Swatches by Louis Postel in Design Times
Welcome to the Rough and Tumble World of Design
There goes another editor!
Just as we were preparing this issue, a heavily capitalized furniture dot.com poached one of our most talented staffers. Wow, she will be the third to leave us for cyberspace this year! It’s nice to be a hot magazine, but the downside is that our masthead has become a happy hunting ground for recruiters.
To the uninitiated, the world of design must seem like a very still lake, where there’s hardly a ripple on the water. After all, classic design is all about serenity and timelessness, the enduring qualities of scale and craft. What does the perfectly positioned drop ceiling or Biedermeier table have to do with the fast changes going on in today’s world? Shouldn’t these life-enhancing marvels stand far apart from the rush of history, the awesome pace of technology and society? By its nature successful design evolves over time, matures slowly, and generally takes great patience, requiring a true sense of collaboration between designer and client. (We recently overheard one designer quip: “The more expensive it is, the longer it takes!”)
All this thoughtful evolutionary process may be so, but the rush of the design industry itself is moving faster than anyone can say “World Wide Web.” Change is everywhere.
Demand has never been greater. Choice has never been greater. And, as you can tell from our story on Introducing 10 New Design Stars on page 48, the amount of new talent coming onto the scene has never been greater.
Speaking of change, and specifically the Web, click on page 34, which introduces a new department where designers test drive some of the latest design sites. And don’t forget to visit us on our own site www.designtimes.com for easy subscription renewals, back issues, links to the resources, even some very attractive “Help Wanted” postings.