"Ain't nobody giving up no ass."
Ice Cube
This is the quote I often relay to anyone who wants a board seat at the table of awesome. Listen up. There are no short cuts in life. Ask any career stripper in her late 30's. Nobody's getting a whole lot of something for a whole lot of nothing.
Ice Cube's Comptonian wisdom about the failure of free booty to appear in exchange for one's total lack of effort is the very foundation of what this blog is about. Sourcing awesome requires you to be a resourcing ninja. And that means obsessively cataloging everything you see that speaks to you and getting gold stars in note taking. More on my method for the Studio Kendrick School for Design Ninjas at a later post.
For now, here is my top five list for gangsta product designers that get gold medals for waging war on boring. These designers make things I am obsessed with, am jealous of, and are the fantasy players of what is out there in the world of design today. Cue the N.W.A.
1. Nika Zupanc
She's about to bitch slap everybody in the design world and they will thank her for it. It's art-deco-boudoir-badass. And yes, those cherries are pendant lights (they also come in black!). We better do what she says if we know what's good for us. In the US you can only find her pieces at the Moooi Shop in NYC and at Garde in LA. She designs pieces for Moroso as well, and she's a total babe. Her home town is Ljubljana in Slovenia, but finders keepers my friends, you can't have her back.
2. Lee Broom
The lighting is the real crown jewel of this British design star, although he makes furniture as well. And a line of vases for Wedgwood that is so beautiful, it made all my Jonathan Adler pieces fling themselves out the window in despair. The first piece to garner him accolades was his crystal bulb pendant, inspired from cut-crystal glassware. He used to work for Vivienne Westwood, he is my number one designer crush, and has one of the best interviews on my favorite design podcast, Clever (produced by Jaime Derringer, founder of Design Milk and HBIC design pro Amy Devers). He's available through a few online retailers, but currently the only Lee Broom showroom stateside opened in 2016 in NYC.
3. Hayon Studio
The best way to describe Spanish designer Jaime Hayon's work is that it looks like what someone would create if they rolled up Philippe Starck in a joint, laced it with a dusting of magic mushroom powder and PCP, and smoked it while listening to the soundtrack from Amelie.
In other words, FANTASTIC.
He's also unstoppable and master of a multitude of crafts. This guy makes ceramics, he makes watches, he makes furniture, he makes lighting. Time magazine named him one of the top 100 visionaries of our time. He's a hopeless weirdo and he has a circus fetish. I've seen him wear a full face of clown makeup for the cover of the Financial Times. And in that same photo shoot, rocked a fuzzy pink onesie with little dog ears on the hood and hold a finch on his finger. I'm pretty sure that was NOT the direction THE FINANCIAL TIMES takes with any of it's featured content. He definitely brought that stuff all on his own. This is the stuff of legends!
4. Anna Karlin
I first spotted her colorful stools and textiles at Ten Over Six, the gift shop inside the Joule Hotel in Dallas when I went to see the Kaws exhibit at the Ft Worth Modern. If you are in NYC, you can experience the real deal at one of my favorite shops, Les Atelier Courbier.
The first work I saw from this German designer were his Bell Tables, and I was intrigued by how he managed to seamlessly fuse the glass base with the brass top. For me, the signature of a lot of his products are two broad geometric shapes made from two contrasting materials. Marble and metal. Velvet and brass. He likes shapes that look like they were pinched to create the silhouette, and he favors jewel tones. Expanding and collapsing are important motifs. For other designers of important expanding and collapsing motifs: See God, Universe.
