Sadly, an old favorite design blog of ours is shuttering it’s windows and locking up all of the doors. You can read more about it here. The site, created by design couple extraordainare Armin Vit and Byrony Gomez-Palacio, was started in 2003 as home for critical thinking for the traditional designer. Over the years we have enjoyed taking part in the monthly ‘Word Its’, a couple of which made into the super fun ‘The Word It Book‘. We also had a great time contributing to their poster contest a couple years back that was judged by Art Chantry, Ellen Lupton and James Victore. You can seeone of our submissions here. I recall poster numero uno was a hot topic leading to some interwebs style yelling. Oh youth. Word it has found it’s own home over here. They also have a couple of other enjoyable sites like Brand New, Quipsologies and The Design Encyclopedia. All-in-all those kids at Under Consideration have done a great job and we at Ziegenhagen Studio thank and salute them.

I just bought ‘The Design Entrepreneur‘ by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico. It was unsurprisingly well designed and came in a super cool die-cut hard case. The design of the site and book were by Landers | Miller. There quite a few interesting case studies with designers like Maria Kalman, James Victore and Stefan Bucher. I won’t go into some in-depth review. The folks over at Core 77 have one here. I will however note a small complaint. As beautiful and star studded as it was I found myself being a bit disappointed. I was really expecting something I could learn from. Maybe specific production tasks, how some of the artists found vendors, etc. But in reality, it was a lot little comments about ‘drive’ and anecdotes about how the designers got started. I am still glad I bought for it’s overall great design but as a tool for the design entrepreneurs out there it fell a little short.  You can buy it yourself over yonder.

No no no! Not that kind of baby. We can hear our moms calling now. We have a new site up. Yup, the one you’re looking at right now. It’s still a bit gooey and needs some work but after very busy year working with great clients like Focus Features and Shu Uemura we finally have something up. We’ll continue writing copy, fixing bugs, adding forms and tweaking the design but for now here you go. The very betaish version. If you see typos or anything that is generally stupid let us know.

Thanks,

Mike Ziegenhagen