mark your calendar

Get out your fancy pens and draw an elaborate box around November 4-13. That’s Illustration Week, an event bonanza featuring exhibitions, talks, panel discussions, and parties that will draw out a crowd of people who don’t blink when faced with questions such as “Prismacolors or Copics?” The fun begins next Friday, November 4, as Parsons the New School for Design plays hosts to the third annual Pictoplasma Conference, which invites designers, illustrators, fimmakers and producers, artists, and character connoisseurs to discourse freely about the world of character-driven art and design. The two-day event features lectures by global superstars such as Siggi Eggertsson, Wooster Collective, Jon Burgerman (whose work is pictured above), and French-Swiss Technicolor enfants terribles Ben & Julia. The Society of Illustrators follows up that character-building bunch with a presentation on the history of illustration by Murray Tinkelman, an Illustrators Sketch Night featuring the musical stylings of the Half-Tones (illustrators Barry Blitt, Joe Ciardiello, and Michael Sloan, joined by guest guitarist Kenny Wessel), and an evening with children’s book icons and illustrators including Ted and Betsy Lewin and Jerry Pinkney. Check out the full schedule of events here.

Saturday marks the start of National Design Week. Now in its sixth year, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum-sponsored series of programs and events (including the National Design Awards gala) falls in the middle of “Archtober,” New York’s inaugural Architecture and Design Month, which means that there are more ways than ever to celebrate. Here are five of our favorites:

Why and how does color motivate, trouble, persuade, and feed our spirits? How does Pantone decide upon the “color of the year” and does it involve alcohol—a mimosa, say, or a Bombay Sapphire martini—and/or a dartboard? Why do we feel giddy when walking by the Farrow & Ball emporium that recently opened a few blocks from UnBeige HQ (hint: paint colors like “Dead Salmon,” “Mouse’s Back,” and “Clunch”)? Answers to these questions and many more are on the agenda at Print magazine’s first ever Color Conference, a three-day confab that kicks off on Tuesday at the Art Directors Club in New York. Among the creative thinkers and experts in visual culture scheduled to “reveal their passion for color, their processes, and their ideas on how color connects us all” are Leatrice Eiseman of the Pantone Color Institute, Pentagram’s Eddie Opara, and Cooper-Hewitt director Bill Moggridge, whose tireless engagement with the design community leads us to believe that he has managed to transform his ground-breaking GRiD Compass laptop into some sort of time machine that allows him to be in many places at once. Sign up for the conference here and enter code UNBEIGEPCC to save $50 on the $595 registration fee. And whatever you do, don’t wear beige.

After 16 years in Berlin, the annual TYPO Design Conference is returning to London for a three-day inspirationfest and creative boot camp that kicks off on October 20. And don’t let the “typo” title fool you. Along with typography, the deliberately broad program will include aspects of visual communication, film, emerging media, design, education, technology, and information. “Our aim is for people to leave the event with strong talking points, controversies, new favorites and, most importantly, new perspectives and knowledge,” says conference director Robin Richmond. Among the speakers that will tackle this year’s theme of “places” are Neville Brody (Royal College of Art), Michael Bierut (Pentagram), Chip Kidd (Knopf), and—would you believe?—artist Lawrence Weiner. The agenda also has plenty of new faces (read: design minds to whom you haven’t already constructed elaborate shrines in your basement), such as the dynamic duo pictured at right. That’s Togbe Ngoryifia Céphas Kosi Bansah, King of Hohoe, Ghana, and designer Julian Zimmerman. King Bansah works as an automotive mechanic in Ludwigshafen, Germany, and governs his people in the African Volta region from there. As part of his undergraduate thesis, Zimmerman created a corporate identity for the king. Their joint presentation at last year’s TYPO Berlin Design Conference brought many delegates to tears and garnered standing ovations.
(Photo: Gerhard Kassner)

(Photos: UnBeige)

The torrential rains have ceased (Anna Wintour must have put in a call), the clouds have parted, and Fashion’s Night Out is nearly upon us. Now in its third year, the after-hours shopping and schmoozing event has gone global, but the epicenter of the retail-themed frenzy remains New York City, where Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week kicked off today at Lincoln Center with spring 2012 collections from the likes of Richard Chai, Porter Grey, and Tadashi Shoji, who took inspiration from Portland-based photographer Ron van Dongen‘s stunning images of tulips. Here are our five favorite ways to spend the sartorial night of nights. Thirsty for more? Check out the official listing of events and happenings on the Fashion’s Night Out website. See you tonight at the shops!

James Rosenquist’s “The Richest Person Gazing at the Universe Through a Hubcap” (2011), one of 26 works donated to the Artists for Haiti auction (Photo: David Zwirner)

Earlier this year, actor Ben Stiller and gallerist extraordinaire David Zwirner teamed up to organize Artists for Haiti, an art auction to benefit huminatiarian efforts in the wake of the catastrophic January 2010 earthquake that took 230,000 lives. Months of work on the project have paid off in the form of a jaw-dropping selection of 26 pieces—most created specifically for the sale—that will go on the block at Christie’s on the evening of Thursday, September 22, in New York. Artists including Jasper Johns, Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Cecily Brown, and Raymond Pettibon have donated works, and they’re not standard benefit-auction fare. Mamma Andersson has contributed a haunting oil called “Night Train” (2011), and Neo Rauch is represented by a breathtaking new canvas of alienated souls poised to break into song in a technicolored forest. In “Le juif errant” (2011), Francis Alÿs depicts a figure traversing a map while carrying the built world on his shoulders. The canvas could function as a new identity for Architecture for Humanity, one of several nonprofits and NGOs that all of the proceeds from the Artists for Haiti auction will support. Learn more about the auction and check out all of the works in person at David Zwirner (September 6-14) or at Christie’s (September 17-20). Click here to watch Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer, who has written a text in the Artists for Haiti auction catalogue, discuss the situation in Haiti during his recent appearance on Charlie Rose.

Mark your calendar for Urban Design Week, a new public festival created to celebrate New York’s streetscapes, sidewalks, and public spaces. Today the Institute for Urban Design published the full schedule of events, which will kick off on Thursday, September 15, with the launch of By the City/For the City: An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York, a book that brings together design ideas submitted for the By the City/For the City competition. “New York has such an exceptionally rich public realm, and there are so many ways for individual citizens to get involved in shaping their city” says Anne Guiney, executive director of the Institute. “We see Urban Design Week as an opportunity to provide more people with the tools to do just that.” Stock your toolbox at events organized in partnership with more than 50 non-profit organizations, design firms, and city agencies. Among the discussions, tours, and screenings that caught our eye: a celebration on the High Line of trains on film, a walking tour of the Brooklyn Bridge, a chat about “Public Art, Science, and the Sustainable City,” and the U.S. premiere of Gary Hustwit‘s new film, Urbanized.

Stills from Qui Êtes-Vous, Polly Magoo? and The Eyes of Laura Mars, two of the films that will be screened during “Fashion in Film.” (Images courtesy Museum of Arts and Design)

On the glitter-encrusted platform heels of the Museum of Arts and Design‘s David Bowie retrospective comes Fashion in Film, a three-day celebration of fashion, design, and style on the silver screen. The New York institution has partnered with Vanity Fair and the Film Society of Lincoln Center on a long weekend (Setember 9-11) of screenings, panel discussions, and receptions that will keep the Fashion’s Night Out momentum going through next Sunday. The singular Simon Doonan has co-curated the screening program, which includes iconic favorites (William Klein‘s Qui Êtes-Vous, Polly Magoo?, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) as well as new releases, including the world premiere of Jan Sharp‘s new Rick Owens [claps gleefully] documentary, Rick, Michele, and Scarlett, and a look inside the elite ateliers of Hermès. On Sunday afternoon, Doonan will chat with the likes of designers Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra, Matt “Valentino: The Last Emperor” Tyrnauer, and the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Valerie Steele about how film inspires fashion. Tickets for the chic film series are going fast. Purchase yours here.