This week, the Environmental Defense Fund is hiring a designer, while Hanley Wood needs an art director. NCARB is seeking a graphic designer/videographer, and Advocate Media is on the hunt for a magazine/web designer. Get the scoop on these openings and more below, and find additional just-posted gigs on Mediabistro.

• Designer Environmental Defense Fund (New York, NY)
• Art Director Hanley Wood (Washington, DC)
• Graphic Designer/Videographer NCARB (Washington, DC)
• Magazine/Web Designer Advocate Media (Dallas, TX)
• Presentation Designer Refinery29 (New York, NY)

Find more great design jobs on the UnBeige job board. Looking to hire? Tap into our network of talented UnBeige pros and post a risk-free job listing. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

“The words graphic designer, architect, or industrial designer stick in my throat, giving me a sense of limitation, of specialization within the specialty, of a relationship to society and form itself that is unsatisfactory and incomplete. This inadequate set of terms to describe an active life reveals only partially the still undefined nature of the designer.”

-Alvin Lustig (1915-55) in The Designer Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom, compiled and edited by Sara Bader, new this month from Princeton Architectural Press

Toymaker Brinca Dada is best known for its stunning modernist dollhouses and “BiModal” building blocks–curvy, asymmetric wooden shapes that we’ve previously suggested deploying in games of Masochist Jenga. Now the promoters of beautiful fun are in the critical final days of a fundraising campaign for a line of thoughtfully designed wooden toys that teach kids simple principles of science. Meet the Stunt Brothers, adorable daredevils that perform classic stunts (human cannonball, anyone?) and tool around in retro vehicles. Help them get out of prototype purgatory and into production by backing the project on Kickstarter. Register your pledge of $1 or more by Friday to help Brinca Dada meet its fundraising goal.

Got an in-the-works project to tell us about? Write today: unbeige [at] mediabistro.com

Famed literary critic Lionel Trilling once described Henry James as a “social twitterer.” Sure, he meant it as an insult, but it makes us feel better about having signed up to twitter ourselves. Look to the official UnBeige Twitter feed, for up-to-the-minute newsbites, event snippets, links of interest, design trivia, and free candy (OK, we’re still working on the physics of that last one). The mediabistro.com tech wizards have added to the sidebar at right a handful of our most recent word bursts (limited to 140 characters), but you can sign up to follow all of our twittering, and start twittering yourself at twitter.com.

Sound works and art fairs are rarely compatible. There’s the impetus to keep moving (must…see…everything), the ambient murmur, and for exhibiting galleries, the difficulty of peeling off fairgoers to don headphones or enter a booth for a bit of aural stimulation. Frieze New York tackles these problems with the help of luxury cars and technology. The fair, which runs through today, partnered with BMW on Frieze Sounds, transforming a sleek fleet of VIP shuttles into sound cocoons for the duration of the commute to Randall’s Island–of course, it helps that the BMW 7 Series has a sound system that suggests a full orchestra is hiding in the trunk. Cecilia Alemani (pictured), curator of Frieze Projects, organized the program of three specially commissioned audio works by Trisha Baga, Charles Atlas and New Humans, and Haroon Mirza, which are also accessible at a listening station inside the fair. Not a VIP? Not in New York? Not to worry: the Frieze Sounds are now posted online for all to enjoy. So sit back, relax, and pretend you’re being chauffeured to an art-filled island inside a shiny new 740i.

At left, the booth of Jousse Entreprise at the inaugural Collective Design Fair, which runs through today at Pier 57 in New York. (Photos: UnBeige)

NYCxDESIGN is upon us, and among our favorite happenings so far is Collective, a new design fair that has brought 22 galleries from around the world to New York’s Pier 57. Spearheading the impressive initiative is Steven Learner, working with a supportive bunch of designers, curators, collectors, and dealers (hence “Collective”). “As an architect and collector, I have visited the greatest design fairs in the world and realized that it was essential to create an event of this caliber in New York,” says Learner, whose architecture and interior design firm managed to make the gritty, 70,000-square-foot hangar feel breezy and inviting. Here are a dozen of our favorite works from the fair.

J. Lohmann Gallery brought a stunning assortment of new works from five European artists. Here, a ceramic and PVC “Tied Up” piece by Steen Ipsen.

The gorilla in the room, shown by Southern Guild of South Africa, is Bronze Age’s “Welcome to My World” (2012), a bronze and timber primate that stands nearly seven feet tall. “Shadow of Time,” a 1989 floor clock by Ron Arad, is at the booth of Stockholm-based Modernity gallery.

Win the rat race with Atelier Ted Noten‘s lucite tote, at Ornamentum.
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What Gatsby? From left, Kate Spade’s book clutch, a Mac decal inspired by the the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, and a t-shirt from the 1925 first edition jacket by Francis Cugat.

Baz Luhrmann‘s adaptation of The Great Gatsby arrived in theaters today, old sport, and everyone from here to Montenegro–little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!–is trying to get a piece of the action. Although we’ve yet to see Meyer Wolfshiem-style molar cufflinks hit stores or Goddard‘s The Rise of the Coloured Empires ascend the bestseller list, the merch is multiplying. Of course, there’s the movie tie-in version of the book, sporting a new cover that one bookseller characterized as “just God-awful.” Brooks Brothers is selling a Gatsby Collection, inspired by costume designer Catherine Martin‘s take on all those heartbreakingly beautiful shirts (Gatsby had his man in London send a fresh batch over each season), and Tiffany & Co. is promoting “jazz-age glamour” pieces, such as this diamond- and pearl-studded Great Gatsby Collection headpiece–yours for $200,000. Fans on a budget closer to that of Nick Carraway can opt for a selection of Gatsby t-shirts after trying their hand at The Great Gatsby video game, the brilliant, Nintendo-style creation of Charlie Hoey and Peter Malamud Smith. But as usual, everyone looks like beautiful little fools when compared to Stephen Colbert, who didn’t let his failure to read Fitzgerald‘s classic stop him from greenlighting a book club segment on it.

What are the most influential buildings in America? Jot down a top ten list and then compare your picks with the structures that get their close-ups in 10 Buildings That Changed America, a special that premieres Sunday night on PBS. Host Geoffrey Baer criscrosses the country on a journey that spans two centuries of architectural innovation, from Thomas Jefferson‘s neoclassical Virginia State Capitol to the swooping stainless steel forms of Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. In an interview with Baer, Frank Gehry reveals the secret behind the profusion of brass handrails in the concert hall and describes winning the 1988 design competition as “the least-likeliest thing that I thought would ever happen to me in my life.” New York is represented by the Seagram Building, which comes in at #7 and with insights from Phyllis Lambert, although three other Gotham landmarks–the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Guggenheim–made the extended list (“ten more buildings that changed America“) posted on the program’s website, where you can watch the individual segments along with web-exclusive additional footage.

The idea of picking up an iPad to commune with nature sounds counterintuitive–until you’ve swiped and tapped through an issue of Nature Conservancy magazine, which mails to the environmental conservation organization’s 650,000 members on a bimonthly basis. “Our digital edition features the same engaging stories and stunning photography as our print magazine, plus exclusive photo galleries, videos, audio commentary, interactive maps, and more,” says creative director Christopher Johnson. “Readers get to experience the places we protect in a whole new way.” The high-tech twist on news from the natural world is a hit with readers. The free Nature Conservancy app, launched last year, has emerged at the top of the iTunes newsstand’s Outdoors and Nature category and is a finalist for best tablet app (interactive single or series) in the Society of Publication Designers annual design competition. Johnson made time to answer our seven questions before heading down to Cipriani Wall Street for tonight’s SPD gala.

What do you consider the most important ingredients in a successful tablet app?
For us, a successful tablet app combines beautiful design, intuitive navigation and engaging interactive features like video, audio and slideshows that allows us to bring readers into our stories in richer, more immersive ways. It’s allowed us to reach a whole new audience of potential supporters with our inspiring stories.

What is your publication design pet peeve?
It has to be design by committee. Inevitably it becomes more about pacifying the group than it does about meeting the original objective.

What has been your best or most memorable design-related encounter?
Years ago, in order to graduate from the design program I attended, students were required to put together a portfolio and go on a mock interview. Our department chair organized interviews with a creative director from a local design firm. That experience had such an impact on me. It made me realize the importance of communicating and connecting with people, that it wasn’t just about the strength of your work. You had to be able to sell your ideas.
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Tom Friedman, Untitled (Hostess Treats), 2013. (Photo: UnBeige)

Twinkies and their eternally shelf-stable sibling snacks have been absent from stores since Hostess shut its doors late last year, but a trio of the company’s beloved treats can be found at Frieze New York, which opens its second edition today on Randall’s Island in Manhattan. Luhring Augustine gallery’s solo booth by Tom Friedman includes this giant Twinkie, Ding Dong, and Sno Ball. The new work, being exhibited for the first time at Frieze, is made of Styrofoam (just like real Hostess foodstuffs!) painted to convincingly evoke spongy, cream-filled goodness. No word on whether Friedman’s snacks were snapped up at yesterday’s VIP preview, but we suspect the work will end up in the hands of megacollector Leon Black. His Apollo Global Management teamed with Metropoulos & Co. earlier this year to acquire Hostess and Dolly Madison products. The $410 million deal closed last month, and four bakeries that produce snacks such as Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and Ho Hos are slated to reopen this summer.