Five business models. Five design firms. Five presentations. One cocktail hour. Could you ask for a better way to spend a Saturday? We think not, and so we advise you to consider prefacing your ICFF'ing with Smart/Models, a one-day conference presented this Saturday by the New York chapter of AIGA at the TimesCenter, home of The New York Times (and, we might add, some stellar identity work by our friends at Pentagram). Smart/Models offers up piping hot business principals for design principals, and oh, the design principals you'll see:

Jason Fried from 37signals, who went from studio to product developer with wildly popular web-based business tools such as Basecamp; Matt Owens from Athletics with their studio-as-collective model; Joe Duffy and Eric Block from Duffy & Partners in their creative-plus-business partnership; Sylvia Harris from Sylvia Harris, LLC, who has gone from partner to solo, pursuing new kinds of projects with a new model; and Douglas Riccardi from Memo Productions who runs a small design firm while singlehandedly tackling large projects.

Our good pal Debbie Millman dropped us a line late yesterday, letting us know about a fun side project she's in the middle of that she thought you readers of our humble little site might enjoy. So we'll shut up now and let her do the talking:

I will be interviewing Michael Bierut at the HOW Conference next week in Boston and he came up with an idea that I would like to undertake. He thought it might be fun to solicit questions from people *before* the interview via the design community blogs and I was wondering if you might be able to assist us by posting a "request for questions" on UnBeige.

I have interviewed Michael on Design Matters, and in my book (wherein he waxes sentimental about his passion for folding laundry), so the more inventive the questions, the better! (and the more personal!!!)

In the request, folks can send the questions to designmatters@sterlingbrands.com

You've seen the banner ads! Thrilled at the video! Lusted afer the peripherally-related art book! And now, it's nearly upon us: the Mediabistro Circus. Kicking off on the morning of Tuesday, May 20th, the two-day, three-ringed summit will focus on media-changing digital platforms and trends (notably video, mobile, and social). Among the speakers are Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, executive director of Frog Design Tjeerd Hoek, and New York Times digital news editor Jim Roberts. The organizers remain cagey as to whether the show will include such circus staples as trapeze acts (Anderson has always struck as nimble), lion tamers, and tiny cars brimming with clowns, but we at UnBeige will be sitting near the front with our fingers crossed, and we hope to see you there.

Last year's Opportunity Green Sustainable Business Conference at UCLA featured presentations on everything from Live Earth and Ethos Water to sustainable branding and chair design, and so it's never too early to start thinking about this year's event (November 7-8). That's part of the idea behind Room 367, a "networking group for young, green-minded professionals" that launches with an Opportunity Green-hosted party next Tuesday evening at L.A.'s Architecture and Design Museum. Addressing the organic hors d'oeuvre-munching crowd will be Michael Danenberg, COO of GOOD Magazine; Maria Giudice, CEO of Hot Design Studio; and Scott Mattoon, Western U.S. Chief Architect for Sun Microsystems. And after you've flooded yourself with green beverages, check out the museum's current exhibition "After the Flood: Building on Higher Ground," which presents proposed replacement housing and redevelopment in post-Katrina New Orleans. Then take another drink every time someone mentions "Brad" (Mr. Pitt if you're nasty), whose Make It Right Foundation is among the featured contributors to the exhibition.

As we're in the thick of conference season, Rick Poynor has some thoughts about the lot of them over at Creative Review. Hitting both the wide variety of pros and cons, but largely finding many negatives, from lack of sufficient Q&A and participation with invited speakers to book famous names and asking them to just speak about whatever they want, without any specific requests or guidance. Poynor does touch on some conferences that have worked, his views on what conference trends designers seem more drawn to (smaller, more focused, and green-centric), as well as talking to oft-invited speakers like Stefan Sagmeister:

"First and foremost," he says, "I like doing it. I tend to get the most out of conferences that are either not centered on design -- my favourite in that category by far is Ted, where I am just coming from -- or the ones that are in places I normally would not get to visit, like Poona, Shenzhen or Doha." Sagmeister adds that he enjoys being introduced to a new culture by local designers, and all this is fair enough. These are reasons that most people would give for accepting invitations to speak in faraway places: lecture trips provide a little holiday at someone else's expense. We might also mention the career-building opportunity, the adulation and the speaker's fee, which can be considerable.

In case you missed it, New York's Vulture blog (whose logo won second place in the Logo Design Love Awards) has some terrific coverage of this weekend's New York Comic-Con. While its easy to throw up some hesitation there when "comic" and "con" are located in the same phrase, if you're like this writer, who doesn't know much about graphic novels and comics, it's great to see the incredible artistry involved in the medium and Vulture provides loads and loads of scans and conversations, all previews of the best of the best, the nominations for the Eisner Awards. If Maus or Persepolis were the last times you gave graphic novels a try, this'll provide a nice reason to get more into that world.

The third time's a charm for the Seed Conference, which this year will take place on June 6 in Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall on the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. And there's sure to be more to swoon over than those dreamy exposed steel trusses. The one-day conference will focus on design, entrepreneurship, and inspiration with presentations and discussions led by the founders of 37signals (Jason Fried), Segura Inc (Carlos Segura), and Coudal Partners (Jim Coudal). The event will also feature a lunchtime talk on Crown Hall by NPR correspondent Edward Lifson and a presentation by Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff of skinnyCORP, the company born from the community-based t-shirt design concept that is Threadless. Meanwhile, the ebullient Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV will not only speak but also select the wines for the evening's reception. A summer Friday devoted to design and inspiration in a legendary Mies structure accented by the presence of both wine and our own Steve Delahoyde? Best to register now (seats are limited to 270) and beat the seeding frenzy.

Like we've said in posts gone by, they've really kicked things up a notch over at ideasonideas, so much so that we just couldn't keep up, lest we be forever referred to as "that site that does nothing but talk about another site." But this time around, they're breaking a bit from their norm of talking thoughts and doing some coverage of their own after recently attending AIGA's Y Conference out in San Diego. The theme of the event was "Seeds of Change" and was all about trying to "design with a conscience" and it makes sense that they'd ask ideas' Eric Karjaluoto to come talk, given his experience with smashLAB's Design Can Change site. But instead of talking about himself and his appearance, he offers up a great recap of the whole event. It's a great quick read and comes recommended.

We've got the perfect excuse for you to spend a couple days in the dazzling new Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons the New School for Design: AfterTaste 2, a two-day symposium on Friday, April 4 and Saturday, April 5 that will take a critical look at contemporary issues in the field of interior design. In the course of three panels that promise to tackle everything from "the intellectual history of taste" to "the narrative life of things," more than a dozen illustrious designers, scholars, and artists will explore how interior design has come to be a curious blend of environmental psychology, fashion design, product design, architecture, material science, and cultivated taste (hmm, sounds like a certain blog we know). Among the speakers are artist James Casebere, known for his photographs of modeled built environments; the amazing Quay Brothers; Columbia dean Mark Wigley; and I.D. editor in chief Julie Lasky.

The fun begins on April 4 in Parsons' new Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Auditorium. "The auditorium's perforated bamboo side walls slow down the speed of sound as it travels back," architect Lyn Rice told us when we toured the new Parsons building last month. Come for the design discussion, stay for the defying of physical laws!

Remember when we first told you about the Mediabistro Circus, the upcoming technology-focused media conference that will feature such speaker/performers as WIRED editor-in-chief Chris Anderson and Google designer John Wiley? Well, we're happy to report that Mediabistro.com's Laurel Touby has taken our advice to sartorially embrace her role as ringmaster (off with the boa, on with the braid-trimmed cutaway jacket!). Below, she becomes one of the few people in history ever to have held a press conference whilst wearing a top hat: