1. You’ll be presenting at the upcoming ABSTRACT Conference in Portland, Maine. Can you give us a sneak preview of your presentation?
I’ll be talking about the four or five guiding principles of the ongoing Fast Company redesign. For previous titles, I’ve always employed specific design frameworks based on an editorial idea, so I’ll be sharing how that approach works, and doesn’t work, for Fast Company.

2. What is your greatest graphic design or publication design pet peeve?
People who don’t create content passing judgement on those who do.

3. What is your best or most memorable design-related encounter?
Three things: 1) Working for many years under Bob Newman, and trying to practice daily the lessons he taught me; 2) My first SPD Board meeting in 2002, and sitting at the same table with people like Diana LaGuardia, Janet Froelich, and especially Fred Woodward, who is the reason I’m a designer; 3) Having the opportunity to get to know George Lois, which is an experience and a privilege all it’s own.

4. What do you consider your proudest design moment?
Seriously, it’s every single day that I get to make a living doing a job I love. My father worked as a steel smelter for one company all of his life, from the age of 16 (he told the company he was 18) to 62. He never understood what I did, but he saw that I loved it. It’s a luxury he never had.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Tonight is the premiere of Bravo‘s newest docu-series, Million Dollar Decorators, and if you can make it past the unctuous opening montage and obligatory round of sassy, arms-akimbo introductions (“I don’t follow trends, I set them,” says Jeffrey Alan Marks, smoothing a lushly textured rug and plopping down on a coordinating settee), you’re in for an entertaining peek into the lives of five Los Angeles-based interior designers: Marks, Martyn Lawrence-Bullard, Kathryn Ireland, Mary McDonald, and Nathan Turner. These high-charisma characters offer plenty of reasons to watch, but having previewed the series (thanks, Bravo!), we offer eight additional enticements to tune in.

UnBeige’s Eight Reasons to Watch Million Dollar Decorators

8. The designers’ offices. Not up for watching the beat-the-clock challenge of furnishing Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne’s new apartment? Cut the sound and delight in the glimpses of the designers’ workspaces, including McDonald’s glam/mod aerie and Ireland’s Provence-infused pool house. And while Lawrence-Bullard’s home teems with exotic rugs and Hermès Balcons Du Guadalquivir china, his offices are dominated by white lacquer and inspired accents—fur-covered task chairs, anyone?

7. The seersucker blazers. We’re suckers for seersucker, and the premiere episode doesn’t disappoint. For those inclined to TV-based drinking games, take a sip anytime someone wears a seersucker or a plaid, or says “madness.”

6. The birthday parties. This series runs for eight episodes, and there are about as many elaborate parties. Tonight’s premiere features a birthday bash for Ireland, whose three teenage sons offer to do the cooking (weak-stomached viewers may want to turn away during this portion of the program). The trio gets waylaid by preparing tortilla chips from scratch, so the dinner menu is abridged. No worries, says Ireland. “Give [the guests] enough tequila and we can skip the middle course and go straight to the cake…if there is cake.”

5. The design concepts. “I’m kind of thinking of doing antlers, but in a hip way. There’s nothing ski house about it,” says McDonald of her concept for a new project. Meanwhile, Marks advises, “You should always decorate a room and then put one thing in there that’s an accident.” [Cut to: the wooden rowboat suspended upside-down from the ceiling of his living room.]
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Remember last year when Lady Gaga was named the rebooted Polaroid brand’s Creative Director? Or earlier this year when, at the Consumer Electronic Show, the three products she’d reportedly helped develop for the company received their high-profile debut? Well, hot off the heels of the release of Gaga’ new album, the first fruit of that collaboration were finally made available this weekend for public consumption. Zdnet reports that the GL10, a mobile printer from its Gaga-connected Grey Label line, has been made available for purchase at Bloomingdale’s flagship store in Manhattan and for pre-order on Polaroid’s site, shipping sometime in early to mid-June. While aesthetically appealing, and technically interesting, in that the small device will print wirelessly from cell phones, cameras, or anything with Bluetooth connectivity, to this writer, it isn’t the most thrilling release. While we’re sure they’ll sell, both to the gadget-inclined and the Gaga-enthused, we’d much rather have seen a quicker release of the GL20, a pair of glasses with a camera built in that allowed users to immediately display photos onto the lenses themselves. It’s an utterly ridiculous product, and likely won’t sell as well as something that’s occasionally useful in the real world, but surely would have captured a bit more attention and excitement than a mild-mannered printer. But we’ll reserve any more judgment than that until we’ve seen the GL10 in the flesh.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Another Chicago-centric retail story from over the weekend. Fashion designer/general media personality, Isaac Mizrahi, was to have his own storefront open up in the city, in the swanky Gold Coast area near downtown, a second location in addition to his shop in Manhattan. According to the Chicago Tribune, Mizrahi’s company leased out the space starting back in the fall, with a planned opening on April 1st. However, as that date has long since come and gone, with no store in sight, the space’s future was in question. Now the building’s owner, Rush Walton, has sued the company, asking for close to $700,000 for defaulting on its lease. Here’s a bit more from the paper’s report on the suit:

“Shortly after” Mizrahi took possession of the space, the designer’s firm notified Rush Walton “that it would never open the planned Isaac Mizrahi store and would not make the required rent payments,” the lawsuit said.

Rush Walton began proceedings March 1 to take back the property, winning a court order to do so April 11 and issuing Mizrahi’s firm a formal notice of default May 6.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

For fashion retailer Urban Outfitters, this long weekend past couldn’t come quickly enough. Just before everyone left the office for barbecues, road trips, and hopefully some memorializing along the way, an accusation was leveled against the company by Chicago designer Stevie Koerner, who claimed the company had stolen the concept behind a popular set of necklaces she’d been making for her Etsy-based shop and were now selling them in stores and on their website. “My heart sank a little bit,” she wrote, “The World/United States of Love line that I created is one of the reasons that I was able to quit my full-time job. They even stole the item name as well as some of my copy.” While the retailer is no stranger to these sorts of accusations, something about this allegation took hold and by the end of the week, was everywhere, swamping Twitter and landing mentions in surprising places, like on the Apple-focused Daring Fireball. By the time pop star Miley Cyrus tweeted, “Not only do they steal from artists but every time you give them money you help finance a campaign against gay equality,” a reference to the company’s founder’s contributions to the campaign of Rick Santorum, it was all over. Originally remaining silent during the early days of the controversy, Urban Outfitters eventually issued a statement, saying that a) they did steal the idea and b) that Koerner’s idea wasn’t original to begin with, and even vaguely accused her of copying the idea from others. “…We believe the media response to her campaign is threatening to impact the dozens of independent designers we work with on a daily basis,” the company wrote on their blog. “For many of them, having their work sold at Urban Outfitters is a very positive turning point in their careers, and we will not allow their hard work and commitment, or ours, to be undermined by these false allegations.” Fortunately for the company, following that burst of negative press, the weekend came and the fires seemed to die out a bit (until, of course, people like us decided to do a wrap-up post about it). Between then and now, they also apparently decided to pull the offending product from both the site (now just a blank page) and from their stores as well. And meanwhile, Ms. Koerner received a flood of support and what sounds like more orders than she’d ever expected in record time.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Motion graphics by Erick Fletes

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Following in the footsteps of organizations ranging from the U.S. Green Building Council and the Walker Art Center to Google and Adobe, Knoll is the winner of the 2011 National Design Award for Corporate and Institutional Achievement. The honor recognizes the East Greenville, Pennsylvania-based company’s use of design as a strategic tool and its efforts to advance the relationship between design and quality of life. Founded in 1938 by Hans Knoll on the conviction that good design enriches lives, the company pioneered the planning of office interiors under Florence Knoll (who turned 94 on Tuesday), championed modern design and innovative manufacturing processes, and has worked with designers from Alvar Aalto to Otto Zapf. “Everyone who has ever been involved in designing, manufacturing, or selling our products deserves credit for, and should take pride in, this award,” said Andrew Cogan, CEO of Knoll.

It’s been a busy May for the company, which earlier this month celebrated the opening of “Knoll Textiles, 1945–2010,” an exhibition on view through July 31 at the Bard Graduate Center, and is now completing final preparations for NeoCon in Chicago. So what does Knoll have in store for the mega trade show? “We will introduce ReGeneration, the latest member of the Generation family of chairs,” Cogan told us of the new streamlined piece designed by New Zealand-based Formway. Made from fewer parts, the chair uses post-consumer recycled content from soda bottles in its structure as well as corn-based renewable material and bio-based upholstery foam. Among other big Knoll NeoCon debuts are “enhancements to our Antenna Workspaces and Reff Profiles furniture lines, a new collection of conference tables designed by Lehman Smith McLeish, and the Krusin Seating Collection for KnollStudio, as well as new textiles from Dorothy Cosonas and Suzanne Tick.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The seemingly non-stop push to get Donald Fisher a posthumous building has inched closer to reality this week with the release of some architectural renderings of SFMOMA‘s planned expansion to house the founder of Gap‘s massive modern art collection. You might recall that Fisher suddenly passed away in the late summer of 2009, shortly after his many, ultimately failed attempts to have a brand new museum build inside San Francisco’s Presidio had finally come to an end and he decided to just pass everything along to the SFMOMA. Following his passing, last year went by in a blur, with the museum announcing that, within just six months of his death, it had already raised $250 million to help build the wing, an unprecedented amount in such a short amount of time. Then, of course, came the starchitect-heavy shortlist and the announcing of a commission that was eventually handed over to the Norwegian firm Snøhetta. Now the museum and the firm have publicly released what they’re calling “Preliminary Sketches,” showing the new structure that dwarfs their current building in height and length but is a bit thiner in the middle. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s John King reports that the new building would offer “seven levels of gallery space topped by two floors of offices” and would connect to the rear of original building. And to get the new building in, the SFMOMA will have to demolish to existing structures, including a fire station, which the museum has already pledged to relocate and rebuild with the help of a $10 million gift to the city. It’s still very early days, but if all goes as planned, the new wing is set to open sometime in 2016.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In the wake of this morning’s announcement of the recipients of the 2011 National Design Awards, we’ll be spending the next few days tracking down a few of the winners, thrusting a non-functioning microphone in their faces, and breathlessly asking, “You’ve just won a National Design Award, what are you going to do next?” First up: Rick Valicenti, the winner in Communication Design, who the jury lauded for “graphics [that] bristle with innovation, imagination, curiosity, and craft” as well as his “leading presence in design as practitioner, educator, and mentor.”

The founder of Chicago-based design collaborative Thirst is no stranger to major honors (he received the AIGA Medal in 2006) or the Cooper-Hewitt (his work has been included in the musem’s National Design Triennial), but word of his NDA win still came as a pleasant shock to Valicenti. “Both surprise and delight,” is how he described his reaction as he prepared to follow Ingo Maurer to the podium at the Gravity Free conference today in San Francisco. “To be recognized at this level is an indescribable professional reward which both validates the circuitous path I made through design as well as reminds me that the time practicing design is about more than simply the artifacts,” Valicenti told us. “It’s about being passionate, curious, generous, humble, and hanging out on some edge.” Any celebration plans? “All in all, I am soaking it in and enjoy the supportive outpouring of so many friends and colleagues.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

While the AIA‘s Architecture Billings Index has remained either flat for months or, most recently, dipped back into the negative, that might not indicate that everything is still so rough and tumble inside the business of building. Architectural Record reports that firms are now slowly beginning to hire again, following now years of massive purges across the industry. The cite a number of firms, from the smaller shops, like Crawford Architects in Kansas City, who have recently hired two new employees, bringing them up to 15 in total (down from 23 at its peak), and the large, like mega-firm Gensler, who laid off nearly a quarter of their staff during the great financial crippling, but have now opened several new offices internationally and hired “several hundred employees” to fill the ranks. Still, even if the trend continues and firms gradually start hiring again in (hopefully) increased numbers, considering how many experienced architects were laid off during the period, and how few worried students were graduating with new degrees in architecture, the fight for employment is sure to be tough for at least the next few years. Here’s a bit more from AR‘s report:

Indeed, firms that are making job offers are still nervous about the future. Johnson Fain, of Los Angeles, saw its staff plummet from 108 to 40 in a year’s time; it’s now back up to 50 based on inquiries about mixed-use local developments, says principal Larry Ball. But developers are slow to fully commit to those projects, a trend that gives the recovery a scattershot vibe. “It’s all speculative,” Ball says. “I don’t see things going gangbusters yet.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New York’s High Line was already a big draw for tourists and locals alike, particularly when it finally gets around to being comfortable to be outside again. And while the opening of the second section of the High Line was also destine to attract flocks of people, if not outright floods, it’s sure to be even more crowded with this week’s announcement by the project’s organizers, Friends of the High Line. This summer, they’ve been lent an empty lot on the corner of 15th St. and 10th Ave. by developers who plan to start building a residential building there later this fall. Before that gets built, the lot will be converted into “The Lot,” a temporary bar and event space, all overseen by celebrity chef Tom Colicchio and designed by the original High Line crew, James Corner and Diller Scofidio & Renfro. The bar, called The Lot on Tap, will reportedly seat around 350 and serve “domestic wines, local beers, and non-alcoholic sodas” and “will be located directly under the High Line, with the historic structure’s steel girders flanking either side of the bar’s counter.” For food, Colicchio will curate a revolving set of food trucks that will pop in to feed the hungry, parched, or drunk. These are already set to include favorites like Red Hook Lobster and the recent NY arrival, Coolhaus. AOL has also latched on and will be running something called Rainbow City, a temporary installation that will offer live music, film screenings, and other usual outdoor fare. So all that said, if you’re planning to swing by this summer to see the new wing of the High Line, expect some crowds. Not that you weren’t already.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.