Design, Products
October 10, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
We’ve been focused on Magis in this series but today we look to Italian furniture company Mattiazzi. Back in June we announced this exciting partnership and now, with Nitzan Cohen’s He Said and She Said chairs (pictured above) available at the Herman Miller store, we finally can share the elegant designs with you.
“Mattiazzi has a history with design, craft, industrial processes, and sustainable practices that makes them a natural fit with Herman Miller,” said Jack Schreur, Vice President of Herman Miller Classics and Retail. “In the past, when you needed a wood supplier that could do the impossible, you called Mattiazzi. Today, they’ve taken their expertise in wood manufacturing to a new level, partnering with leading designers.” Those leading designers include Nitzan Cohen (pictured above), Sam Hecht, and Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec.
Here we look at Mattiazzi’s collaboration with Nitzan Cohen. Cohen, who graduated from the renowned Design Academy Eindhoven, Holland, worked as a designer and project leader in Konstantin Grcic‘s studio n in Munich. He finally opened his own studio in 2007 and his client list now includes BMW-Group, Diesel, Mattiazzi, and Bree.
“It’s a joyful project with wonderful people,” said Cohen of his collaboration with Mattiazzi. “It’s a great example that no matter what technology one has (and Mattiazzi has the latest in CAD wood working) it is still all about the basics, about carpentry work, an intuition for wood together with years of experience and most of all tons of love for it all.”
This year Cohen was tapped to design the Mattiazzi stand (above and below) at the Milan furniture fair. Dubbed “Mirror! Mirror!” Cohen writes “Our installation for Mattiazzi’s 2011 collection was made solely of raw chip-boards, large mirror panels and light bulbs, the installation is an abstract homage to old mirror rooms and analogue times when bare light bulbs were used as a highlight.” The result is theatrical, a stage that’s perfect for Cohen’s elegant chair designs.
Balance, Design, Products, Technology
July 22, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
Where we’ve been this week…
1. AIA’s Architect Barbie’s House Competition. Yes, that is a home office complete with an Eames Lounge Chair (above).
2. Rupert Murdoch and the “pie” incident. I was amazed by two things here – how quickly Murdoch’s wife Wendy Deng literally jumped to her husband’s defense and how good the Eames Aluminum Group Chairs look in that deep green!
3. Beyond the Cubicle by Allison Arieff. Arieff’s article includes an interview with our very own Lifework contributors – artist Rebecca Niederlander and architect Iris Anna Regn.
4. Web Design Ledger for their post on excellent iPad Apps. Check out the Awesome Note HD as a good organizing tool (below).
5. Seed Walker for Parneet Gosal’s piece tracking 5 emerging trends on Google+ – which has acquired more than 10 million users.
6. Coudal Partners for their link to these amazing 1960s Japanese office spaces (above). Herman Miller abounds!
7. The Journal of Dustin Heerkens for its beautifully-presented content covering design, art, hotels and food in East Asia (below). My next vacation spot may just have to be the Waterhouse.
8. Grain & Gram for raising up our work lives to an elegant art. I love the piece on butcher Ben Runkle.
9. Fox Johnston Architecture. These two Australian architects do amazing work and this website is a testament to their careful eye. I can see working away on my laptop from this sofa.
10. DWR’s Design Notes for their post on a cool little Vipp Bin trashcan icon to replace the wire basket that now sits on your desktop.
Technology
May 17, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
Full disclosure: I blog on the internet. And, yes, that involves a lot of time spent reading lengthy walls of text on my MacBook screen in the name of research. So when I heard somebody had developed a font that was specifically designed to be the best for reading text on bright screens, I knew I wanted to test it out for myself, and you can too.
The awesome in-house designers at the awesome font foundry FontShop already launched Axel, a font optimized for readability in Excel (and other) spreadsheets viewed on screen. But now they’ve expanded their offerings to Azuro, a font designed to make reading walls of text on the web easier to read.
Assuming you’re reading this on the screen of your phone, tablet or computer, you can check out the difference Azuro makes on this wordy email compared to the furniture of e-mail fonts, Arial and Verdana, in the GIF image below:
Cool, right? If you want to get your hands on Azuro, head over to Font Shop, where you can get a set of 4 variations (regular, italic, bold and bold italic) for just $19.90, either in Web formats or in OpenType with TrueType outlines for Windows or Mac.
By Taryn Fiol
Font Feed via Gizmodo
This story appears in partnership with Unplggd, a site for people who embrace technology and design in their home.
Balance
January 14, 2011
By Cerentha Harris
Ten spots around the web that caught our attention this week:
1. DWR’s blog Design Notes for Joel Pirela’s awesome eye chart.
2. Mocolo (even with that annoying horizontal design) for the cool-looking Charcoal House by Atelier RZLB.
3. Pinterest for some incredible home work spaces.
4. M-Dashing by our very own Amy Feezor for the blog’s new design.
5. Australian Vogue Living for its excellent archiving of back issues.
6. Little Scraps of Paper for the interviews with creative people on how they develop ideas.
7. Time magazine for a well-written piece by John Cloud on how exercise won’t make you thin.
8. Core77 for the Powers of 10 video competition. Deadline extended to 2/2/11.
9. The 3six5 project for its brilliant daily reporting by 365 different writers.
10. UK’s LivingEtc for the color-packed home office gallery.