bebe is the go-to destination for chic, contemporary fashion. The brand evokes a mindset - an attitude, not an age. Designed for the confident, sexy, modern woman, bebe is a global label that embodies a sensual, sophisticated lifestyle. If you are a detail oriented and passionate textile designer with exceptional print and graphic skills, your designs could grace the product lines of this iconic label.

With 2 to 4 years of experience, you should be comfortable assisting or executing in all graphics needed for the apparel/non apparel businesses and creating new prints as needed. You're whiz at handling sample processing and documentation and you never shy away from putting in the extra hours when needed. You are the ideal Associate Textile Designer bebe is seeking. Apply Now.

By John Clifford

While writing my book Graphic icons: Visionaries Who Shaped Modern Graphic Design, I was impressed by how many of the legendary designers I was profiling pushed themselves and branched out to other disciplines, such as industrial design and architecture. Such explorations can inspire creativity and bring fresh perspectives to each area of practice.

Catalog cover for Cuno Engineering Corporation, 1946; Build the Town building block set, c.1942

Ladislav Sutnar

Influenced by the functional Constructivist and De Stijl movements, Sutnar always worked at developing a visual language that communicated directly. Charts, graphs and images simplified information, helping busy people save time. The way, Sutnar steered readers through complex information sounds much like what we now call information design or information architecture, which has been further developed by Edward Tufte and Richard Saul Wurman, as well as by digital and web designers everywhere.

As someone who believed that design should influence every part of daily life, Sutnar designed pretty much everything: furniture, fabrics, glassware and dishes, even toys. His colorful and geometric building block set, "Build the Town," was never actually produced, in spite of Sutnar's efforts to design packaging and promotional materials for it.

Industrial Design magazine cover, 1954; 3 Tragedies book cover, paperback version, 1955; Staff magazine cover, 1944.

Alvin Lustig

Magazines, interiors, book jackets, packaging, fabrics, hotels, mall signage, the opening credits of the cartoon Mr. Magoo—even a helicopter—Alvin Lustig designed all of them. He always felt the title "graphic designer" was too limiting, and it's clear why: He designed everything. And he did it all before dying at the young age of 40.

Lustig started designing interiors while working for Look magazine in the 1940s. Work like this inspired him to design the total package for his clients, from corporate identity to office environments. Though he is best known for his book covers, his experience among many disciplines gave him more freedom and opportunities.

We recommended the Grabit Pro Screw Extractor in last year's Gift Guide, and mentioned the Accutrax Pencil Blade here. Here they are in action, as demonstrated by tool entrepreneur Bob Cumings of Prazi USA:

Those of you who are based in Chicago might recognize the two fellas in the photo above—it's none other than longtime Core-tributors Craighton Berman (a.k.a. Fueled by Coffee) and Bruce Tharp of Materious. Say what you want about keeping it in the family, but when we say them sitting next to each other in the Design Debut section of the 2014 International Home + Housewares Show, we couldn't resist the opportunity to stage a conversation so that each of them could share what they're working on these days.

The Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club is looking forward to reflecting and projecting at tonight's presentation by Severin Villiger. The talk starts at 6pm at the Hand-Eye Supply store in Portland, Oregon. Come early and check out our space or check in with us online for the live broadcast!

Severin Villiger:New Technology vs. Old Technology - Recreating Masterpieces of Architecture and Engineering With 3D Technology
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, Oregon 97209
Tuesday, Mar. 25th, 6pm PST

Here's another product showing Festool sweating the details, those little things we industrial designers are trained to look out for.

If you're using a drill to drive something into an overhead surface, you'll find that pulling that trigger subtly changes the balance of your grip. This is a minor issue for the DIY'er hanging a pair of IKEA lamps, but a major issue for someone who hangs drywall for a living and will drive hundreds or thousands of screws in a day. Thus Festool's DWC-18 series of cordless drywall screwdrivers feature an "Auto" setting, where the user simply presses the attachment's plunger against the surface to drive the screw.

Ergonomically speaking, this means you're just cradling the unit in your palm and pressing upwards, rather than gripping, squeezing and pressing upwards. Multiply that subtle energy savings over a full workday, across thousands of tool-buying customers, and that small design feature makes a profound impact.

Here's how it looks in action, and you'll also hear the rep run down the full list of the tool's stats and features:

Once again we must apologize to our U.S. readers, as this was one of only two Festool demos we were able to capture at JLC Live—and both of those tools are Euro-market-only, at least for now. (If you haven't yet seen the other, the dust-free TSC-55 track saw, be sure to check that out!)

Fifti Fifti's Take-Off Light is fitting for two kinds of people: the DIY-inclined and those with a habit of poking holes through paper. You know who I'm talking about—the people who can't keep their hands from haphazardly crumpling and drowsily stabbing scratch paper with pens during meetings (guilty as charged). This steel-and-paper lamp makes our lethargic tendency look good—all it takes is a steady hand and some design sense.

Reporting by Morgan Walsh, photos by Benjamin Gross

For most 20- to 30-year-olds, the red Solo cup is an everyday object that stands for convenience, disposability and often debauchery. Often filled with an adult beverage, the Solo cup is frequently found at a house party, outdoor barbeque or while helping a friend paint an apartment. My first encounter with the ceramic version was during a studio visit. As I accepted the cup I was surprised by it's weight and rigidity—I was expecting the plastic variety. In ceramic, the cup was classier, more grown up and signified something lasting, other than the obvious reuse value.

Though I still attend parties where the original plastic Solo Cup proliferates, I'm drawn, as I imagine Core's audience is, to the durable and more thoughtful take on this vessel. While the Kikkerland version (pictured above) may or may not have been conceived in an effort to elevate the everyday object, the newest version by Revol, a 225-year-old French ceramics company, certainly is. (And here I can't help but call out a Chicago design collective's nod to ubiquitous design, Chilab and it's 2013 Unfolding Chair. Located in the southeastern city of Saint-Uze, Revol is the ultimate heritage brand, employing nearly 200 workers and finishing each piece by hand.

Editor: Here in Part 4, Accidental Designer comes face to face with someone he'd been looking to avoid. Following that encounter, his subsequent talent for design accidentally gets him the attention of Hollywood!

Previously: The Accidental Designer, Part 3 - Is This Seat Taken?

"Hey man," Rusty said. He introduced himself even though I already knew who he was. "I've been following you for the past few."

"Oh, ah," I said. What was there to say—what could I possibly say? All I could do was apologize. "Listen man, I'm, ah, sorry—so sorry that I took your, uh—"

Rusty cut me off. "What are you talking about, man?" he said. "Your chair looks awesome." Your chair, he'd said.

"But I took the design from you," I said.

"Yeah, you did, and I took the design from somebody else. And I made it a little bit better. And that guy I took it from, he took it from someone before him, and he'd made it a little bit better. This chair has been around for ages, dude," he said. "And yours looks awesome."

I was so relieved, and felt a huge weight come off of my shoulders. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you should all go out and steal someone else's designs. These days, things are copyrighted and IP'd and everybody's all lawyered up. But that sling rocker chair had come into the world iteratively, like shipwrighting skills. People got better and better at it and the product improved through succession and collaboration. No one owns a shiplap joint and back then no one owned that chair (though I'll betcha someone with lawyers does today).

Rusty and I remain good friends to this day. But before you think I got off easy for taking that design, well, I didn't. Rusty might not have given a damn, but though I didn't know it, the karma was going to come back around one day.

Changing the world is all in a day's work at Apple. If you love innovation, here's your chance to make a career of it. At Apple, great ideas have a way of becoming great products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. Bring passion and dedication to your job and there's no telling what you could accomplish.

iCloud Engineering is looking for a Software Engineer to develop world-class applications. This is a hands-on role in the development of software systems to support existing and new product features. This role requires working closely with cross-functional teams to effectively coordinate the complex interdependencies inherent in this role. You'll work hard. But the job comes with more than a few perks. Apply Now.

There's an entirely new direction for materials coming to life—specifically, a hybrid that combines the best of non-living matter with living matter. Sounds sci-fi, but it's here and it's quite promising. Researchers at MIT have found a way to coax E. Coli bacteria to latch onto inorganic materials in order to create a much more flexible and adaptable non-living material. What this means is that we get the benefit of a living cell that can easily and smartly adapt to its environment, as well as the benefit of a non-living material that can conduct electricity and emit light. Essentially, the result is a non-living material that mimics a living one.

The scientists have created bacteria that can latch onto gold nanoparticles and semiconducting crystals called quantum dots. (Quantum dots are tiny particles that can emit light in an incredibly beautiful array of glowing and very discrete colors.)

First things first: This is without a doubt the worst demo video I've ever shot, in terms of A/V quality. The surly gentleman in the video refused to perform a demo for the camera, only agreed to let us shoot if he was trying to close a sale with a "real customer" and would not repeat actions for close-ups. (Plus he kept calling me "Junior.") To make matters worse, you can't really hear much after the guy in the next booth fires up his own tools.

Nevertheless, Bad Dog Tools' Bad Dog Biter is amazing enough that I had to try to capture what I could, lack of cooperation be damned. This drill-mounted nibbler is designed to cut all the tricky materials you hate cutting, whether plastic, metal or laminates, and whether they're in sheets, corrugated sheets or tubes. Check it out:

HTC launched the new HTC One (M8) to great fanfare in central London yesterday, it's new DotView case stealing much of the show. Core77 UK correspondent Sam Dunne caught up with VP of Design Scott Croyle to talk industrial design on the front-line.

With the keynotes out of the way and a restless swarm of tech bloggers let loose on banks of demo handsets, we were plucked from the fray and ushered down a bright white corridor of pre-fab meeting rooms. A quick handshake and a warm smile, Scott takes a seat at a table strewn with a spectrum of handsets, apologizing for the smell of fresh paint. I mention the local joke that the smell follows the Queen around. He lifts his gaze and grins quizzically.

HTC's VP of Design makes no attempt to hide his relief at another launch event done and dusted. "Selling," Croyle tells me, "is a huge part of my job, of the designer's job, both externally and internally... You gotta engage the business with stories to drive home innovations that are actually meaningful to people... even our engineers are selling their new stuff with fun little consumer stories now..." And then, of course, it's showtime: "Giving the consumer the stories behind the design helps them engage with our work emotionally." Getting up on stage, Scott admits, doesn't come naturally, "but it's so important for us as designers to put ourselves and our ideas out there... we've got to be confident and resilient if we want to be heard."

As a leader within a massive organization, Scott eloquently elaborates on the ongoing battle of championing meaning in product development: "There's a fire hose of information and stuff coming at you from all directions all the time... the only thing you can do is to filter it. With experience, designers develop what I call an informed intuition. You don't need to know everything before you act. You do have to know when to trust your gut. These days, I can look at the title and summary of a report and know whether I should dig for more detail. It comes with practice." With a wince of self-awareness, Scott speaks of the language he has armed himself with for fighting feature creep and mediocrity. "I don't let anyone talk about differentiation, it's not about that, it's got to be better-entiated. I'm always talking about meaningful innovation... innovation by itself just doesn't cut it."

The International Housewares Association's Student Design Competition has been going for over two decades now, showcasing the work of six winners (and several runners up) who represent some of the most promising young designers from some 30+ design programs from around the world.

There was a clear theme amongst the winners this year—the IHA noted that five of them had developed "products that 'make a difference'"—assistive or otherwise Universal Design objects—alongside with a more heritage-oriented cleaning product. At least a couple of them were lucky enough to enroll in courses that are dedicated to the IHA's Student Design Competition, for which they are tasked with designing a prize-worthy entry for the Show, while others took inspiration from their own research and observations.

First Place: "Connect" electrical outlet adapter - Matthew Burton, University of Houston

First Place: "B-PAC" kitchenware for vision-impaired - Amanda Bolton, University of Cincinnati

Freshly foraged from former eyewear giant H.L. Bouton's funkiest new-old-stock archive, these safety glasses are still practical and hip as the day is long. Impress everybody in your shop class with your OG safety. Large lenses protect your eyeballs from intruders and the crushing boredom of contemporary style.

Choose from sweet fades, neon frames, and retro shapes but rest assured all of these babies are ANSI Z87.1-2010 certified.

Available Now from Hand-Eye Supply $5.00 - $20.00

World Kitchen, a global leader in consumer housewares, seeks an innovative Industrial Design Intern to work with our global design organization in their Rosemont, Illinois headquarters. They are home to Pyrex, Corningware, Corelle, Snapware and Chicago Cutlery, and are committed to growing their brands and contributing meaningful innovation to consumer's lives. If you want to sharpen your Industrial Design skills this summer, this internship is for you!

The right person for this opportunity will have a basic level of knowledgeable and practiced in design skills application, have high levels of visual literacy, and have a respect for and basic level of understanding of the broad value of design thinking. This is a paid 3 month contract position in an established group and will provide lots of opportunity to work on real world products and experiences for the World Kitchen, LLC. Apply Now.

This is the beginning of an interview series about young entrepreneurs around the globe working within the creative fields such as photography, product design, fashion and music just to mention a few.

Below you find the very first interview which is about Jonas Hojgaard and his up and coming Danish furniture brand Nordic Tales. It all started with the lamp Bright Sprout and have grown exponentially ever since. If you want to know more after reading this little interview, you will find him in Milan during the furniture fair April 7–13.

Core77: What inspired you to start Nordic Tales?

Jonas Hojgaard: Nordic Tales is the product of an idea about that it is possible to handle the whole range, from idea to development to sale, as a designer! You don't have to wait for somebody to approve or disapprove your ideas to realise them! A design business put in the world, mainly and primarily to contribute with aesthetics and secondly to earn money will have a set of values that the general business man can't compete with.

What would you say are the values that define Nordic Tales?

We are storytellers just as much as we are designers. We try to contribute with products that you can influence and give your own touch. We grant you with "the power to design!"

Maybe the fascination about this remodeling / customizable thing comes from all the years I spent playing with Lego as a kid, or maybe I'm just curious.

When I design, I always try to achieve some complexity, to make it more than what it is! My ultimate goal is to do this and then hide it and let you discover the products' true features—it surprises you and gives you that very special "A-ha!" feeling!

Besides this, my goal is always to make something that you can't really describe why you like. The design should be a sum of many small details, balanced so that none outshines the other. The experience of the design should resolve in an emotion that you like and not any particular characteristics that you can point out.

I find it much more challenging to achieve this in design than in, say, photography. Design is more difficult especially because it has to be producible on a large scale. Photography is much easier since it consists mostly of visual parameters.

If the novelty product category seems to be an inexhaustible source of visual puns and other clever gift items, brands like Kikkerland, DCI, Fred & Friends, and at least a couple other mainstays of NY NOW and IH+HS offer reliably entertaining (and video-friendly) on a seasonal basis. This time around at the Housewares Show, we caught up with Los Angeles-based Mollaspace, who were exhibiting at Chicago's McCormick Place for the very first time. The X-Ray playing cards struck our fancy at NY NOW, so it was good to have Fumi Suzuki walk us through some highlights from the new collection.

Long before the likes of Facebook and Flickr co-opted the color, the original Big Blue had established itself as a giant in a different era in tech. A perennial fixture of "most valuable brands" lists, IBM is pleased to announce that will be committing over $100 million to "globally expanding its consulting services capability to help clients with experience design and engagement." The Armonk, NY-based company is capitalizing on its strength in the Big Data with plans to open IBM Interactive Experience labs in Bangalore, Beijing, Groningen, London, Melbourne, Mexico City, New York, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo.

In short, IBM is making a major foray data-driven service design, a nod to a broader definition of product as experience or interaction (a.k.a. the shift from physical to digital, hardware to software, etc.). Shannon Miller, a Global Strategy Leader at IBM Interactive Experience, shared more details on their vision for what the future holds both for IBM, its clients and the end user.

Core77: We've witnessed the rise of service design (i.e. experience design) as a discipline in its own right, what makes this a good time for IBM to make this major investment in this area?

Shannon Miller: We have seen growing client demand in the marketplace around experience design capabilities and the front office transformation—and this market only continues to grow as consumers continuously look for the next best experience. IBM is the only company that can bring research, creative and design skills together with data experts and a traditional consultancy to solve our clients' biggest problems. We see this demand globally and wanted to expand our reach to create centers around the world where we can collaborate and co-create with clients to develop innovative solutions.

To what degree is this data-centric approach to experience design an extension of the company's long history in the computer industry, and to what degree is a new frontier for IBM's strengths?

Technology is becoming ingrained into the DNA of every business and personal interaction, especially in today's customer-centric world, and IBM is helping clients understand their customers as individuals through the use of Big Data. While this certainly is an extension of IBM's 100-plus-year history and commitment to design, IBM researchers within IBM Interactive Experience invented unique algorithms that conduct the analysis for new capabilities—Intelligent Customer Profiles, Influence Analysis and Customer Identity Resolution. These join an existing portfolio of data-driven capabilities including Life Event Detection, Behavioral Pricing and Psycholinguistic Analytics.

IBM Interactive Experience is an industry first—a management consultancy and systems integration company combined with a digital agency powered by data and research. IBM Interactive Experience drives insights from data—including information on individual decisions, choices, preferences and attitudes—to transform the customer experience.

Most desks ignore the cable chaos that many end-users suffer with—but a few designers have created desks that recognize the problem and try to help. These desks can be both functional and eye-catching.

Of course, there are always trade-offs to be made. A desk with built-in cable control will often have less flexibility to respond to changing uses than would a simpler desk combined with aftermarket products that can be readily removed or replaced. And the cable control features will probably add to the cost, making the purchase a bigger commitment for the end-user.

The OneLess Desk from Heckler Design is composed of two nesting surfaces made of 12-gauge powder coated steel—but the feet are made of polypropylene so they won't scratch the floor. It's a neat design for a small space, and it also provides cable control that's especially effective if the desk faces a wall or a window. Behind that grill on the top level is a rear-facing shelf with notches and cut-outs near its rear edge for wrapping longer cables. And if you place your power strip on the shelf, you can have just one cable going from the desk to the outlet.

Christofer Ödmark's desk also has a hidden space for cables and their power adapters. As his site explains: "The back of the table top features eight power sockets and enough space to gather all your cables. The electricity is supplied by a detachable power cord."

This raises another design issue: power management. As you look through these desks, you'll see that some include an integrated power strip, while others omit this feature. Having the power strip certainly helps control the cable clutter, but also raises issues of maintenance; what happens if the power strip has a failure?