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In 2007, when Nate Young was first asked to head the fledgling NewNorth Center, no one had to sell him on the area and its business community. Young had already co-founded a successful product design firm in Holland, Mich., and had spent 13 years in key design-related positions at Prince Corporation (later Johnson Controls).
“The work ethic here is amazing,” says Young, who more recently served as provost of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. “People are unusually dedicated to their companies. They see them more like partnerships, and you don’t get that in a lot of major metropolitan areas.”
There’s something else that he says differentiates West Michigan. “The people who have generated wealth here have kept it here. They put it back into the community because they believe in the community. They invest in culture, in neighborhoods, in social and civic causes. This has helped build the quality of life here.”
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Bengtsson uses high technology to create furniture with no lack of personality (or ambition): Slice, a series of[…]
When installation art came of age in the '60s, traditional museums ran into problems trying to show such big, often performance-based, pieces. The conundrum inspired the popularity of column-free (or “clear span”) galleries and museums that could fit, say, a[…]
The basic shape of the clothes hanger hasn’t changed much in over a hundred years: a flattened triangle with a hook. They’re perfectly serviceable for jackets and button-up shirts but fail miserably when it comes to T-shirts and crewneck sweaters,[…]
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Brand consistency is one of the trickiest design problems facing global corporations today: How does a company maintain its look and feel across borders and languages--in both the United States and Saudi Arabia, English and Arabic?
Nokia tapped British typographers[…]