He will be replaced by Facebook head of design Luke Woods.
Instagram’s Ian Spalter has stepped away from his position as the company’s head of design. Spalter shaped the look and feel of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms and oversaw its design team at a time of tremendous growth. Luke Woods, head of design at Facebook, which bought Instagram in 2012, will take over his role. Spalter is moving to Japan to lead Instagram’s new office there.
Many governments around the world have eliminated the need for third-party tax assistance by making it easy to pay taxes. Not so in the United States.
$16,000. I’ll write it again. $16,000. That’s the number I want you thinking of every time you painfully file your taxes–as you curse confusing forms, or slice off a nice chunk of your return to the software that handles the task for you. $16,000 was the total contribution Richard Neal (D-Mass) took from Intuit and H&R Block over the last two election cycles, to say nothing of the many other politicians who received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from tax prep companies in 2018.
The idea that people have an innate affinity for nature dates back to the 1980s, but designing spaces according to the principles of nature is reaching a peak now.
Recently, a quiet revolution has begun to change the way people think about their spaces, both at home and at work. It centers on the idea that the great indoors should mimic the great outdoors to improve people’s lives–an insight that is backed up with increasing amounts of research.
Design Mario Romano carves building-size murals and patterns into Corian using robotics. The results are unlike any wall coverings out there.
Last year, the Venice, California-based designer Mario Romano invented a new kind of wallpaper. Except this “wallpaper” isn’t made out of paper at all. It has volume and texture you can touch, and it can be carved in a single, continuous design, because it’s made out of Corian, a solid surface material created by DuPont. Romano’s tagline for his product? “Nature doesn’t repeat itself. Nor should your walls.”
This outdoor lantern doubles as a bluetooth speaker, and looks stylish to boot. Buy it at the MoMA Design Store.
Spring is here, and with it comes planning for the summer. Whether you’re going to staycation and chill at the local park or go camping, you’re going to want light and music.
Architects at Solomon Cordwell Buenz will attach a glass elevator to the side of the 45-year-old Aon Center skyscraper.
Within the next three years, tourists in Chicago will have the chance to go on one crazy ride: A glass platform will launch thrill seekers 82 stories into the air, at speeds of 16.6 feet per second. This isn’t an amusement park attraction, though. It’s a glass elevator that will be installed on the exterior of one of the city’s many notable towers, the Aon Center. When construction of the elevator is finished, it will be the tallest (and fastest!) of its kind in North America, only 70 feet shy of the current world record-holder, the Bailong elevator in Zhangjiajie National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site in China.
“It’s like riding in a first-class cabin on Emirates airline,” says the interior architect behind one $50,000-per-night hotel suite beneath the Indian Ocean.
Along the rocky southern coast of Norway, 16 feet below sea level is just deep enough to touch the white sandy sea floor. At that point, the choppy water clears and you can view the fauna and fish that make up Norwegian aquatic life.
Real estate, baby.
Walmart is the biggest employer in the country and the largest retail company in the world, but it’s currently locked in a battle for consumers’ dollars with Amazon that dominates online shopping. Walmart hopes to leverage one staggering fact: 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store.
The typeface is called Movement, and it’s beautiful.
When we think of calligraphy, we think of perfect penmanship–the practiced micro-movements of a surgeon-steady hand. Even modern typefaces, constructed on computers, are still based upon that human anchor that brought us all written language.
These burners hang on your wall until you need to cook something, echoing a growing trend among professional kitchens.
I once had the chance to peek my head into the kitchen at Alinea, the avant-garde Chicago restaurant that’s also one of the top-ranked in the world. It looked nothing like I expected. The standard elements of commercial kitchens, with their industrial griddles, stoves, and salamander broilers, were almost completely absent. Instead, it was just a long room filled with unadorned stainless steel tables. If a chef needed to sauté something, they simply grabbed an induction burner–a magnetic-based hotplate that generates no ambient heat–and brought it to their spot.
