🌙 “Architecture, at its best, is the power to make the world a little bit more like our dreams.” Our architectural spirit animal is most definitely @BjarkeIngels, his architecture group, @big_builds, designs "buildings that defy convention." Dive in to explore our favorite projects they’ve launched around the world.
Read More📊 File this one under #GraphicGenius: The latest addition to our office bookshelves is by the witty Michelle Rial - her book of artistically illustrated and inventive infographics, “Am I Overthinking This?” is a fantastic compilation of her creative charts over the years - spanning the vast meme-scape of millennial tropes.
Read More☁️ If you could re-live your dreams, what would they look like? We went on a hunt to find out exactly that. In the wide sea of VR, we were pleasantly surprised with our recent field trip to the newly minted Museum of Future Experiences in SoHo - an experience that will stay with you, far after you’ve exited their doors.
Read More🇫🇷 We’re studying his commitment to a single idea, the parabola, expressed through his visionary fashions, iconic architecture and sculptural industrial and furniture design. At 97, he continues to stay curious and invent his vision of the future, which is fascinating to say the least - hop aboard the Cardin Express with us!
Read More💆🏼 Re: #SlowLiving x #HumanCenteredDesign - We’re studying how to authentically incorporate these principles to our latest experiential design for retail, a few thoughts: some people have reverse-engineered SLOW as an acronym - Sustainable, Local, Organic, and Whole, specifically in regards to Food Sourcing. Read more on this philosophy after the jump.
Read More✈️ Curious Architecture Lovers seek Eero Saarinen’s 1962 Utopia - in the form of the infamous TWA Terminal at JFK Airport. This architectural icon lived as a closed time capsule since 2001. This month, it makes its comeback as the @TWAHotel, where Space Odyssey dreams can come true #hellodave
Read More🌵Just in time for Spring, DesertX lured us to Palm Springs, a city rich in mid-century style, architecture and retro signage - three things we love and tend to seek out. On through April 21, 2019 in the Coachella Valley, this freshly minted biennial is a brilliant fusion of art and environment, where contemporary artists stage their works against the dramatic landscapes, leaving us in a state of hypnosis.
Read More📍The experiential grounds of The Vitra Campus are a thrilling place to discover modern architectural and built environment concepts. The Campus is open to the public via tours of key structures and the architects behind them. With over 330,000 visitors a year, this special campus has the most concentrated collection of buildings by world-famous architects, than anywhere else in the world.
Read More🛋“Design is an expression of the purpose.” Charles Eames // As the most important exponents of organic design, Charles and Ray Eames demonstrated how good design can improve quality of life and human understanding and knowledge. One of their top lessons here are the Case Study Houses - built in 1949, No. 8 was a celebration of indoor-outdoor living, and for the Eameses it became a laboratory for their shared life and work.
Read More🌺 Assouline’s ‘In the Spirit of...’ series may cause severe cases of wanderlust (and should be read with your travel planner in hand). This iconic book publisher is known for the best of the best editorials on iconic travel destinations and specialty subjects. From Gstaad to Rio, Harlem to the Hamptons, we’ve found great design inspiration in these beautifully-curated pages.
Read More🌈 We’re in a Gerhard Richter frame-of-mind, and this gorgeous book, Panorama is the most extensive representation of his career to date. Including his work from the 1950s to present - from paintings to sculptures, drawings and photographs - it’s a fantastic deep dive into the artistic journey of Richter. And when it comes to squares, they haven't been the same since Josef Albers applied his spectrum of colors to them.
Read More🛵 While in Venice exploring the Architecture Biennale, we enjoyed a private visit to the Furnace of Orsoni - the only mosaic tile furnace still functioning in the historic center of Venice. Orsoni has revived the city's Byzantine mosaic style and remains an icon in the artisan craftwork communities. They use the same techniques since 1888 to produce 24K gold leaf mosaics, colored gold and Venetian smalti in more than 3,500 colors.
Read More🗣A lot of companies treat their brands as "stories to be told". In this post we explain how this framing makes brands overly reliant on third parties, typically media companies, to keep them in the public eye. We also show why this approach is so damaging to long-term brand health, and propose a different way of understanding your brand that can lead to long-term growth and success.
Read More⏳The so-called Shirky Principle states that institutions only survive by NOT solving the problems that they set out to solve. In this post we explore what this means for brands. Specifically, we look at how framing a brand promise that's forever slightly out of reach might well be the best path to success for a business.
Read More💾 The inexorable march of the software industry across the global economy continues unabated. Incumbent and after incumbent goes from skepticism, to panic, to obsolescence. It's now apparent to everyone not living in a bunker that the level of disruption, great as it has been, will only increase. There will be no more "status quo", at least, not for the rest of my life, or yours. What's a business to do?
Read More📈 Traditional brand metrics are too slow, internet era brand metrics are too superficial; brand managers need a third type of metric for a complete and actionable view of brand health.
Read More❤️A lot of ink has been spilled (and money spent) on trying to convince companies that the goal of having a brand is to get people to fall in love with your business. While nobody's going to argue that having customers who love you is a bad thing, too much focus on this from the outset could distract brands from more important work that creates more enduring sources of value for customers and the companies that serve them.
Read More📣Having points of difference is the lifeblood of branding. Without it, you're a commodity. Finding those points is the easy part, the hard part is finding ones that others are unwilling or unable to imitate. Differentiation is exponentially harder in professional services, where the barriers to entry and imitation are almost non-existent. One of the ways we have achieved differentiation in this market is through a greater willingness to stick our necks out in an industry that's notoriously risk-averse.
Read More📉 In almost every category of business, the current approach leads to managers seeking to squeeze a few more percentage points of revenue out of business practices that they have already optimized, over and over again, in many cases going back decades. Managers end up ignoring bigger opportunities because they don't fit neatly into the established paradigms implied by existing measurement systems. Put simply, the needs of the measurement system start to outweigh the broader need of the business (to grow, to add value, to win).
Read More📱Many brand managers are happy to talk about disruption. Talk, as the saying goes, is cheap; too often, actions fail to keep pace with good intentions. Until more brand managers embrace the transformational opportunities of mobile, social and the emerging Internet of things, the future will remain unevenly distributed.
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