“The words graphic designer, architect, or industrial designer stick in my throat, giving me a sense of limitation, of specialization within the specialty, of a relationship to society and form itself that is unsatisfactory and incomplete. This inadequate set of terms to describe an active life reveals only partially the still undefined nature of the designer.”

-Alvin Lustig (1915-55) in The Designer Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom, compiled and edited by Sara Bader, new this month from Princeton Architectural Press

What Gatsby? From left, Kate Spade’s book clutch, a Mac decal inspired by the the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, and a t-shirt from the 1925 first edition jacket by Francis Cugat.

Baz Luhrmann‘s adaptation of The Great Gatsby arrived in theaters today, old sport, and everyone from here to Montenegro–little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!–is trying to get a piece of the action. Although we’ve yet to see Meyer Wolfshiem-style molar cufflinks hit stores or Goddard‘s The Rise of the Coloured Empires ascend the bestseller list, the merch is multiplying. Of course, there’s the movie tie-in version of the book, sporting a new cover that one bookseller characterized as “just God-awful.” Brooks Brothers is selling a Gatsby Collection, inspired by costume designer Catherine Martin‘s take on all those heartbreakingly beautiful shirts (Gatsby had his man in London send a fresh batch over each season), and Tiffany & Co. is promoting “jazz-age glamour” pieces, such as this diamond- and pearl-studded Great Gatsby Collection headpiece–yours for $200,000. Fans on a budget closer to that of Nick Carraway can opt for a selection of Gatsby t-shirts after trying their hand at The Great Gatsby video game, the brilliant, Nintendo-style creation of Charlie Hoey and Peter Malamud Smith. But as usual, everyone looks like beautiful little fools when compared to Stephen Colbert, who didn’t let his failure to read Fitzgerald‘s classic stop him from greenlighting a book club segment on it.

Need a nudge to get moving on the graphic novel you’ve been writing and/or drawing in your head for years? First, seek inspiration from Code Monkey Save World. The graphic novel in-progress–based on the songs of Jonathan Coulton, written by Greg Pak, and drawn by Takeshi Miyazawa–is poised to clear $200,000 in Kickstarter funding (five times its original goal). According to the creators, the project was born last November after Pak joked on Twitter about writing a supervillain team-up comic based on Coulton’s characters. Coulton tweeted back “DO IT.” And so they did. You can, too, and the Mediabistro mothership is here to help with an online course that promises to move your graphic novel out of your head and onto the page–and beyond. Marvel Comics veteran Danny Fingeroth leads the eight-week learning adventure, which will take you from devising a proposal and writing word balloons to surviving Comic-Con and handling Hollywood. Learn more and register here.

• “[S]tripped of most traditional linguistic elements, the short film has to move fast, but it must strive not to confuse the viewer with too many objects or jarring cuts,” writes Stephen Apkon in The Age of Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, new this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book inspired this short film (above) by Daniel Liss.

• And speaking of short films, the Tribeca Film Festival has selected the winners in its six-second film competition. Watch all of the jury’s top picks in under a minute here.

• It’s the end of an era for Cooper Union, which will begin charging undergraduates tuition beginning next fall.

• The design community and members of the general public are protesting MoMA’s decision to raze the building that Tod Williams Billie Tsien designed for the American Folk Art Museum. The Architectural League drafted this open letter requesting MoMA to provide “a compelling justification for the cultural and environmental waste of destroying this much-admired, highly distinctive twelve-year-old building.”

• All is fair (use) in love and appropriation? Artist Richard Prince emerged largely triumphant in yesterday’s appeals court ruling on the copyright case involving his 2008 “Canal Zone” series, which used portraits from Patrick Cariou‘s Yes, Rasta book.

“After so many years of averting the border patrol between the disciplines of art and architecture, while inhabiting both yet claiming to be outsiders, this is the ultimate validation,” said Elizabeth Diller last Wednesday at the Plaza Hotel, as she joined partners Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro in accepting the American Academy of Rome’s Centennial Medal for their exceptional contributions to the worlds of architecture and the visual arts. The trio spent the previous evening at the New York Public Library, where they discussed their interdisciplinary design studio’s renewal of Lincoln Center. We asked writer Nancy Lazarus to attend the event and harvest some memorable quotes. Learn more on May 10, when Diller and Scofidio will be joined by DS+R monograph author Edward Dimendberg for a book talk at the Center for Architecture.

Redesigning Lincoln Center was an epic undertaking that involved a prominent public landmark and a painstaking process that evolved over nearly ten years. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the design studio behind most of the project, has chronicled their experiences in Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account (Damiani). The three principals shared their views on the project and the book at a recent event hosted by New York Public Library and moderated by Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA. The DS+R trio is just as articulate as they are creative, so here are excerpts from that discussion.

On Lincoln Center’s design:
Diller: The old Lincoln Center was too elitist, solid, and turned its back on the neighborhood and community. We were drawn to the promenade levels where everyone pours out in the middle of events. We wanted to extend that social feeling to the rest of the project. We broke down the edges to enable events in the public spaces. There’s more symmetry now across the public and private spaces.

Scofidio: There were no photos of the old Lincoln Center except the main plaza with the fountain. Someone said that in the 1960s, plazas were designed to be desolate.

On how they approached the project:
Diller: To win the project we showed many ideas, since we tend to think in multiples, with different approaches and solutions. We demonstrated our affection for the place and showed how to take it to the next step. We felt we could do it justice and interpret it for contemporary culture. We wanted to transform Lincoln Center for the logic of our time.

Scofidio: We didn’t go in and say here are the problems we have to correct. We just said we can finish Lincoln Center.
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Sagmeister & Walsh’s “Now is Better” project, seen here installed at the Jewish Museum, will be included in the 51st D&AD Annual and is up for a Yellow Pencil. (Photo: David Heald)

• On Monday a 192-member jury of leading creatives and designers began the business of judging the 51st D&AD Awards. As you await today’s installment of nominations and “in-books” in categories such as branding, graphic design, and art direction, page through the first five decades of excellence in visual thinking with D&AD 50, new from Taschen.

• The Tribeca Film Festival organizers recently announced its first six-second film competition, challenging amateur and pro filmmakers alike to make cinemagic with the bold, new, yet Super 8ish medium of Vine. The festival’s director of programming has narrowed down the approximately 400 entries to this shortlist. A jury consisting of director Penny Marshall, Vine-loving actor Adam Goldberg, and the team from 5 Second Films will have the final say on the winners, which will be announced next Friday.

• Transform the leather jacket languishing in the back of your closet into something that doesn’t scream “Wilsons Leather circa 1998″ with Remade USA, designer Shannon South‘s freshly relaunched custom service that repurposes individual vintage leather jackets into new one-of-a-kind handbags, through redesign and reconstruction.

• And speaking of textile innovation, on May 1, New York’s Eyebeam presents “Smart Textiles: Fashion That Responds,” a panel that will bring together a diverse group of designers and scientists working in cutting-edge textile research and production–think nanoparticles, circuit boards, and clothing that’s more responsive to changing needs and conditions.

• Visit St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai without leaving your home in journalist Daniel Brook‘s A History of Future Cities, new from Norton. Stop by Brooklyn’s powerHouse Arena on Thursday, April 18, for a discussion with Brook.

• Elsewhere in far-flung reading material, don’t miss the dreamy Designers Abroad, in which Michele Keith peeks inside the vacation homes of the likes of Mica Ertegun, Juan Pablo Molyneux, and Juan Montoya. The envy-inducing tome, a follow-up to Keith’s 2010 Designers Here and There, is out next week from Monacelli.

• When in doubt, ask yourself: What would Jacques Derrida do? Deconstruct the possibilities with the help of a recently translated biography by Benoît Peeters.

• “Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place,” Banksy has said. “Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.” Steep yourself in the street art superstar with reporter Will Ellsworth-Jones‘s Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall (St. Martin’s Press), an unauthorized biography that tries to piece together Banksy’s path from vandalism to international stardom and an Oscar nomination.
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“I fell into a job working for a book printer in Los Angeles. He taught me how to set type—metal type, by hand—and that was a learning experience for me, just being exposed to books and piles of paper, pinched together by binding. And somehow the simplicity of that affected me and work. And this printer was a letterpress printer, so I got into the beauty of the pressed letterforms and paper. Somehow that moved me along into doing books. And I didn’t necessarily have to repeat the letterpress idea, but books and pages and flipping of pages, just drove me crazy. I had to deal with it. I had this deep need to make some kind of book, and it didn’t matter what it was about. I just said to myself, ‘I have to make a book. Now is the time to make a book.’

So it sort of evolved, backwards and inside out. I had no logical thoughts behind it, and finally my mind went back to those times when I was either hitchhiking or riding across country, and US 66 and gasoline stations, and they were like belches in the landscape, and I just felt like I want to capture these things somehow, and maybe this is the excuse—to make a book. So it’s the idea of a book that came first and the second was this idea of gasoline stations.”

-Ed Ruscha, in a recent conversation with Paul Holdengraber at the New York Public Library. An exhibition (pictured) of Ruscha’s books, together with books and works of art by more than 100 contemporary artists that respond to his original project, is on view through April 27 at Gagosian Gallery in New York.

Labels from the Central Hotel in Nantes, France (circa 1930s) and the Joia Hotel in Sao Paulo (circa 1964). © Louis Vuitton Archives

Remember when travel involved more than clutching bar-coded scraps and wheeling an ugly black case through “concourses”? Neither do we, but just imagine scenes from Titanic (pre-iceberg) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (without the murder)–all crisp kerchiefs, exotic matchbooks, and hotel labels slapped onto sturdy packing cases. Return to the golden age in the gilt-edged pages of World Tour, out this month from Abrams.

Chilean-born, Paris-based travel writer Francisca Matteoli (pictured) draws upon the vintage hotel labels collected by trunkmaker and traveler Gaston-Louis Vuitton (whose grand-père founded the leathergoods juggernaut) as fodder for a 21-city global adventure illustrated by oodles of illustrations, photos, vintage postcards, and more than 900 labels that live on as graphic souvenirs of getaways from Athens to Zermatt. “I realized that a small piece of paper like a simple label can tell a million stories,” says Matteoli. “Stories of woman and men, travelers, adventurers, gangsters, elegant people…and also of history, architecture, art, countries.” She made time between voyages to answer our seven questions about culling down the collection of labels, some personal favorites, and her own choice of luggage.

How did you come to write World Tour?
I was having lunch with Julien Guerrier, editorial director at Louis Vuitton, and I told him about my Chilean great grandfather and my family who always lived in hotels, and about our life in Chile and France…He then told me that Louis Vuitton had a magnificent collection of hotel labels and that we could connect our stories. He knew I liked writing stories, and we thought that it would be a very original way to talk about travel. That is how it all began.

How did you go about narrowing down/selecting the labels to feature in the book?
We wanted mythical hotels that are representative of the golden age of travel, that have a real visual quality–many of the labels are works of art. This allowed me to write not only about labels, but also about life, historical events, and people, because travel is connected with everything in life. We wanted a book that was both a pleasure to look at, and a pleasure to read.

What are some of your favorite labels from the collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton?
The ones that bring back personal memories. The one of the Hotel Meurice in Paris–so refined, so art déco, because my grandparents liked walking down the rue de Rivoli when they came to Paris, as do the tourists today. The one of the Hotel du Louvre, where I lived with my family when we arrived from Chile. The Savoy Hotel in London–the label is very creative, very modern for its time–because my mother, who is Scottish, used to go to the Savoy when she was young. The Hotel Gloria in Rio de Janeiro, because I lived in Rio, love Rio, and this label is not only historical but also extremely stylish. The Waldorf Astoria in New York, where I have beautiful memories, so chic and a fine example of the architecture of the 50s.
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A photograph by Terry Jones taken at the Comme des Garçons showroom.

“My creative inspiration [for putting together these books] was seeing how [my wife] Tricia arranged her wardrobe. Fashion is not about the latest item you’ve bought–it’s an evolution of personal style. Today’s wardrobe is most inspirational when it has a history…

Selecting from the pages of i-D and sometimes making repro-facsimiles of the fashion pages to reflect the graphics of the time, together with transcripts of conversations or interviews with designers, then adding footnotes and facts, gave me opportunity to add a depth of hidden information. I avoided putting the book in chronological order–I prefer the moment being right, and these books are portfolios of moments in time, much like how the brain works. We have included images that I’ve found in i-D‘s archive or been given permission by the designer or some of our photographic contributors. We have also included video stills taken from screen grabs from my personal footage, as I love the blur of fashion.”

-Terry Jones, founder and creative director of i-D magazine, on his new Taschen series on contemporary fashion designers. The first three monographs–on Rei Kawakubo, Vivienne Westwood, and Yohji Yamamoto–will most likely be followed by books on Raf Simons and Rick Owens, according to Jones.