Trend Report: Piles of Chairs

I’ve started blogging for Metropolis magazine, y’all!  My first trend report was just published.  It is called: Piles of Chairs.

Those of you who went to Milan this year had a lot on your plates. You navigated the ever-expanding array of booths. You deduced which satellite events were skippable. You managed to get some interviews amid exhibitor-buyer talks that increasingly resembled Hungry Hungry Hippos. You even found your way back to the hotel, despite the trains shutting down before you finished your prosecco! And this was all before some volcano erupted!

With all of the distraction, you could be forgiven for overlooking a trend or two. Particularly this one. It’s the latest example of an obscure-but-intriguing furniture-design trope that I would hereby like to dub Piles of Chairs...

Metropolis is one of my favorite magazines and I’m delighted to contribute to their blog.  You can read the whole piece here.

Trend Report: Glop Art

Winsor&Newton must be happy.

Those of you who are contemporary painting nerds might have noticed a trend: one all about squeezing, slathering, scooping and smearing on the paint in generous piles. Great big gloopity gloops that, okay, might remind you of heaps of paint-poo. It’s messy, it’s visceral, but also it’s sculptural and silly and gosh dangit most of the time I find myself loving it. Why? What can I say: I’m a sucker for paint acting like paint.

So, as part of No Smarties‘ burgeoning fine arts coverage (ahem), I am here to bring you a trend report on what swank art bloggeur Joanne Mattera recently dubbed “Glop Art.” Hold onto your aprons kids!

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Trend report: Things That Fall Over

Everybody should head over to SallyTV to check out my report on everyone’s favorite new mini-trend, Things That Fall Over.  You’re welcome, world!

Lots of things seem to be taking a fall lately. Surely you’ve noticed this – everything from the price of an iPhone to the speed of your stolen WiFi is just dropping like a brick. But maybe something you haven’t noticed is that this action is also appearing in design. Not so much in the “look out for that falling piano” sense – that is pretty timeless. What I’m talking about is the “pretend you’re microwaving this thing” sense.  Read more…

Trend Report: Unusual Items Attached to the Head

I would be remiss if I didn’t use these pages to point out the mini-trend of Unusual Items Attached to the Head.  Where is this happening, you may ask, and by whom?  Okay, I wouldn’t say that this is the most widespread phenom.  You may not have even noticed it happening.  Luckily, you have No Smarties to analyze these things for you!  So, without further ado, allow me to present the following…
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Trend Report: Things That Look Digital But Aren’t

As those of you who hang around the internet a lot have probably noticed, design blogs these days have been chock-full of things that look digital but aren’t.

This is only natural for us young designers. We’ve grown up alongside floppy disks, keyboards, printers, pixels – and after all, designers are prone to abstracting their surroundings into decoration. And since decoration came back into style we can do basically anything we want, which is pretty sweet (just as long as it’s not floral-viney things or baroque silhouettes. Let’s all agree to not do that any more, hm?).

So let’s take a look at some examples of this trend… Continue reading…

ICFF 2008: The Tubes

Pretty much every conversation regarding this year’s ICFF begins: “Did you catch ICFF this year?” and ends: “Yeah, I took a nap in the car too.” Where were our fruit beds this year, ICFF? Our humongous UFO sofas? Even a good old-fashioned box of nothing? Nope. Nada. The place was dry. But apart from boredom, there was at least one trend that stood out as unique to this year…wait for it…

Tubes. Tubes! I know. But hear me out.

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