designer

An Overview on Designer Jewelry

Jewelries are ornaments used for decorative purposes. However, there are lots of other uses of jewelries. The use of jewelries depends largely on the dispensation in which you are taking reference to and also the culture. For instance,...





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Weaving Connections: British designer William Morris’s colonial inspirations

The handcrafted colourful textiles of South Asia appealed immensely to the celebrated 19th-century craftsperson and polymath. A new exhibition of his works highlights these influences






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Top 11 WordPress Themes for Web Designers in 2024

A WordPress theme that doesn’t look modern, doesn’t come with built-in flexibility, and with a developer that doesn’t support it can spell trouble for you down the line. Your website’s design needs to adapt and evolve alongside the business it represents.




designer

Incisive analysis of hydrogen-bonded supramolecular architectures in designer polycyclitols: observation of some interesting self-assembly patterns

CrystEngComm, 2024, 26,1952-1961
DOI: 10.1039/D4CE00010B, Paper
Showkat Rashid, Ahmad Husain, Bilal A. Bhat, Goverdhan Mehta
This article examines C–H⋯O and O–H⋯O hydrogen-bonded patterns in polyoxygenated decalins, showcasing varied supramolecular architectures influenced by oxyfunctionalisation and surrogate carbonate groups.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Role of soft skills in industrial and product design career success: Preparing next generation of designers

Kushal Karwa, a thought leader in design education, emphasizes the need for integrating soft skills training into career preparation programs to help young designers thrive in real-world environments.




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Masaba Gupta: Not your everyday wedding designer

Up, close and personal with Masaba Gupta on wedding outfits and life choices




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How Porsche and Lucasfilm Teamed Up to Create a New Star Wars Starship | The Designer Alliance | WIRED Brand Lab

BRANDED CONTENT | Produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Porsche | Want to see the fastest ride in the galaxy? Meet the Tri-Wing S-91X Pegasus, the newest starfighter in the Star Wars universe. Watch as designers from Porsche and LucasFilm race the clock to bring together two iconic brands and create this one-of-a-kind vehicle. See Star Wars: #TheRiseofSkywalker December 20.




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Using AI as a creative tool with artist and stage designer Es Devlin | WIRED Live

Artist and stage designer Es Devlin has created stage sculptures for Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, the WEEKND and U2 and now at WIRED Live, she discusses her approach to creativity; AI as a creative tool; and the future of live experiences. "The practice has changed beyond recognition."




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The Drop In: Creative Collaborations at Work | Designer Sophia Chang on Creating a More Equitable Sneaker Experience

Produced by WIRED Brand Lab with Dropbox | Illustrator and designer Sophia Chang talks about her mission to empower women within sneaker culture and using Dropbox to collaborate.




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Dune Costume Designers Break Down Dune’s Stillsuits

In 'Dune,' inhabitants of the desert planet wear full-body stillsuits for their survival. These stillsuits capture moisture and recycle it into drinking water. Jacqueline West and Bob Morgan, costume designers on 'Dune,' explain how they approached designing the suits for the film.




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Tech Support - Urban Designer Answers City Planning Questions From Twitter

Former Chief Urban Designer of The City of New York Alexandros Washburn joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about city planning. How does the New York City Subway compare to others worldwide? What are the pros and cons of rent control initiatives? Which city can lay claim to being "smartest" in the world? Or has the best airport? What challenges will the urban designers of tomorrow need to meet? Alexandros Washburn answers these questions and many more on City Planning Support.




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Tech Support - Urban Designer Answers More City Planning Questions

Former Chief Urban Designer of The City of New York Alex Washburn returns to WIRED to answer another round of the internet's burning questions about city planning. How should cities accommodate electric bikes? Can urban planning mitigate over-gentrification? How can urban planning prevent crimes? What does the future of public transportation in urban centers look like? Can a city ever reach population capacity? How's it possible for a city to run out of water? Alex Washburn answers these questions and many more on City Planning Support, Vol. 2. Director: Justin Wolfson Director of Photography: Constantine Economides Editor: Richard Trammell Expert: Alex Washburn Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi Associate Producer: Brandon White Production Manager: Peter Brunette Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark Casting Producer: Nicholas Sawyer Camera Operator: Christopher Eustache Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen Production Assistant: Kalia Simms Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen Additional Editor: Jason Malizia Assistant Editor: Billy Ward




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Designers, (Re)define Success First

About two and a half years ago, I introduced the idea of daily ethical design. It was born out of my frustration with the many obstacles to achieving design that’s usable and equitable; protects people’s privacy, agency, and focus; benefits society; and restores nature. I argued that we need to overcome the inconveniences that prevent us from acting ethically and that we need to elevate design ethics to a more practical level by structurally integrating it into our daily work, processes, and tools.

Unfortunately, we’re still very far from this ideal. 

At the time, I didn’t know yet how to structurally integrate ethics. Yes, I had found some tools that had worked for me in previous projects, such as using checklists, assumption tracking, and “dark reality” sessions, but I didn’t manage to apply those in every project. I was still struggling for time and support, and at best I had only partially achieved a higher (moral) quality of design—which is far from my definition of structurally integrated.

I decided to dig deeper for the root causes in business that prevent us from practicing daily ethical design. Now, after much research and experimentation, I believe that I’ve found the key that will let us structurally integrate ethics. And it’s surprisingly simple! But first we need to zoom out to get a better understanding of what we’re up against.

Influence the system

Sadly, we’re trapped in a capitalistic system that reinforces consumerism and inequality, and it’s obsessed with the fantasy of endless growth. Sea levels, temperatures, and our demand for energy continue to rise unchallenged, while the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Shareholders expect ever-higher returns on their investments, and companies feel forced to set short-term objectives that reflect this. Over the last decades, those objectives have twisted our well-intended human-centered mindset into a powerful machine that promotes ever-higher levels of consumption. When we’re working for an organization that pursues “double-digit growth” or “aggressive sales targets” (which is 99 percent of us), that’s very hard to resist while remaining human friendly. Even with our best intentions, and even though we like to say that we create solutions for people, we’re a part of the problem.

What can we do to change this?

We can start by acting on the right level of the system. Donella H. Meadows, a system thinker, once listed ways to influence a system in order of effectiveness. When you apply these to design, you get:

  • At the lowest level of effectiveness, you can affect numbers such as usability scores or the number of design critiques. But none of that will change the direction of a company.
  • Similarly, affecting buffers (such as team budgets), stocks (such as the number of designers), flows (such as the number of new hires), and delays (such as the time that it takes to hear about the effect of design) won’t significantly affect a company.
  • Focusing instead on feedback loops such as management control, employee recognition, or design-system investments can help a company become better at achieving its objectives. But that doesn’t change the objectives themselves, which means that the organization will still work against your ethical-design ideals.
  • The next level, information flows, is what most ethical-design initiatives focus on now: the exchange of ethical methods, toolkits, articles, conferences, workshops, and so on. This is also where ethical design has remained mostly theoretical. We’ve been focusing on the wrong level of the system all this time.
  • Take rules, for example—they beat knowledge every time. There can be widely accepted rules, such as how finance works, or a scrum team’s definition of done. But ethical design can also be smothered by unofficial rules meant to maintain profits, often revealed through comments such as “the client didn’t ask for it” or “don’t make it too big.”
  • Changing the rules without holding official power is very hard. That’s why the next level is so influential: self-organization. Experimentation, bottom-up initiatives, passion projects, self-steering teams—all of these are examples of self-organization that improve the resilience and creativity of a company. It’s exactly this diversity of viewpoints that’s needed to structurally tackle big systemic issues like consumerism, wealth inequality, and climate change.
  • Yet even stronger than self-organization are objectives and metrics. Our companies want to make more money, which means that everything and everyone in the company does their best to… make the company more money. And once I realized that profit is nothing more than a measurement, I understood how crucial a very specific, defined metric can be toward pushing a company in a certain direction.

The takeaway? If we truly want to incorporate ethics into our daily design practice, we must first change the measurable objectives of the company we work for, from the bottom up.

Redefine success

Traditionally, we consider a product or service successful if it’s desirable to humans, technologically feasible, and financially viable. You tend to see these represented as equals; if you type the three words in a search engine, you’ll find diagrams of three equally sized, evenly arranged circles.

But in our hearts, we all know that the three dimensions aren’t equally weighted: it’s viability that ultimately controls whether a product will go live. So a more realistic representation might look like this:

Desirability and feasibility are the means; viability is the goal. Companies—outside of nonprofits and charities—exist to make money.

A genuinely purpose-driven company would try to reverse this dynamic: it would recognize finance for what it was intended for: a means. So both feasibility and viability are means to achieve what the company set out to achieve. It makes intuitive sense: to achieve most anything, you need resources, people, and money. (Fun fact: the Italian language knows no difference between feasibility and viability; both are simply fattibilità.)

But simply swapping viable for desirable isn’t enough to achieve an ethical outcome. Desirability is still linked to consumerism because the associated activities aim to identify what people want—whether it’s good for them or not. Desirability objectives, such as user satisfaction or conversion, don’t consider whether a product is healthy for people. They don’t prevent us from creating products that distract or manipulate people or stop us from contributing to society’s wealth inequality. They’re unsuitable for establishing a healthy balance with nature.

There’s a fourth dimension of success that’s missing: our designs also need to be ethical in the effect that they have on the world.

This is hardly a new idea. Many similar models exist, some calling the fourth dimension accountability, integrity, or responsibility. What I’ve never seen before, however, is the necessary step that comes after: to influence the system as designers and to make ethical design more practical, we must create objectives for ethical design that are achievable and inspirational. There’s no one way to do this because it highly depends on your culture, values, and industry. But I’ll give you the version that I developed with a group of colleagues at a design agency. Consider it a template to get started.

Pursue well-being, equity, and sustainability

We created objectives that address design’s effect on three levels: individual, societal, and global.

An objective on the individual level tells us what success is beyond the typical focus of usability and satisfaction—instead considering matters such as how much time and attention is required from users. We pursued well-being:

We create products and services that allow for people’s health and happiness. Our solutions are calm, transparent, nonaddictive, and nonmisleading. We respect our users’ time, attention, and privacy, and help them make healthy and respectful choices.

An objective on the societal level forces us to consider our impact beyond just the user, widening our attention to the economy, communities, and other indirect stakeholders. We called this objective equity:

We create products and services that have a positive social impact. We consider economic equality, racial justice, and the inclusivity and diversity of people as teams, users, and customer segments. We listen to local culture, communities, and those we affect.

Finally, the objective on the global level aims to ensure that we remain in balance with the only home we have as humanity. Referring to it simply as sustainability, our definition was:

We create products and services that reward sufficiency and reusability. Our solutions support the circular economy: we create value from waste, repurpose products, and prioritize sustainable choices. We deliver functionality instead of ownership, and we limit energy use.

In short, ethical design (to us) meant achieving wellbeing for each user and an equitable value distribution within society through a design that can be sustained by our living planet. When we introduced these objectives in the company, for many colleagues, design ethics and responsible design suddenly became tangible and achievable through practical—and even familiar—actions.

Measure impact 

But defining these objectives still isn’t enough. What truly caught the attention of senior management was the fact that we created a way to measure every design project’s well-being, equity, and sustainability.

This overview lists example metrics that you can use as you pursue well-being, equity, and sustainability:

There’s a lot of power in measurement. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets done. Donella Meadows once shared this example:

“If the desired system state is national security, and that is defined as the amount of money spent on the military, the system will produce military spending. It may or may not produce national security.”

This phenomenon explains why desirability is a poor indicator of success: it’s typically defined as the increase in customer satisfaction, session length, frequency of use, conversion rate, churn rate, download rate, and so on. But none of these metrics increase the health of people, communities, or ecosystems. What if instead we measured success through metrics for (digital) well-being, such as (reduced) screen time or software energy consumption?

There’s another important message here. Even if we set an objective to build a calm interface, if we were to choose the wrong metric for calmness—say, the number of interface elements—we could still end up with a screen that induces anxiety. Choosing the wrong metric can completely undo good intentions. 

Additionally, choosing the right metric is enormously helpful in focusing the design team. Once you go through the exercise of choosing metrics for our objectives, you’re forced to consider what success looks like concretely and how you can prove that you’ve reached your ethical objectives. It also forces you to consider what we as designers have control over: what can I include in my design or change in my process that will lead to the right type of success? The answer to this question brings a lot of clarity and focus.

And finally, it’s good to remember that traditional businesses run on measurements, and managers love to spend much time discussing charts (ideally hockey-stick shaped)—especially if they concern profit, the one-above-all of metrics. For good or ill, to improve the system, to have a serious discussion about ethical design with managers, we’ll need to speak that business language.

Practice daily ethical design

Once you’ve defined your objectives and you have a reasonable idea of the potential metrics for your design project, only then do you have a chance to structurally practice ethical design. It “simply” becomes a matter of using your creativity and choosing from all the knowledge and toolkits already available to you.

I think this is quite exciting! It opens a whole new set of challenges and considerations for the design process. Should you go with that energy-consuming video or would a simple illustration be enough? Which typeface is the most calm and inclusive? Which new tools and methods do you use? When is the website’s end of life? How can you provide the same service while requiring less attention from users? How do you make sure that those who are affected by decisions are there when those decisions are made? How can you measure our effects?

The redefinition of success will completely change what it means to do good design.

There is, however, a final piece of the puzzle that’s missing: convincing your client, product owner, or manager to be mindful of well-being, equity, and sustainability. For this, it’s essential to engage stakeholders in a dedicated kickoff session.

Kick it off or fall back to status quo

The kickoff is the most important meeting that can be so easy to forget to include. It consists of two major phases: 1) the alignment of expectations, and 2) the definition of success.

In the first phase, the entire (design) team goes over the project brief and meets with all the relevant stakeholders. Everyone gets to know one another and express their expectations on the outcome and their contributions to achieving it. Assumptions are raised and discussed. The aim is to get on the same level of understanding and to in turn avoid preventable miscommunications and surprises later in the project.

For example, for a recent freelance project that aimed to design a digital platform that facilitates US student advisors’ documentation and communication, we conducted an online kickoff with the client, a subject-matter expert, and two other designers. We used a combination of canvases on Miro: one with questions from “Manual of Me” (to get to know each other), a Team Canvas (to express expectations), and a version of the Project Canvas to align on scope, timeline, and other practical matters.

The above is the traditional purpose of a kickoff. But just as important as expressing expectations is agreeing on what success means for the project—in terms of desirability, viability, feasibility, and ethics. What are the objectives in each dimension?

Agreement on what success means at such an early stage is crucial because you can rely on it for the remainder of the project. If, for example, the design team wants to build an inclusive app for a diverse user group, they can raise diversity as a specific success criterion during the kickoff. If the client agrees, the team can refer back to that promise throughout the project. “As we agreed in our first meeting, having a diverse user group that includes A and B is necessary to build a successful product. So we do activity X and follow research process Y.” Compare those odds to a situation in which the team didn’t agree to that beforehand and had to ask for permission halfway through the project. The client might argue that that came on top of the agreed scope—and she’d be right.

In the case of this freelance project, to define success I prepared a round canvas that I call the Wheel of Success. It consists of an inner ring, meant to capture ideas for objectives, and a set of outer rings, meant to capture ideas on how to measure those objectives. The rings are divided into five dimensions of successful design: healthy, equitable, sustainable, desirable, feasible, and viable.

We went through each dimension, writing down ideas on digital sticky notes. Then we discussed our ideas and verbally agreed on the most important ones. For example, our client agreed that sustainability and progressive enhancement are important success criteria for the platform. And the subject-matter expert emphasized the importance of including students from low-income and disadvantaged groups in the design process.

After the kickoff, we summarized our ideas and shared understanding in a project brief that captured these aspects:

  • the project’s origin and purpose: why are we doing this project?
  • the problem definition: what do we want to solve?
  • the concrete goals and metrics for each success dimension: what do we want to achieve?
  • the scope, process, and role descriptions: how will we achieve it?

With such a brief in place, you can use the agreed-upon objectives and concrete metrics as a checklist of success, and your design team will be ready to pursue the right objective—using the tools, methods, and metrics at their disposal to achieve ethical outcomes.

Conclusion

Over the past year, quite a few colleagues have asked me, “Where do I start with ethical design?” My answer has always been the same: organize a session with your stakeholders to (re)define success. Even though you might not always be 100 percent successful in agreeing on goals that cover all responsibility objectives, that beats the alternative (the status quo) every time. If you want to be an ethical, responsible designer, there’s no skipping this step.

To be even more specific: if you consider yourself a strategic designer, your challenge is to define ethical objectives, set the right metrics, and conduct those kick-off sessions. If you consider yourself a system designer, your starting point is to understand how your industry contributes to consumerism and inequality, understand how finance drives business, and brainstorm which levers are available to influence the system on the highest level. Then redefine success to create the space to exercise those levers.

And for those who consider themselves service designers or UX designers or UI designers: if you truly want to have a positive, meaningful impact, stay away from the toolkits and meetups and conferences for a while. Instead, gather your colleagues and define goals for well-being, equity, and sustainability through design. Engage your stakeholders in a workshop and challenge them to think of ways to achieve and measure those ethical goals. Take their input, make it concrete and visible, ask for their agreement, and hold them to it.

Otherwise, I’m genuinely sorry to say, you’re wasting your precious time and creative energy.

Of course, engaging your stakeholders in this way can be uncomfortable. Many of my colleagues expressed doubts such as “What will the client think of this?,” “Will they take me seriously?,” and “Can’t we just do it within the design team instead?” In fact, a product manager once asked me why ethics couldn’t just be a structured part of the design process—to just do it without spending the effort to define ethical objectives. It’s a tempting idea, right? We wouldn’t have to have difficult discussions with stakeholders about what values or which key-performance indicators to pursue. It would let us focus on what we like and do best: designing.

But as systems theory tells us, that’s not enough. For those of us who aren’t from marginalized groups and have the privilege to be able to speak up and be heard, that uncomfortable space is exactly where we need to be if we truly want to make a difference. We can’t remain within the design-for-designers bubble, enjoying our privileged working-from-home situation, disconnected from the real world out there. For those of us who have the possibility to speak up and be heard: if we solely keep talking about ethical design and it remains at the level of articles and toolkits—we’re not designing ethically. It’s just theory. We need to actively engage our colleagues and clients by challenging them to redefine success in business.

With a bit of courage, determination, and focus, we can break out of this cage that finance and business-as-usual have built around us and become facilitators of a new type of business that can see beyond financial value. We just need to agree on the right objectives at the start of each design project, find the right metrics, and realize that we already have everything that we need to get started. That’s what it means to do daily ethical design.

For their inspiration and support over the years, I would like to thank Emanuela Cozzi Schettini, José Gallegos, Annegret Bönemann, Ian Dorr, Vera Rademaker, Virginia Rispoli, Cecilia Scolaro, Rouzbeh Amini, and many others.




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How to develop your first Figma plugin for designers

I recently developed my first Figma plugin.

It wasn’t hard, and my whole team joined in, exposing us to what is possible with the Figma API.

Here’s a quick tutorial…

Read on Medium




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571: Searching vs AI, Getting Designers to Play Nice, and Web Components

Do you listen at 2x? Do Chris and Dave sound weird at normal speed IRL? How searching compares to using AI, chatbots kind of suck at context, getting a designer to work with developers at an agency, what happened to content visibility, and how to best build a design system using web components.




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For the festive season, designers are working with artisans to create clothes with a conscience

As gifting and dressing up for the festive season begins, consumers are increasingly looking at sustainable, environment friendly choices



  • Life & Style

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Designer Ranna Gill brings the essence of Lake Como to the runway at the Lakme Fashion Week X FDCI

Twenty-five years of Ranna Gill, and she still lets the flowers do the talking in her garments. Ahead of her show at Lakme Fashion Week X FDCI, the designer gives us a sneak peek into her collection



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Meet Aswanth A, the visual designer behind the IFFK 2024 logo and brand identity concept

The IFFK film festival will take place in Thiruvananthapuram from December 13 onwards




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Designer cocoon

Zaarga uses the Internet to weave a unique success tale. Payal Chhabria has the details...




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Decoding Diljit Dosanjh’s global desi style with designer Raghavendra Rathore

Designer Raghavendra Rathore takes us behind Diljit Dosanjh’s traditional-contemporary look at The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon




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From Radhika Merchant to Katrina Kaif, meet the designer who makes floral jewellery for weddings

At Srishti Calcuttawala’s Floral Art Studio in Mumbai, it took five karigars six hours to create Radhika Merchant’s floral dupatta and jewellery



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Why Amit Aggarwal is one of the most exciting designers at India Couture Week 2024

In the sea of wedding lehengas, heavy silk saris and Swarovski-encrusted gowns that made Couture Week, this outlier’s bold experiments with polymer and corded textiles stood tall




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Designers Abraham and Thakore bring their black and white design philosophy to Hyderabad

Slow, responsible and fashion that lasts seasons are beliefs that A&T hold dear




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Kochi designers use memories, motifs and gold for their Onam collections

Can’t make up your mind about your Onam fit? Here are some options...




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Chennai designer Neesha Amrish’s handmade stoles are now at the Van Gogh museum store in Amsterdam

The Ahimsa silk stoles are inspired by Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom and it takes 15 days to create one



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Manish Malhotra becomes the first Indian designer to showcase his fashion line, World Collection, at Harrods, London

The couturier navigates the global fashion scene through his World Collection that modernises India’s traditional textile crafts 




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Lakme Fashion Week 2024: Designer Aneeth Arora on Péro’s collaboration with Hello Kitty

At Lakme Fashion Week SS 25, the fashion brand’s biggest collab yet with Hello Kitty channeled ‘Cottagecore Kawaii’




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‘Shocking’: Ananya Panday, Sonam Kapoor, Manish Malhotra, mourn demise of fashion designer Rohit Bal

From Bollywood actors to designer Manish Malhotra, many took to social media to pay their respects to Rohit Bal, affectionately known as 'Gudda' by his admirers




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Designer Arpita Mehta’s wedding collection

Nazara, Arpita Mehta’s latest bridal couture collection, is inspired by the vibrant traditions of Gujarat and the Northeast




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Designer Sanjay Garg of Raw Mango fuses Mughal and Rajputana traditions in his latest festive line

Raw Mango’s Sanjay Garg fuses Mughal and Rajputana traditions to create a joyful line in jewel tones for the festive season




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Complete Your Style with Designer Footwear

 

It is generally perceived that whenever a person observes anyone, the eye goes from top to bottom. No one knows the reason but it is the fact. So the first thing which...




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Autocad Draughtsman Mechanical, Auto Cad Designer

Company: Confidential
Qualification: Aviation, Bachelor of Arts (B.A), Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch), Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A), Bachelor Of Computer Application (B.C.A), Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com), Bachelor Of Technology (B.Tech/B.E), Bachelors of Law (B.L/L.L.B), Bachelor Of Pharmacy....




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Katrina Kaif’s 5 Wedding-Perfect Designer Lehengas Are All You Need To Stand Out

Bollywood actress Katrina Kaif has made numerous statements in her western outfits and there is no doubt she has left us absolutely stunned in each outfit of hers. But apart from it, she has also given us some ethnic




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Looking for graphic designer




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In times of corona, youths’ ‘designer shield’ for poor




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Costume Designer Velayudhan Keezhillam Passes Away

Velayudhan Keezhillam, one of the senior-most costume designers of the Malayalam film industry passed away. The 66-year-old breathed his last at a private hospital in Chalakudy, on April 26, Sunday. As per the reports, the last rights of Velayudhan Keezhillam were




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User Testing as a Design Driver:Looksery created a product for users, not designers

October 5, 2015

You may have recently seen an abundance of bug-eyed people puking rainbows on Snapchat. Thank Looksery for that. Launched last year as an entertainment app based on face recognition technology and special effects, Looksery was acquired by Snapchat last month.

Looksery technology propels Snapchat’s new special effects

Founded in 2013, Looksery launched in October 2014 after...read more
By Jordan Crone

             




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Designer Neeta Lulla recalls creating Juhi’s look in 2.5 hours for the movie Darr




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'Lost in Space' robot designer Robert Kinoshita dies at 100

Video of the B9 robot from "Lost In Space" and his most famous catchphrases.; Credit: timtomp (via YouTube)

Mike Roe

Robert Kinoshita, the Los Angeles native who designed the iconic robots from "Lost in Space" and "Forbidden Planet," has passed away. He was 100 years old.

Konishita died Dec. 9 at a Torrance nursing home, according to the Hollywood Reporter, citing family friend Mike Clark. His creations included "Forbidden Planet's" Robby the Robot, the B9 robot from "Lost in Space," Tobor from "Tobor the Great" and more. Kinoshita also created "Lost in Space's" iconic flying-saucer-shaped Jupiter 2 spaceship.

Kinoshita built the original miniature prototype of Robby the Robot out of wood and plastic by combining several different concepts, according to the Reporter; the Rafu Shimpo reported that he struggled with the design.

"I thought, what the hell. We’re wasting so much time designing and drawing one sketch after another. I said to myself, I’m going to make a model," Kinoshita told the Rafu Shimpo in a 2004 interview. "Then one day, the art director sees the model. He says, ‘Give me that thing.’ He grabbed it and ran. ... Ten minutes later, he comes running back and puts the model back on my desk and says, ‘Draw it!’"

Watch Kinoshita and his colleagues talking about the construction of Robby the Robot:

Robby the Robot's construction

The 1956 classic sci-fi movie "Forbidden Planet" — based on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" — went on to be nominated for a special effects Oscar.

Kinoshita later served as art director on the 1960s sci-fi TV series "Lost in Space," creating the arm-flailing robot — named B9 — who delivered the classic line "Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!" That robot received as much fan mail as the actual humans on the show, according to the Reporter.

Watch the robot's feud with "Lost in Space's" Dr. Smith:

The robot vs. Dr. Smith

The "Lost in Space" robot even inspired a B9 Robot Builders Club, featured in Forbes. Kinoshita sent a message in 2000 to the club, thanking them for their support for the robot he originally nicknamed "Blinky."

"I'm truly flabbergasted and honored by your support for 'Blinky!' It's a well-designed little beauty," Kinoshita wrote. "Your thoughtful remembrance is something we designers seldom are lucky enough to receive."

Kinoshita described the thought process behind its design in a 1998 interview.

"You're laying in bed, and something comes to you," he said. "Until, finally, you get to a point where you say, 'This could work,' 'OK, let's see what the boss man says.' And you present it to him."

He told the Rafu Shimpo that he tried to create his robots to disguise the fact that there was a person inside. "I tried to camouflage it enough so you’d wonder where the hell the human was," he said.

Both the Japanese-American Kinoshita and his wife, Lillian, were sent to an Arizona internment camp during World War II, though they were able to get out before the end of the war and moved to Wisconsin, according to the Reporter.

While in Wisconsin, Kinoshita learned industrial design and plastic fabrication, designing washing machines for the Army and Air Force before returning to California, according to the Rafu Shimpo.

Kinoshita said that he had to overcome racial prejudice to break into working in Hollywood.

Kinoshita attributed his long life to clean living — along with daily doses of apple cider vinegar, family friend Clark told the Reporter.

Kinoshita also worked as a designer and art director on numerous classic TV shows, including "Kojak," "Barnaby Jones," "Hawaii Five-O," "Bat Masterson," "Sea Hunt," "Tombstone Territory," "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry's "Planet Earth" and more, according to his IMDB. His last TV show was 1984's "Cover Up."

Kinoshita grew up in Boyle Heights, according to the Reporter, attending Maryknoll Japanese Catholic School, Roosevelt High School and USC's School of Architecture. His career began with work on 1937's "100 Men and a Girl." Kinoshita graduated cum laude from USC, according to the Rafu Shimpo.

Watch Kinoshita speak at his 95th birthday gathering with the B9 Robot Builders Club. He said he hoped to make it to 100, and he ended up doing so.

Kinoshita's 95th birthday speech

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.




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Curling Game Update: App Designer and Stateflow

Someone recently challenged me to convert the curling simulator we published a few years ago (See this post and this post) to take advantage of new features not available at that time: App Designer and Stateflow for MATLAB.... read more >>




designer

Watch: Designer opens up dingy, diminutive studio in Athens

Although it may strike some as too minimalist, too clinical, this remodel of a cramped studio apartment in Athens is full of clever, space-expanding tricks.



  • Remodeling & Design

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Indian designer creates Braille Phone, a smartphone for the visually impaired

Imagine a smartphone for the visually impaired that has the tools most sighted smartphone users have come to take for granted




designer

Designer Vivienne Westwood opts for quality over quantity

"Buy less, choose well, make it last," says the iconic designer.



  • Natural Beauty & Fashion

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Maya Penn: Teen designer, entrepreneur, and activist

This 13-year-old fashion designer, cartoon animator, and activist is committed to making eco-savvy clothing that gives back.



  • Natural Beauty & Fashion

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This designer doesn't make furniture, he grows it

On a farm in England, Gavin Munro trains trees into beautiful and functional shapes.



  • Remodeling & Design

designer

Designers create cool hospital gowns to help sick teens feel better

Teens don’t want to be defined by what ails them, and these hospital gowns let their personalities shine.



  • Natural Beauty & Fashion