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Enhance your resume and your vacation photos with the mediabistro.com mothership’s two-day crash course in Adobe Photoshop, back by popular demand. In one short weekend (March 3-4) you can get up and running on the program of programs—the subject of many an ethical debate—under the guidance of images whiz Rob Tannenbaum, a photo editor who has worked for The Martha Stewart Show and wields a master’s degree in newsroom graphics management. Learn more here.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

Here are two things we didn’t know up until just a second ago: 1) that musician and longtime New Yorker, Moby, is now living in Los Angeles (apparently we must’ve missed this NY Times profile on the castle he bought in the Hollywood Hills), and 2) that, as of last week, he’s recently started a new architecture blog, the perhaps over-aptly named Moby Los Angeles Architecture Blog. Thus far, it isn’t the sort of site that you’ll glean a lot of factual information from, not even such info as who the architect was who built the building he’s profiling on that day. Instead, his very well-made photos are accompanied by leisurely thoughts on Los Angeles’ architecture (all residential thus far) and where that building-of-the-day seems to fit within the city. It’s certainly an interesting, somewhat meditative departure from our usual architectural reads, but we’ve already bookmarked it and are already awaiting more. Here’s a bit of the description of his new site from his first post:

a daily (or weekly) collection of some of the random and strange and banal and beautiful architecture i see in l.a. most cities have beautiful architecture. but most cities have beautiful architecture that is prominently displayed and relatively easy to find (think: chrysler building, sacre couer, st peters, sydney opera house, etc). one of the very odd things about l.a is that the most beautiful architecture in l.a is hidden on tiny streets that very few people will ever see. and the architecture in l.a is, generally, of a very domestic and modest scale (probably facilitating it’s strangeness).

The design whizzes over at C&G Partners have many talents, but among the most mind-blowing is their ability to transform grayish-yellowish mountains of historical documents and artifacts into visually stunning, user-friendly exhibits and displays. Feast your eyes (and your web browser) on their latest archival triumph: a website for The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. A C&G team led by partner Maya Kopytman (working in collaboration with Chicago-based web development firm Palantir) created a site that builds on the graphic identity established for a related traveling exhibition that the firm completed last year. At the core of the site, which launched yesterday, is a new digital archive for The King Center Imaging Project, a JPMorgan Chase & Co.-backed initiative to “bring the works and papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. to a digital generation.” Browse the archive to pore over King’s handwritten notecards and telegrams or zoom in on a Flip Schulke photo of MLK enjoying lunch with his family in 1964, under the watchful gaze of Ghandi, whose image hangs on a wall above them. Next up: more meticulously scanned and eminently searchable letters, speeches, drafts, notes, and photos. The King Center Imaging Project digital archive will eventually contain about a million documents.

New year, new masthead additions! Over at Fortune, Emily Kehe (pictured) has been doing the heavy lifting on the art side since August, when creative director John Korpics left the Time Inc. title to get sporty, as vice president and creative director for print and digital media for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. Kehe jumped into designing Fortune covers and layouts, overseeing the iPad edition, and managing the department, according to managing editor Andy Serwer. “So much so that when it came time to find a permanent replacement for John, and while we did consider other candidates, I really needed to look no further than a few doors down to Emily’s office,” he wrote in an e-mail announcing Kehe’s appointment as design director. A native of Colorado, she studied publication design and photography at the University of Miami School of Communication before working at publications including The Miami Herald and The Boston Globe. Kehe began her career at Fortune as a freelancer in 2008 and later returned to help Korpics with the magazine’s 2010 redesign.

And over at New York, editor-in-chief Adam Moss and photography director Jody Quon have tapped Christoper Anderson as the magazine’s first photographer-in-residence, a position created both to showcase his work and deepen New York’s commitment to original photography. “We thought that we could be the ideal outlet for Chris to explore his painter’s palette of image-making,” said Quon in a statement issued Monday by the magazine. “Chris’s commitment to journalism combined with his range of artistry makes him the perfect partner for the magazine.” Anderson, an acclaimed photographer and member of Magnum Photos, will shoot editorial work exclusively for New York on an array of subjects in a full range of styles, from photojournalism to portraiture to conceptual work. His photography will appear regularly beginning with this week’s issue, which features Anderson’s surveillance-style photos in its “Classifieds” cover story.

Eastman Kodak has been trying to stave off bankruptcy for some time, but the floundering photo company now looks bound for Chapter 11. Late last month, Kodak elected a new president—former general counsel Laura Quatela—and inked a deal to sell its Eastman Gelatine subsidiary, moves that were touted as part of the company’s focus on its intellectual property business and “digital growth initiatives,” respectively. But it might be too little, too late. A bankruptcy filing could come as soon as this month or early February if the company is unsuccessful in selling off some of its patent portfolio, according to a report published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. “That Kodak is even contemplating a bankruptcy filing represents a final reversal of fortune for a company that once dominated its industry, drawing engineering talent from around the country to its Rochester, N.Y., headquarters and plowing money into research that produced thousands of breakthroughs in imaging and other technologies,” write Mike Spector and Dana Mattioli, who also note Kodak’s failure to capitalize on the digital camera invented by the company—in 1975. Meanwhile, Moody’s has just downgraded Kodak’s debt due to the bankruptcy buzz.

In a year studded with beautiful new volumes by and about artists and designers ranging from Alexander McQueen to Andrea Zittel, these are the five that we found most inspiring.

Autobiography of a Fashion Designer: Ralph Rucci (Bauer and Dean) by Ralph Rucci, with photographs by Baldomero Fernandez
Fashion designer and artist Ralph Rucci has been betrayed by key members of the fashion press, who should have made him a household name years ago, but critics, curators, and connoisseurs have picked up the slack. This just-published volume is a fascinating follow-up to Ralph Rucci: The Art of Weightlessness (Yale University Press), published in 2007 to accompany the Museum at FIT’s exhibition of the designer’s work. Like Rucci’s exquisite creations, Autobiography of a Fashion Designer rewards patience and close-looking, with pages of lush color photos and descriptions of the couture techniques used (and in some cases pioneered) in the Chado Ralph Rucci atelier. Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Autobiography (1980), a kind of exhaustive visual index of the artist’s life, this book also tells the stories behind 20 objects Rucci has collected in his lifetime. It’s a fitting tribute to an uncompromising designer with the soul of artist.

Alexander Girard by Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee (Ammo Books)
Treat yourself to the amazing Alexander Girard mega-monograph by designer Todd Oldham and writer Kiera Coffee. The product of nearly four years of research and, at 672 pages, an innovative scheme of printing and binding, this book is a must for any design lover. Oldham was granted exclusive permission to sift through the fastidiously kept archives of Girard (1907-1993), who is best known for his folk art-infused textiles for Herman Miller but also designed everything from buildings to typography. “I’d estimate that 90 percent of the work in the book hasn’t been seen,” Oldham told us earlier this year. “Wait ‘til you see the stuff from his early design career, in the ‘20s.” And take a closer look at the image credits: many of the archival photos were taken by frequent Girard collaborator Charles Eames.
Read more

This next item in the UnBeige Gift Guide combines four of our favorite favorite things: modernism, minimalism, photography, and Todd Eberle. A longtime contributor to Vanity Fair, Eberle defies categorization: one day he’s revealing the beauty in overlooked architectural spaces (abstracted elevator banks, ceilings, bathrooms) or immortalizing the works of Donald Judd and the next he’s making a luminous portrait of the uber-multitasker: Martha Stewart. Part of the pleasure of paging through Eberle’s 30-year career in Empire of Space (Rizzoli) is that the book, designed by Richard Pandiscio, unfolds as a series of paired images, visual juxtapositions inspired by the Walker Evans book, First and Last. “It allowed me absolute freedom to mix subjects,” Eberle has said. “I wanted to have my first book represent what I do. I think it’s hard to come up with a point of view when making a book and the pairings solved many things for me.”

Have a suggestion for the UnBeige Gift Guide? E-mail us at unbeige@mediabistro.com.

Previously on the UnBeige Gift Guide:
♦ A is for Adjaye’s African Metropolitan Architecture
♦ B is for Brinca Dada Bennett House
♦ C is for Can Can Pendant Light
♦ D is for Dress by D-Crit

This just in: Dwell is a wrapping up a busy 2011 with two new hires. The San Francisco- and New York-based shelter magazine—turned burgeoning media empire—has poached its new photo director, Anna Alexander (at top right) from Conde Nast’s Wired, while senior editor Kelsey Keith (at bottom right) will bring her experience as the founding editor-in-chief of Architizer and New York editor of Curbed.com to Dwell‘s front-of-the-book section, In The Modern World, and to features for the magazine. Other recent additions to the Dwell masthead include publisher Brenda Saget and art director Alejandro Chavetta, hired from San Francisco Magazine. Look for the freshly renovated team to hit the ground running in 2012.

With artist Ai Weiwei gaining ever-more international praise and growing more vocal in speaking out against the Chinese government, as well as vowing to fight against the tax evasion charges he’d been hit with, it felt like it was only a matter of time before his perpetual sparing partner hit back. Now it looks to have either just happened or is but the first step in the return volleys. The government has reportedly taken in his assistant for questioning over one of the artist’s pieces, “One Tiger, Eight Breasts,” which featured Weiwei and four women, all nude, sitting in a studio. Claiming the assistant was spreading pornography on the internet, he was ultimately released, but now Weiwei believes that this might be the next major charge leveled at him by the government (an initial charge of distribution of pornography was brought up during his mysterious, three-month detainment this summer, but the authorities seem to have wanted to focus more on the tax charges). Since his assistant’s release, in a show of solidarity, a number of fellow Chinese artists and other international supporters have uploaded nude photos of themselves individually or in groups, including one “with images of Ai’s head superimposed over their genitals and nipples.” In response to this latest effort by the government, Weiwei has said, “If they see nudity as pornography, then China is still in the Qing dynasty” and has called upon his allies to harass state-run media outlets and those paid by the government to denounce him online, by providing their phone numbers on his Twitter feed.

Thomas Struth’s 2009 photo of pharmaceutical packaging laboratories in Buenos Aires

“To my thinking, the technology pictures are a lot about the brain and about entanglement and this belief in progress and an investment in this slightly hysterical belief in improvement through science and technology. Why is it that people can agree on plasma physics or sending satellites to space for the latest GPS system, but in the social realm we seem to be as incapable as ever? This is a big contradiction. Most of the time these inventions are sold as glitzy, perfect and promising until the first disaster happens. I wanted to take off some of the clothes and show the interior more directly, behind the scenes of some of these places. At the same time I wanted to show them in a manner that makes you understand the fascination for these things.” -Thomas Struth