HOOP DREAMS

It’s All Around You All The Time hula hoops by Keetra Dean Dixon, looking particularly good hanging on a wall.

CUTTING GLASS

The Bombay Sapphire Company is holding a designer martini glass competition, and if this clever design (named Fulfilled) from Polish designers Ola Dabrowska and Adam Groch doesn’t win, someone needs to sober up.

PRINTED MATTER

Ophelia Chong applies richly hued inks to woodblock type, and then prints them, via letterpress, onto sheets of existing ephemera. The results are haunting, sexy and just plain beautiful all rolled into one.

GOLD PAINT

Ed Ruscha’s homage to autumn, from a recent issue of the New York Times.

FINE TUNING

With the advent of the CD’s diminished dimensions, album art has never quite been able to replicate the panache of vinyl.  Maybe that’s why vintage record covers continue to fascinate musicologists and designers alike. The 1970′s German band, Faust, was experimental not just musically, but visually–exploring unconventional ways to present and package their albums at a time when it was barely a consideration for most musicians.  This 1973 album, The Faust Tapes, is a spare and sophisticated piece, featuring a signature optical composition by the British painter Bridget Riley, who is currently the subject of a retrospective at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.  Now, if only I could get my hands on one of these beauties.

BLUE PRINT

Playing around with Apple’s iPhone applications is an addictive pastime to which, sadly, I’m not immune. The application Shake It is one of many that taps into our current love affair with old Polaroid snapshots.  Here, rising above Manhattan’s lower east side, is Blue, New York’s first residential project by Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss-born architect and architectural theorist, who obviously has some coloroful ideas about how to stand tall amidst the neighborhood’s low-profile tenement buildings.

LOVE, ACTUALLY

Poster by Pentagram’s Angus Hyland, one of 20 posters commissioned for the London Design Festival, aimed at commemorating London as the world’s creative capital.  Blanka is selling it in a limited edition of 50.

SEX & DEATH

20 years ago, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography exhibition, A Perfect Moment, replete with frankly sexual, highly stylized, unabashedly obscene imagery, caused such a ruckus, the National Endowment for the Arts, which partially funded the show, has never quite recovered its footing.  Little has changed, as evidenced by the outcry against the current show at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, in which gay-themed works by Mapplethorpe and others have the locals abuzz. Controversy and revulsion aside, Mapplethorpe, it’s often forgotten, was a great photographer. And it’s pictures like this one–his last self-portrait, taken just months before he died in 1989 at age 42, and poignantly infused with the specter of death–that have staying power long after the headlines fade.

PAGE TURNER

How do you take mind-numbingly boring reading material and give it visual allure?  Find some great designers. The Manchester-based design studio, Music, clearly has plenty.

PERFECTLY CLEAR

Robin Rice Gallery in the West Village is currently showing 14 exquisitely delicate, impossibly lovely digital X-ray images of flowers and other subjects by Steve Miller.