• The Association of Art Museum Directors is also seizing the Museum Day momentum. The organization is encouraging its members to offer free admission and special programs on Saturday for Art Museum Day. See if your favorite museum is participating by consulting the AAMD’s latest list.

• All that museumgoing sure works up an appetite. Depatures highlights some extraordinary museum restaurants around the world. Please pass the “whipped casein with strawberry-and-violet ice cream,” a specialty at the Guggenheim Bilbao’s Nerua.

• Where in the world are the best university museums? Consult this new ranking of the 30 Most Amazing University Museums. Created by Best Colleges Online, the international list is based on qualities such as architecture, depth of resources and collections, and activity as a learning and teaching resource for the surrounding community.

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• With the help of Christian Marclay‘s “The Clock,” the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is counting down the days until it closes its doors to the public on June 2 to prepare for construction on its major expansion. Now comes word that the museum has raised its fundraising goal to to $610 million from $555 million. The additional funds will allow SFMOMA to pursue three goals: to become a national leader in digital engagement, to pursue an expanded art commissioning program in the museum’s public spaces, and to increase accessibility to the museum, according to a statement issued Wednesday.

• Wondering how SFMOMA’s expansion will be reflected in its new visual identity? Get the scoop from the museum’s design director, Jennifer Sonderby, who is speaking at HOW Design Live, which gets underway on June 22 in San Francisco.

• ‘Tis the season for refreshed European galleries. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has just opened a sumptuous suite of five galleries, including the newly renovated Art of the Netherlands in the 17th Century Gallery and the Alan and Simone Hartman Galleries, which showcase art from Great Britain. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art follows suit later this month, with the May 23 reopening of its renovated and reinstalled collection of European Old Master paintings from the 13th through the early 19th century.
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Adobe is bidding adieu to packaged software, the company announced Monday at its Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. As part of an expansion of the Creative Cloud subscription model launched in May 2012, Adobe will not release any further versions of its CS applications, although it will continue to sell and support CS6. Instead, it’s betting big on the cloud. “We believe that Creative Cloud will have a larger impact on the creative world than anything else we’ve done over the past three decades,” explained David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager of digital media, in a Monday keynote during which he unveiled a more integrated, collaboration-minded line of Adobe “CC” applications.

Many of the new features require access to Creative Cloud. “‘CC’ represents the next generation of Adobe apps,” he said. “Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, InDesign CC, and all of the other apps will continue to run on your desktop, whether you’re connected to the Internet or not…but the apps will increasingly be part of a larger creative process centered on Creative Cloud.” The major update will be available in June. Adobe exited the first quarter of 2013 with 479,000 Creative Cloud subscribers and expects to reach 1.25 million by the end of the year.

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Blik isn’t sticking to walls. This week the self-adhesive wall graphics company launches Surface Skins, a new line of durable decals that promise to “bring some graphic goodness to humdrum furnishings everywhere.” Designed to cover desks, tables, cabinets, bookshelves, and other smooth surfaces in need of a boost, the removable stickers (which start at $42) debut in a dozen bold designs that are based on the artfully crafted gift wrap of Wrapped, Blik’s design-minded neighbor in Venice, California. Pattern options include a rainbow of Hirstian spots, AbEx-style flourishes, pseudocowhide, or good ol’ plywood. “We had the idea a few years ago and finally found a new material that made Surface Skins a possibility,” said Blik co-founder Scott Flora in a statement issued Monday. “Wrapped’s designs are so graphic, that you can take an ordinary object and make it really dynamic.”
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This is the first brand extension for Departures, the magazine that mails to holders of platinum and centurion American Express cards, and comes packaged with the May issue of the flagship publication. “We’ve wanted to do a real home and design magazine that’s published for true luxurists, whose interests are global and whose style is not built solely around name-brand designers but created organically through their own sense of self, their particular passions and desires,” says Departures editor-in-chief Richard Story, who may have coined the term “luxurists.” Inside, alongside ads by the likes of B&B Italia, Roche Bobois, and Baccarat are features such as “The Master of Accumulation,” a look into the private quarters of W alum-turned-Barneys creative director Dennis Freedman; a celebration of midcentury Honolulu; and a feature on the Persian gardens of L.A.’s Nazarian family.

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So what is actually set to be spun off? You may recall that Kodak recently sold its digital imaging patents for $525 million and then pulled a Polaroid by licensing the Kodak brand name to Los Angeles-based JK Imaging for consumer products such as digital cameras, pocket video cameras, and portable projectors (having shuttered the Kodak digital cameras business last year), as it moves to focus on B2B commercial imaging. The business units involved in the KPP deal are personalized imaging, which includes retail photo kiosks and dry lab systems, photographic paper and workflow solutions, still-camera film products, and “event imaging solutions,” which allows theme parks to sell garishly framed souvenir photos to queasy, fresh-off-the-rollercoaster types. The deal will also divest Kodak of its document imaging business, a line of scanners, software, and professional services.

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• “[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.

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• 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.

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Today Time revealed its annual selection of the 100 most influential people in the world, and while we remain suspicious of any list that includes both Christina Aguilera and Elena Kagan, it’s difficult not to enjoy the logistical wonder that is the Time 100 issue. On newsstands tomorrow, the massive editorial effort commissions a diverse group of notable figures—many of them Time 100 alumna—to write a paragraph or two about the chosen influencers. And so this year we get Richard “I know a thing or two about building spaceships” Branson on SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, Claire Danes‘s clear-eyed look at the uniquely vanity-free and shameless Lena Dunham, and Michael Bloomberg‘s cliché-ridden paen to Jay-Z, who emerges as a 21st century Gatsby that gets the girl–she also made the Time 100–and the American Dream.

Art and design stars that made it onto this year’s Time 100 include Apple’s Jony Ive, Michael Kors, who joins the likes of Uniqlo honcho Tadashi Yanai and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in the “Titans” category; artist Ed Ruscha, who Richard Lacayo likens here to “a SoCal Magritte;” 2012 Pritzker laureate Wang Shu; and Jenna Lyons, executive creative director of J. Crew. “She has made fashion relatable,” writes fashion designer Prabal Gurung of Lyons. “Being fashionable doesn’t mean being trendy; it means having a sense of style. Jenna has made J. Crew more than a brand or a company–it’s a philosophy that believes in style.”

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Twenty years on, Andre the Giant still Has a Posse, and now the subversive sticker campaign that ignited Shepard Fairey‘s worldwide propaganda delivery system gets its cinematic due in Obey the Giant, a narrative film that makes it online debut today (watch it above). Director Julian Marshall is fresh out of the Rhode Island School of Design, Fairey’s alma mater and the setting for the 23-minute film. Based on the true story of Fairey’s first act of street art, Obey the Giant is something of a portrait of the artist as a young skate punk–challenging a big-city mayor (the oleaginous Buddy Cianci, played by Keith Jochim) and the powers that be at art school.

“We moved heaven and earth to make this film,” Marshall (pictured below) told us of the ambitious project, for which he raised $65,000 through Kickstarter last spring. “Pre-production was about six weeks. We had to build an army of people, elaborate sets, a 27,000-pound billboard, and pull together an insane amount of props from the 1990s. It was an amazing time though. My crew and I truly became a family.” The Washington, D.C. native, now based in NYC and at the helm of his own film production company, told us more about how Obey the Giant came to be and the hot-button issue he’s planning to tackle next.

How and when did you first encounter Shepard Fairey’s work?
I first encountered Shep’s work on my first skateboard back in the 90s. I had just bought a World Industries deck and the shop owner slapped an “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” sticker on it.

What compelled you to make a film about him?
One morning, I was lying in bed, staring at the OBEY icon poster on my wall that Shep had given me when I interned for him, and I thought: Well, what better story to tell as a RISD student than a story of a RISD student? I had the connection to Shep having worked for him, so I emailed his wife, Amanda, pitched her the project, and a week later I heard back and she said, “Okay, Shepard’s really excited about the project, come out to L.A. and let’s talk about it.”

How did you decide on the format of this project, in terms of making it a narrative film rather than a documentary?
Documentaries don’t particularly interest me from a directorial standpoint. I love the intensity and edginess of the process of making motion pictures. So naturally, when I first thought of this story, I conceived of it in narrative terms.
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• Design Museum Boston‘s Street Seats International Design Challenge, a competition launched last fall, will culminate with an exhibition of the 20 benches selected as semifinalists. Made out of environmentally-friendly materials, the benches were chosen by a jury out of more than 170 submissions by designers, professional teams, and artists representing 22 states and 23 countries. The grand prize winner and runner-up will be selected at an opening celebration on April 27, when the public will pick their favorite to receive the people’s choice award.

• Yesterday marked the 183rd anniversary of Eadweard Muybridge‘s birth. Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic penned a birthday message to the grandfather of the animated GIF.

• Better living through cars? Consider the possibilities on Thursday, when our friends at Inhabitat host a live webcast of “Design with a Conscience,” a conference where leading California architects and automotive designers will be discussing the intersection of car and building design and how conscious design can spur innovation.

• Someone at the New York Post has been watching the Rachel Zoe Project, prompting the paper to crown Nicholas Kirkwood “the new Manolo.” The widely lauded yet humble Brit knows a good kicker. “I was in two hip-hop songs,” he told the Post. “It was awhile ago. It was a Rick Ross and a Foxy Brown song. Kirkwood apparently rhymes with ’hood!’ ”

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In the artistic arms race of Dick Blick versus Utrecht, we’ve always been partial to the one whose jaunty red palette logo implied a connection to the likes of Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld, and Miffy (whose creator, Dick Bruna, is among the Dutch city’s most famous sons), despite its founding in NYC by an artist in search of better canvas. But Mr. Blick is having the last laugh. Galesburg, Illinois-based Blick Art Materials has acquired Utrecht Art Supplies from private equity firm Topspin Partners LBO, which purchased the company in a secondary buyout in 2007.

The deal adds 45 stores to family-owned Blick’s existing network of 39. “The acquisition of Utrecht gives us a tremendous, well-established brand and greater geographic reach for our brick and mortar channel,” said Blick CEO Robert Buchsbaum in a statement issued Monday (and initially straining credulity among April Fool’s Day announcements such as Richard Branson‘s news of Virgin Atlantic’s new glass-bottomed plane). Financial terms were not disclosed, and no word on Blick’s plans for the Utrecht brand or its lines of paints, canvas, and other art products.

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Superior mousetraps have their public health benefits, but they’ve got nothing on condoms. Reinventing the modest but life-saving device (some 15 billion are produced each year) is among the latest round of “Grand Challenges Explorations,” an initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has previously thrown its substantial resources behind design-minded projects such as rethinking the toilet and, in parternship with IDEO, a human-centered approach to poverty-related challenges. Grand Challenges Explorations is ready to award $100,000 grants to anyone–students, scientists, entrepreneurs–with a transformative condom idea:

We are looking for a Next Generation Condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in order to improve uptake and regular use. Additional concepts that might increase uptake include attributes that increase ease-of-use for male and female condoms, for example better packaging or designs that are easier to properly apply. In addition, attributes that address and overcome cultural barriers are also desired. Proposals must (i) have a testable hypothesis, (ii) include an associated plan for how the idea would be tested or validated, and (iii) yield interpretable and unambiguous data in Phase I, in order to be considered for Phase II funding.

The entry process is as streamlined and agile as the grant-making program itself: simply complete the two-page online application. Puzzled by prophylactics? Check out the other new Grand Challenges topics, which include increasing interoperability of social good data and labor-saving innovations for women smallholder farmers.

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Chalk it up to the privileges and pressures of designing for eternity (“Forever” beats first-class any day) or the security that comes with a future of free Saturdays, but the United States Postal Service is on a roll when it comes to fetching stamps. The agency is following up its Armory Show centennial “Modern Art in America” stamps with a fresh take on flowers, a perpetual crowd-pleaser for philatelists and Johnnies-come-philately alike. Behold “Vintage Seed Packets,” a bouquet of ten self-adhesive blossoms sourced from antique seed packets (pictured at right, printed between 1910 to 1920) and cropped to highlight the detail of flowers from asters to zinnias. Each flower is identified in bold capital letters, lest you mistake a calendula for a phlox. USPS art director Antonio Alcalé is to thank for the design of the stamp booklet, which debuts next Friday, April 5.

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Moleskine is following through on its big plans for little notebooks. The Milan-based company, which affects a storied history but in fact was created by design-savvy publisher Francesco Francheschi in 1997 to revive the sleek jotters favored by the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso, is following up last summer’s foray into pop-up shops (at train stations in Milan and Rome) with permanent stores around the world. The first American Moleskine shop–stocked with notebooks, journals, bags, pens, digital device accessories, and cases–opened Friday at the Time Warner Center in New York City.

Among the Moleskine-y touches at the new ground-floor kiosk (pictured above) is a map floorcovering that “symbolizes the mobile identity of contemporary nomads,” according to the company. The NYC location follows recent openings in London (at Heathrow’s Terminal 4) and Shanghai. A Beijing outpost will bow in May. The timing of Moleskine’s retail push is no coincidence: it’s all systems go for a €500 million ($654 million) initial public offering that should see Moleskine shares begin trading on the Milan stock exchange next week.

Previously on UnBeige:
• Mickey Mouse Makes Mark on Moleskine
• Beyond Notebooks: Moleskine Taps Designer Giulio Iacchetti to Expand Product Line
• Moleskine Enters the Digital Age with Kindle Cover/Notebook Hybrid

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