All Things AIGA

After work today, I had a couple hours to kill before attending a lecture I wanted to see (more on that later). So I ventured up to the AIGA headquarters in the Flatiron District to see 365: A Year in Design, the annual exhibition of the year's design awards live in 3-D technicolor.

First of all, the main gallery was transformed complete with a painting supplies theme by a nonprofit called Publicolor, which teaches at-risk youth the trade of commercial painting (by the way, their site, though still in progress, is really rad). The exhibit itself is actually quite sentimental to me because it serves as a marker for my year anniversary in New York City: I visited last year's 365 show just after I moved here. I truly love the way the various design pieces are displayed here, you get a hands-on look at brochures, catalogs, books, posters, web sites, and commercials (just about every form of design). These are the cream of the crop — they are gratifying as individual artworks, but they also serve their function best.

Next it was a short jaunt down to the Apple store in Soho, where I heard swiss-miss.com founder, Tina Roth Eisenberg speak. Incredibly talented and inspiring, Eisenberg showed us a little background of her work as a designer, even highlighting a data organization/visualization project her firm pitched to The New York Times that reminded me of the Met's Timeline of Art History in the way it structures the information.

She then began to describe her blog, whose original intent was actually to organize her bookmarks! I totally understood, since currently I have 83 bookmarks in 7 folders on my bookmarks bar alone — and I just recently cleared some out. Swiss-miss.com visually organizes and highlights Tina's interests, and she has really good taste. Definitely worth bookmarking and visiting daily!