Fashion

Haute Fashion Touchdown

By Delphine Hirasuna | January 30, 2014September 4, 2014

You won’t catch any of the Super Bowl XLIII players butting heads with these helmuts on this weekend, but you can still bid on one and help the NFL Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the health and safety of sports and youth football.

Bloomingdale’s in New York collaborated with the Council of Fashion Designers of America to invite some of the world’s leading fashion designers to bring their own personal flair to football helmuts. The collection of 48 fanciful and impractical headgear has been on display in the window of Bloomingdale’s 59th Street store in Manhattan and can be viewed online as well. The helmuts are being auctioned off to support the NFL Foundation, and the public has been invited to submit their own design with a chance to win a Bloomie’s gift card and a mini 3-D printed version of their submitted design. Even football helmut design is a participatory sport.

Packaging

Dog-Loving Photographer Creates Asian Elixir, Thanks to Lindsay Lohan

By Delphine Hirasuna | December 18, 2013September 4, 2014

Kombucha Dog is one of those “only in California live-your-passion” stories. According to the Kombucha Dog website, the beverage company was started in L.A. by Michael Faye, a successful commercial photographer who loved traveling the world on assignment, until he found that the photo business was beginning to require spending more time on the computer than on location. That’s when Faye sold his studio and set up DogIsArt, a dog portraiture business, combining his avid love of dogs with his professional talent.

The kombucha link comes in because Faye, who was raised as a strict vegetarian by a mother who even made her own yogurt, was strongly into the raw food movement and yoga. An early adopter of kombucha, Faye started drinking the fermented tea back in 2005, but had to stop when actress Lindsey Lohan failed an alcohol test. Lohan’s attorneys launched a “kombucha defense” saying that drinking lots of kombucha caused a false positive on the test. The controversy caused L.A. retailers to pull kombucha from the shelves, forcing Faye to experiment with brewing his own.

Public Service Campaign

Goodwill Goes from Thrift to Style

By Delphine Hirasuna | October 25, 2012September 4, 2014

Is it possible to brand a thrift store stocked with donated goods and make it a look like a place where you’d want to shop? Goodwill in San Francisco is doing just that by giving its in-store signage, website and fleet of trucks a complete makeover.

Typography

See It, Read It, Eat It

By Delphine Hirasuna | February 18, 2011September 4, 2014

Japanese graphic designer Masaaki Hiromura has made pictograms an integral part of the kanji characters he created for Tokyo’s Kitasenjyu Marui department store to come up with food words that can be understood in any language. The silhouette of the food appropriately replaces a stroke in the word so it can be read as text. Although Hiromura was probably focused on devising a witty and graphically interesting way to communicate to multinational customers who frequent the store, this display seems like the reverse of how written languages began in many ancient cultures. Japanese and Chinese characters started as pictographs, ideographic symbols describing objects and actions. Over time, these characters became less pictographic and ideographic and more visually abstract. What’s amusing about these pictogram characters is that we’ve come full circle.