Herman Miller design exhibit at Milan Design Week celebrates company’s 100 years

Herman Miller, one of the most highly-regarded office chair designers and producers, is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its brand name. To celebrate, they will have an exhibit of the rich history of their company’s graphic design journey. The exhibit will begin at the Milan Design Week and eventually go to Chicago in June. You would think that this exhibit is all about the furniture but is more the visual journey of their design and marketing materials.

Designer: Herman Miller

Founded by D.J De Pree, Herman Miller was launched back in 1923 and by 1930, they hired Gilbert Rhode to bring modern design sensibilities to their previously traditional furniture. His wife Peggy Rhode was his partner as she took charge of designing their marketing materials, matching the new direction that the company was taking. When George Nelson started designing for the company in 1945, pioneer graphic designers like Irving Harper and Tomiko Miho also brought in a new look to their designs.

Designer John Massey and eventually his protege Steve Frykholm then brought the Pop Art look to the designs in the 60s and 70s. Barbara Loveland and Linda Powell then brought postmodern sensibilities in the 80s and 90s. For the textile division of the company, Alexander Girard is the name to remember as he used “graphics to create motifs with meaning” during his tenure as the founding director. His designs will also be on display at the exhibition. They will also be selling limited-edition prints of the Eames Soft Pad Group poster which is an iconic look for the brand.

The exhibit not only shows Herman Miller’s visual design journey but also looks like a history of graphic design over the past 100 years. You can see the various design movements for every decade so it’s also interesting how the company was able to keep up with all of that. It makes sense that they would put on this kind of exhibit rather than just show off their chairs or furniture (although they’re mostly pretty nice as well).

The post Herman Miller design exhibit at Milan Design Week celebrates company’s 100 years first appeared on Yanko Design.

These bamboo villas curve into lotus flowers creating a Disney-worthy villa!

Known for creating 3D visualizations of architectural residences that shake up the thrillseeker in each of us, graphic designer Thilina Liyanage has conceptualized a subdued bamboo retreat for when the adventurer grows tired. Taking inspiration from lotus flowers and magical realism, Liyanage’s Hideout Lotus Bamboo Villa rises above the ground on bamboo pillars to form a raised, single-story home resembling the look of a giant rattan table with an intricate, interwoven bamboo lotus mounted on top.

From an exterior perspective, the Hideout Lotus finds a common outdoor area just below its mounted single-level lotus-inspired living area. Four curved bamboo pillars stack atop one another to create borders around the common area, creating a tiered walking space that contains the villa’s canopied deck. Wooden panels line the deck, complimenting the rest of the bamboo structure, where globular concrete mounds harness the villa’s main support beams.

Three wide bamboo shafts elevate Hideout Lotus’s upper deck, which supports the villa’s main interior living area. In a congruent style with the ground deck, the upper deck fashions wooden panels for its flooring, which merge with the villa’s more intricate bamboo lacework. Like a lotus flower floating in a pond, the main villa casually rests on the upper deck, with its bottom petals artfully draped over the edge. The villa’s windows are stationed behind an overlaid bamboo lattice that enwraps the entire villa, giving it an alluring, if not elusive personality.

Symbolic for rebirth and groundedness, the lotus is lauded for its ability to bloom beautifully despite murky waters. Positioned in a dense, wooded area, Liyanage’s Hideout Lotus Bamboo Villa bursts from the ground below in bamboo roots and chutes to grow into a hideaway that creates space for recharging and getting away from the thrill of it all.

Designer: Thilina Liyanage

The villa’s ground-level deck contains an outdoor common area complete with petal ceiling fans and rattan furniture.

Forming a cluster of villas, each one of Liyanage’s Hideout Lotus Bamboo Villa is connected to one another by strings of lights.

Reminiscent of cloaked fairy tale bungalows, the bamboo lattice that envelops each villa only enhances their enigmatic personalities.

Draped over the upper deck’s edge, the curved bottom petals of each villa are some of the finer details in Liyanage’s tribute to the lotus flower.

Supported by groups of concrete-fortified bamboo support beams, each lotus villa rests on a stabilized, secure foundation.

Best Free Graphic Design Software

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Santa meets Willy wonka in this 3D-Engraved Watch that is sure to be a hit this Christmas!

Technology mixed with design gives creators the chance to make anything possible. Through 3D-engraving, even the tiniest of products can be turned into entire worlds, which goes to show that the beauty of rendering in 3D is in the details. Andre Caputo recently took his personal taste and 3D-rendering skills and turned them into a fantastical watch that brings you to the North Pole and delivers you straight to the front steps of Santa’s Workshop.

His finished rendered timepiece is called Majestic and it certainly upholds its title. The watch is ladened with golden cogs and candy accents that instantly inspire visions of whimsical toymaker’s storefronts with snowy rooftops and chimneys billowing with smoke -think Willy Wonka meets watch-making! The watch’s interior depth is hypnotizing for its five-layered dial and latticed network of exposed sprockets and gears. The ultimate timepiece is as zany and flashy as it gets, but the best Christmas movies usually are and this watch brings you right back to the first time you watched your favorite. With all of the details that fill this digital canvas, the timepiece turns out to be relatively easy to read, thanks to the bold, golden hoops that enwrap each big, clunky hour-marker and the smaller hour-markers that dot in between. Just below the dome-shaped crystal, that encases the miniature world of toymaking, reads the days of the week, the specific date is indicated by a red circle that demarks the correct day of the month. Additionally, the candy cane bracelet wraps around your wrist with an armadillo-like cuff and big dials and knobs surround the watch face’s perimeter for easy adjustment of the hour, minute, or date.

Andre Caputo designed this rendering to merge personal taste with technological artwork. Each detail of this watch shimmers like toys from Santa’s factory and sends you right into the spirit of the winter season with brass pulleys and chains, micro Candyland-inspired bridges, and details fit for a fairytale galore.

Designer: Andre Caputo

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These renders of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs take you to an imaginary world!

Frank Lloyd Wright is an icon in the design and architecture world. His career spans over 70 years during which he had 532 completed structures and more than 1114 designs that continue to inspire creators even today. In fact, it is his unfinished concept designs that spark more imagination and Spanish architect, David Romero, has been influenced by just that.

Romero took the 600 designs that Wright left behind and created ultra-realistic 3D renderings of what they would look like today. He even digitally restored some demolished projects. Romero has showcased his art on his website, Hooked on the Past, where he has taken upon himself to complete most of Wright’s unfinished design dreams like the E.A. Smith house, Trinity Chapel, Butterfly Bridge, and the Larkin Administration Building. He uses existing blueprints, plans, elevations, photographs and perspectives from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to guide him as he models structures in AutoCAD and then completing it with finer details using Autodesk 3ds Max.

It is not easy to capture and recreate Wright’s work because most of the plans are from a high point of view. It is a challenge to imagine it from a perspective of someone standing on the street but Romero has a gift to be able to envision a structure and render it with just bits and pieces of the original blueprint. He added details like picturing the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective at night because it was also meant to serve as a planetarium, so he added stars and electric car trails to the image. His attention to detail is seen in the render as he chose to add era-appropriate cars. Romero successfully creates an emotional connection to a building that the audience has never been to but still relates to because of his precise renderings.

“I would love to model all of Wright’s work, but it is immense,” says architect David Romero, a pure Wright fan. “I do not know if during all my life I will have time.” Romero’s work has gone beyond the architecture community and has become relatable to various digital artists like graphic designers and photographers because his renders are so good that they can be considered as contemporary art. While we are all confined to our homes, Romero’s imaginative skills coupled with Wright’s design visions give us the digital window of escape that we can all use right now.

Designers: David Romero

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