NEXT: Design Industry News That Matters
by Alissa Walker

Required Reading
The last time STEP checked in with our 2006 Emerging Talent alumni Andre Andreev and Dan Covert, the two had launched dress code, their New York-based graphic design partnership, on top of their day jobs at MTV. But as Andreev and Covert left MTV last June to focus exclusively on their fledgling firm, they pondered a puzzling question: Where were all the books to help young designers like them get started in the real world? "Coming out of school, we found there was little material on getting a job and the transition to professional practice," says Andreev. "Yeah, and the stuff that was out there was pretty boring or outdated," says Covert. So they took it upon themselves to make one.

Partnering with the publishing house of yet another STEP Emerging Talent alumnus, Giorgio Baravalle (2007), Andreev and Covert have written and designed Never Sleep: Graduating to Graphic Design. Chronicling their journey to founding their own firm, Andreev and Covert lay the foundation for an inspirational and often quite humorous story of two determined young designers who seem to have discovered a fast track to professional success. The narrative covers the basics-interviewing, interning, building a portfolio and the balance of life versus computer-but they then solicited essays from their mentors, from Michael Vanderbyl to Eric Heiman, to round out a roster of sturdy, time-tested advice. Now that they're experts on the subject, what do they think is the most important thing for design graduates to remember? "Keep knocking and the door will open," answers Andreev, while Covert says, predictably, "Never sleep."
www.neversleepbook.com

Lessons Learned
Anyone who’s seen Stefan Sagmeister speak during the last few years knows the story: In 1999, he took a sabbatical he named “a year without clients.” Pulling quotes from a diary kept since he was 14, he assembled a definitive list of 100 phrases that have guided his life and began illustrating them in various works of art, from letters stretched in electrical tape on a chain-link fence, to a regenerating digital spider web that “hung” in a gallery, to signs held while dangling out of a building in Manhattan (nearly getting arrested in the process). The book Things I Have Learned In My Life, So Far (Harry D. Abrams) gathers these extraordinarily beautiful pieces together for the first time, and a new site-specific installation at the Wolfsonian in Miami brought Sagmeister’s words to life during Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2007. For the latter event, inflatable monkeys adorned the Wolfsonian, brandishing the phrase “Everybody always thinks they are right.” Inside, the bar held another message, as martini glasses declared “Low expectations” while swizzle sticks continued the thought with the words “are a good strategy.” Invitations for the opening included Sagmeister’s 100 phrases rendered in a surprising medium: printed on a chocolate bar.
www.hnabooks.com, www.wolfsonian.org

Streching Boundaries
"Designers have the ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science and social mores and to convert them into objects and ideas that people can understand and use,” writes Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli in her introduction for the upcoming exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind. This ambitious show hopes to illustrate designers’ new roles as change agents in a rapidly transforming society, with 200 examples that go far beyond simple problem solving. From biomimetic solutions such as the Aqua_ray Robot or Powered Ankle-Foot Prosthesis that render impersonal, cold technology into beautifully lifelike objects, to web-based applications like gmap-pedometer.com (which mashes Google Maps into more usable information), to presenting a revolutionary concept like Biojewellry (rings fashioned from human tissue), Design and the Elastic Mind will focus on how design can bring possibilities to life. While the exhibition explores the relationship between design and science, it truly focuses on the ways that design reaches people. Feb. 24– May 12, 2008.
www.moma.org

Read the full article in the January/February 2008 issue of Step inside design magazine.

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