Tag Archives: design

Translating Ankestrick's island-inspired knit-erature

Inspired by the North Sea island of Juist, a windswept place where Berlin-based pattern designer Anke Wulffen has been spending summer weeks away from the mainland world of cars and bustle since her childhood, Ahoi: Seaside Sweaters is a new e-book that I describe as knit-erature. Anke blends travel writing, memoir, photography and five new […]

June letters, news and moves

This first week of June, things are feeling summery and full of changes at my studio. For one, I’ve temporarily moved to a studio collective in Mitte for the month, after the Multiverso studio collective closed its doors in May. This Monday, I celebrated my first day (Einstand) in the traditional German manner by bringing my colleagues something sweet — strawberries from one […]

Needle-sharp package design

The design of this packaging, for sewing machine needles, caught my eye. It looks quite Modernist to me, with the simple grid with a space for a different fabric and/or stitch pattern for each type of needle. Schmetz is an old German company, founded in 1851. However, I saw these needles in California.

Lover, lover, torn in two

Last week, a poster in a glass case in one of Berlin’s subway stations caught my eye. Or rather, half a poster. The whole poster, including the word (Love? Lover?) and the image (a woman’s face) had been torn in half from top to bottom, and only the left side remained.

New year, long life, eat well

Tonight’s the eve of the Lunar New Year, tomorrow the Year of the Horse begins. Wishing you a year as full of sweetness and longevity as these colorful cans of condensed milk I admire in the local Asian supermarket. To begin the year right, I suggest my grandmother’s fried dumpling recipe, which was featured here […]

Cheese wrapper of the month

This wheel of cheese landed in my shopping basket simply because I liked the wrapper. It’s a simple, soft-ripened cheese, like a large, plain-tasting Camembert. The label declares it a handmade (actually, “hand-cheesed”) speciality of Saxony, flavored with caraway. Neither the typography nor the illustration are the world’s most refined, but I like their straightforwardness […]

Color-coordinated book zoo

Bookstore windows seem to be catching my eye these days, terraria of print-and-paper creatures. This one, located in San Francisco’s Mission district, is populated only by  orange and yellow books. I like the book-fox and book-hedgehog illustrations on the Cabinet anthology. I like its title, Curiosity and Method, too.