Emily's plans for the magazine and why Print (and print) is alive and well, both on paper and online.

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A few years ago, Kate and Laura Mulleavy got some good advice. "We had designed ten pieces of clothing and we didn't really know what to do with them," says Kate, 29. "And someone told us, 'Maybe you guys should go to New York.'" And so they did. After a blizzard-abridged plane ride from Los Angeles and a train ride from Boston, they were in Manhattan for the first time in their lives. Within two days, Women's Wear Daily had called them in for a chat that would lead to their Rodarte collection being featured on the coveted cover of WWD. Today, having won critical acclaim, industry support, and the 2008 Swarovski Award for Womenswear for their otherworldly designs, the Mulleavys are among fashion's brightest young stars. After a whirlwind fashion week, Kate (at left in the above photo, with sister Laura, 28, and model Liya Kebede) took time to answer our seven questions.

1. What was the inspiration for your spring 2009 collection?
Our spring collection was really inspired by Robert Smithson and earth or site-specific art. In a strange way, Laura and I were really interested in the idea of looking at works by Smithson and exploring the idea of remnants, so we kind of played with the idea of fossils, of skeletal shapes and silhouettes. And that's really what we based the collection off of. In a lot ways, it was a mixture between science fiction and site-specific art. I think that the link in our mind was what's left—this idea of remnants—and we kind of explored that in the show, which moved toward lightness and playing with color, borrowing from different science fiction palettes and this idea of outer space toward the end of the show.

2. You and Laura are both self-taught. How did you gain your design skills?
In all honesty, it's just a lot of trial and error. We look at what we were doing at the beginning and see how it's evolved slowly. We work a lot with tulle and draping, and that's just kind of evolved from collection to collection. We are not afraid of trying new things. We always worked from the very beginning with a small team of people, and we learned a lot from them. I think that we jumped right into the idea of designing, but at the same time, there's so much to learn every season that the learning process will span our career. We're always learning. So I think that we weren't intimidated by that, but we were also really open to knowing that there's so much that you do have to learn and absorb, so just to take it one step at a time.

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In addition to being the only magazine (thus far) smart enough to put Design Matters' Debbie Millman on its cover, HOW is a graphic design resource that likes to mix it up—moving effortlessly from an ode to blackletter typefaces and a Gary Baseman profile to practical advice for those looking to start design shops and a rundown of memorable designer business cards. Then there are the conferences, competitions, and books. HOW do they do it? Well, it helps to have a fearless leader like Bryn Mooth. In answering our seven questions, the magazine's editor-in-chief explains how she explains what she does, offers a peek at her summer reading list, and touches on (ouch!) the enduring appeal of the X-Acto knife.

1. How do you describe HOW to someone who is unfamiliar with the magazine?
My "elevator speech" about HOW is that we create a community where designers can learn how to be more creative, more inspired, more business-savvy and more successful. That's the essence of the HOW brand, whether it's the magazine, our website, our events, our online community, our books...

2. How did you come to be editor of HOW?
I've been involved with HOW for a very long time, longer than I care to admit. It was my first real gig after graduating from journalism school (I initially found the job the old-fashioned way: in the newspaper classifieds). I'm not a designer by training, but I've always been fascinated by the role of words, images, and graphics as they combine in a magazine. I've been editor in chief of HOW for nearly nine years.

3. The August issue of HOW is focused on handmade design. Any favorite handmade objects/design elements/trends that you encountered while working on this issue?
For the August issue on handmade design, we wanted to spotlight this interesting blurring between craft and design. We actually had several ideas for the theme for that issue, so we surveyed HOW readers, and they voted for the handmade topic. I started at HOW when the computer was beginning to have an influence on the practice and aesthetics of design, when print work was made to look like it had been created with all kinds of digital tricks (beveled type, anyone?). So it's interesting to me to see that designers are again picking up X-Acto knives and markers. And it's interesting to see the intersection of digital and by-hand elements, such as when a designer sketches a bit of type and then scans it into a layout.

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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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