Soulellis Studio

I'm itching to get to MoMA to see Design and the Elastic Mind. Meanwhile, the online exhibition is worth perusing, and seeing GoogleEarth figure so prominently reminds me that I should post something here about the incredible work produced in our MArch2 design studio last semester at Cornell. We asked the students to explore the work of Flusser, and use a framework of disjuncture and network to propose ideas about "the city" in Google Earth. Pictured here is an image from the work of Jinang Yang — a sort of mirror-image brand city floating above Chicago.

Lest anyone think that we only use typefaces designed before 1965 at Soulellis Studio, I'd like to take a moment to introduce you to Omnes, a fine rounded typeface by Brooklyn-based Joshua Darden. We're proposing Omnes as the primary typeface for a new identity this week and hoping the client agrees that it's exactly the right kind of friendly for a serious NYC non-profit.

UPDATE — The client chose the *other* concept, so we'll be using Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Knockout.

Here's a little book we just designed. The remarkable cover — the entire front and back unfolds ingeniously to reveal Cornell students at a Katrina disaster clean-up scene — was the idea of Dan Geva, who worked with us briefly last year. The elegant piece will be used to attract new students to the graduate program in City and Regional Planning at Cornell AAP.

Richard Saul Wurman just spoke at TED and introduced 19.20.21., his latest mega-creation/passion/project. (The fantastic Flash site is by @radical.media.) Here's our mini contribution (so far) — a cute little thing that isn't sure if it's a pamphlet or a business card.

"For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives." (WSJ)

I had a nice design surprise last week. I showed up at MAS for a meeting and saw that the Architectural League had opened a small show of Herzog & de Meuron's design for the new Parrish Art Museum in Southampton. All beautifully presented on a single, giant platform. The tabletop was set with all kinds of models, and a single drawing was laminated to the wall. Great installation, but the real surprise was a stack of one-color pamphlets, presumably designed by 2x4 (they are credited on the table). This thing was so modest: flimsy paper, a sort of folded photocopy. One side presents a layout of the objects on the table, rendered in thin black lines. The other side, lots of words and numbers — in reverse. I didn't understand why, but kept it anyway because it looked good. The next day I realized that if held up to the light, I can see the reversed words through the lightweight paper, back-lit onto the diagram — these are the titles and dates for each piece. Nice.

UPDATE: just got a note from the Architectural League that the entire exhibition, including the pamphlet, was designed by Herzog & de Meuron. 2x4 will be designing the graphics for the museum.

AAP, Spring 2008. NEWS04 coming soon. Take a look at NEWS03, NEWS02, and the first issue.