For me, the best thing about Rem Koolhaas’s much-hyped design of Prada’s New York “epicenter,” in the early oughties, was not the 180-foot zebrawood half-pipe so much as the wallpaper—a rotating selection of  slyly subversive graphic themes (with titles like Guilt and Vomit) by the New York design studio 2x4. Now even those of us who can’t afford to shop at Prada can have a little of 2x4’s visual savvy in our daily lives: The wall-graphic company Blik—which sells giant, removable stickers as a decorative alternative to wallpaper and painting—announced today that it is carrying four decal sets by the 2x4 team (including “Modular Icons,” above). The prices range from $25 to $55 per set; check out more photos of the new line after the jump. Read more…

The New York graphic designer Rodrigo Corral has crafted some of the most memorable book covers of the last decade: the sprinkle-dipped hand of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces; the red-graffiti (or is it blood?) silhouette on Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; the gleefully macabre illustrations for all of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels since 1999—including his newest, Tell All, to be released in May. Based on that list, you might assume that Corral specializes in depicting American male angst, which is not entirely accurate; his most recent designs include a box set of Akira Kurosawa films and Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen’s Influence (two projects that, one suspects, have very little else in common.) Earlier this year, I caught up with Corral to ask him about his working methods, the changing face of the design profession, and the differences between designing for Chuck Palahniuk and the Olsen twins.

First, some history: how did you get involved with design and eventually end up with a New York design studio?

I’ve always loved to draw, but it’s been my fascination with popular culture that led me into design. I realize pop culture isn’t so exceptional these days—it’s everywhere and it’s hard to be inspired by it—but while I was growing up, I was affected by TV shows, advertising, and the ideas behind them. Mostly, I was interested in the way visual communication could reach and affect people during the seventies and eighties. TV was different then, and even sitcoms were more meaningful than they seem to be today. They did not feel as safe or politically correct.

At the School of Visual Arts, I learned more about the theories and processes of conceptual design, and I was able to learn on the job afterward in book publishing.  Read more…

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We’ve nicknamed the January issue of Metropolis the “1 - 5 - 10 Issue” for its cover story, called “What Next,” in which architecture and design leaders forecast events in their fields—one, five, and ten years from now. After the jump, watch Metropolis’s creative director, Criswell Lappin, talk about this month’s cover-design process.
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‘Tis the season for new graphic identities, apparently. Already this month, three institutions—the Art Directors Club, Chrysler, and the New York Public Library— have unveiled updated logos. Here’s a quick look at the changes.
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Art Directors Club
Trollbäck + Company’s new design spells out the 89-year-old organization’s name inside a bold pink rectangle—a  major departure from Paula Scher’s original logo, which, according to the folks at Unbeige,was based on Albrecht Dürer’s monogram.

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A Cartagen map of Berlin, color-coded by the users who submitted map data. (Click to view a larger image.)

Scarcely a week goes by without an excited report on Google Maps: the breadth and depth of its coverage, its multiplying features, and all the innovative uses people are finding for it. But could the ubiquitous program be stunting the field of map design?

“Before Google Maps, designers thought much more broadly about what maps could do,” the MIT researcher Jeffrey Warren says. “Now, most mapping on the Web consists just of using Google Maps and sticking pins on it.” In the name of reclaiming some of that creativity, he’s created a software platform called Cartagen, the latest version of which debuted last week. It uses Google’s geographic data as a starting point, but lets people choose which features to include on their maps—streets, parks, churches, and so on—and how to visually represent those features, creating their maps from the ground up. Users can also add new data, which Cartagen can represent not just as points on the map but as outlines, polygons, overlapping shaded clouds—the possibilities are still expanding as Warren’s team brainstorms new potential uses for its creation. Read more…

Photos: Seong Kwon/courtesy Public Art Fund

Richard Woods, a British artist known for covering public spaces with whimsical architecturally-inspired graphics, recently opened his latest installation at New York’s City Hall Park. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, wall and door and roof transforms two security booths plus an interior door in the lobby. Recently, I spoke with Woods—whose work was also featured this summer in an exhibition at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery—about the motives behind wall and door and roof, his impressions of City Hall, and viewer reactions to his work.

Tell me a bit about the development of this project. How did you come up with the idea, and how long did it take to execute?

My public projects regularly take one architectural style and impose a contradictory style onto the surface. I liked the idea of juxtaposing a surface pattern synonymous with low-cost private housing onto this great public building. The work took approximately a week to manufacture in the studio and about the same time to install on site. Read more…

The final July/August cover (left) and an alternate version featuring the Four Seasons

For this month’s cover it was New York vs. Alabama, suits vs. students. Both directions were valid. Each had a pedigree backed by a design legend—Philip Johnson at the Four Seasons, Samuel Mockbee at Auburn University’s Rural Studio. The deciding factor? There were other magazines that could feature the Four Seasons, but only Metropolis could take the Rural Studio’s $20,000 house and put it on the cover. I wonder how many dinners on 52nd Street $20K buys.

The final June cover (left) and an alternate version. Illustration: Aesthetic Apparatus

“It took the editors around here a couple of tries to get used to saying their name without giggling,” says Metropolis’s creative director, Criswell Lappin, of Aesthetic Apparatus, the Minneapolis-based firm that illustrated this month’s cover. “By then we had found one of their concepts particularly com­pel­ling: the idea that the future of green building (in this case, the new headquarters of the U.S. Green Building Council, in Washington, D.C.) would involve utiliz­ing existing structures. We just needed to deter­mine whe­ther it should be type- or image-driven. After Michael Byzewski put in a tad more quality time, we went with this image—a generic-looking concrete structure—but not before pumping up the type a bit.”

For our May cover we approached Brian Collins to create a conceptual illustration for the winning Next Generation project. He and his talented team—John Fullbrook III, Timothy Goodman, and Jason Nuttal—passed along a handful of smart directions, but the pinwheel/pylon juxtaposition really piqued our interest. That concept turned out to be the one John felt the strongest about as well, and he was excited about developing it further. The final cover—fun, bold, and hopeful—clearly reflects our winner’s idea. And be on the loookout for pinwheels; they’re likely to pop up in the oddest places…

Left: an alternate version of the May cover; click to view a larger image.

Want people to recognize what a graphic-design aficionado you are, but tired of lugging around that Josef Müller-Brockman monograph everywhere you go? Skreened’s new Graphic Design Heroes T-shirts can help. The sartorial homages to Paul Rand, Milton Glaser, Wim Crouwel, and 14 other masters were created by Paul Nini, a professor of design at the Ohio State University. (Nini previously created a line of Great Typefaces shirts.) But graphic-design students should be careful not to get caught wearing one to class, lest you make the equivalent of the dreaded band T-shirt faux pas.