Hey folks, it’s SF Design Week!
San Francisco Design Week is a growing celebration of San Francisco Bay Area design which includes an opening reception, Business and Design forums, studio tours, exhibitions, lectures, mixers, a closing party, and more.
Since 2006, AIGA San Francisco has organized San Francisco Design Week as a way to reach out to a diverse community of over 20,000 Bay Area design professionals as well as local businesses, non-profits, entrepreneurs, students, the design-savvy public, tourists, and more. AIGA SF will be partnering with the San Francisco chapters of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), the Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD), and Adobe Systems, to sponsor a full week of events highlighting the diversity and professionalism of the design community around the bay. Our goal is to raise public awareness of the impact that all design-graphic, product, interior, fashion, architecture, advertising, etc. has in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Unfortunately, the SF Design Week website has a rather poorly-designed event schedule – there are no calendar, category, or search functions; rather, you have to scroll through a very loooong list of happenings – but here is my own little short list of events to check out:
TUESDAY, JUNE 12
SF Design Week Pop-Up
Curated by Lower Branch
Date: Tuesday, June 12
Time: 6:00pm-9:00pm
Location: 111 Minna Gallery
Free Admission
Food, booze and local designers and vendors showcase their talent and sell their goods at 111 Minna from 6-9. Over 20 local vendors will be featured including Hammers & Heels, In Haus Press, Hellbent, Materials + Process and Lady Alamo. No entrance fee, food trucks will be on site, and the bar will be open for refreshments.
SF Local Design Market
Date: Tuesday, June 12
Time: 6:00pm-8:00pm
Location: Zinc Details
Free Admission, RSVP
Leading modern furniture showroom Zinc Details presents “SF Local Design Market,” a combined exhibition and design mart that will run from June 11 through June 17 with an opening on June 12 from 6 to 8 pm. In partnership with SF Design Week, “SF Local Design Market” is a cross between a conventional exhibition and design pop-up shop where Bay Area designers, artists and makers will be showcasing their products, which will also be for sale. The exhibition is sponsored by RDI, the Retail Design Institute, San Francisco chapter.
At the opening on June 12, visitors to “SF Local Design Market” will have the chance to chat with exhibitors and view the latest new ideas and designs from the Bay Area. This fun event also gives the public the opportunity to buy design directly from the creator, supporting emerging and established local talent. Light refreshments and drinks will be served.
Participants include designers Nick and Beau Trincia, Beau Oyler and Jared Aller, Rachael Gant, Jeni Tu, Justin Porcano, Jeremiah Collection, furniture and carpet designer Meg O’Halloran, Annie Galvin and Eric Rewitzer, www.3fishstudios.com and design book publishers Gingko Press, which will be organizing a pop-up design bookstore.
SF Local Design Market will be held at the Zinc Details showroom located at 1905 Fillmore Street between Bush and Pine Streets. The event is free and open to the public. Please rsvp at rsvp@zincdetails.com.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13
Open Studio Tours: Wednesday
Date: Wednesday, June 13
Time: 6:00pm-9:00pm
Location: Various, Download PDF Map
RSVP (Free Admission)
Join us as we get a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of a number of influential Bay Area design studios during our Studio Tours. Learn about different firms’ cultures and methodologies while rubbing elbows with design luminaries and up-and-comings in the environment that inspires their best work. Each studio will be open for one hour but we recommend you give yourself plenty of time to get to the next studio. This year, on Wednesday, June 13th, we have two walking paths; one in SOMA, and the other covering Hayes Valley, the Mission and Potrero Hill.
6PM
Apparatus Architecture
Fuse Project
Odopod
R/GA
7PM
Coalesse Design Center
frog design
Interstice Architects
Stamen Design
Daylight Design
8pm:
Gensler Architects
Lunar Design
Smart Design
Behind the Scenes at the Mission: House
Date: Wednesday, June 13
Time: 6:00pm-8:00pm
Location: Mission: House
Tickets
Join AIA San Francisco, architect Andrew Dunbar and landscape architect Zoee Astrakhan – the husband and wife design team behind Interstice Architects – for an open house tour of their home, Mission: House. Located in the diverse Mission neighborhood, Mission: House is both the home and living laboratory for the couple, who have made it their personal trial grounds for material, light and unorthodox construction techniques.
Recently featured in the New York Times and Dwell Magazine, the home is a two-story hybridizing residence. Behind a prototype reclaimed glass façade (Recent winner of the international Green Dot Award for product design), the multipurpose street level room serves as an ad hoc creative space for the family of four, as well as an office or gallery. The main residential space above includes two bedrooms and an open living area. The design team will be on site throughout the night to talk about the home and design process.
THURSDAY, JUNE 14
Shades of Green: Incorporating Sustainability into Design
Time: 11:30am-1:30pm
Location: AIA of San Francisco
Tickets
Admission: $15
Join the Center for Resource Solutions and a panel of design industry leaders on forward thinking design tactics to communicate sustainability. Through targeted questions, our expert panelists will showcase working examples, stories, tactics and challenges around visual communication of complex sustainability principles, particularly as it relates to energy, materials and climate issues. The event will be hosted at AIA in downtown San Francisco with a light lunch, followed by an audience Q&A.
How to Make a Book with Steidl
Date: Thursday, June 14
Time: 5;30pm & 7:30pm
Location: YBCA Screening Room
Information & Tickets
For more than forty years, Gerhard Steidl has personally supervised the publishing and printing of some of the most significant books on fashion, art, and photography. We observe him as he collaborates with renowned artists like Jeff Wall, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Frank, working tirelessly to present their work in beautifully created books. Providing an insightful look at the way Steidl’s printing press operates in Goettingen, Germany, this is a portrait of a dynamic entrepreneur with an uncompromising passion for the craft of bookmaking. (2010, 88 min, digital)
Types THEY Can Make: with Norm and Maximage
Date: Thursday, June 14
Time: 6:30pm-9:30pm
Location: swissnex San Francisco
Information & Tickets
The Types We Can Make exhibit, a project by ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne showcasing Swiss typography, closes its swissnex San Francisco run in style with a string of events beginning with presentations from leading Swiss graphic design teams Norm and Maximage.
The Zurich-based duo Norm is made up of Manuel Krebs and Dimitri Bruni, among the most prominent names in modern Swiss graphic design and typography. Their reputation was cemented with award-winning corporate font programs, institutional signage, and poster and book designs. At swissnex, they touch upon both the Norm examples featured in Types We Can Make (their Replica typeface and corporate fonts for watch industry heavyweights) as well as their typography at large, and they outline their concept of “numerical design.”
Maximage is David Keshavjee and Julien Tavelli, who shuttle back and forth between Lausanne, Switzerland, and Berlin, creating a dizzying body of work that, in its omnivore approach to type and print technique, belies the very young age of these award-winning “wild boys” of graphic design. Keshavjee and Tavelli present the Maximage additions in Types We Can Make and ECAL’s monograph Typeface As Program.
FRIDAY, JUNE 15
Types YOU Can Make Workshop
Time: 9:00am-3:00pm
Location: swissnex San Francisco
Information & Tickets
Grind out original prints from ink stamps and paper cuts with some of Switzerland’s most prominent type designers.
Following the tremendous response to Ludovic Balland’s workshop, held near the opening of the Types We Can Make exhibition, swissnex San Francisco invites Dimitri Bruni and Manuel Krebs (Norm), and David Keshavjee and Julien Tavelli (Maximage) to share their expertise with Bay Area graphic design students and young professionals.
The full-day workshop draws inspiration from two distinct publications referencing American type and print. Published in 1969, Rob Roy Kelly’s American Wood Type, 1828-1900 monograph documents early type design in the United States, tracking rough typography experiments by autodidacts with no academic background or ties to typographic history. Norm and Maximage invite participants to rediscover and adapt these early type techniques using foam and paper cutters.
SUNDAY, JUNE 17
Design the Life You Love Workshop
Time: 10:00am mingle & light brunch, 10:30am-1:00pm workshop
Location: Herman Miller Showroom
Tickets
On Sunday 6/17, SF DesignWeek will host a workshop led by Ayse Birsel, partner of Birsel + Seck and designer of the Herman Miller Resolve office system and the M’Afrique collection for Moroso. In a half-day workshop Birsel will offer her design process, Deconstruction and Reconstruction, as a creative tool to help you design the life you want to live. Using constructive metaphors, playful models and optimistic visualization, attendees will draw from concepts in fields as diverse as fashion, design, art, and gastronomy-looking to the work of thinkers like Issey Miyake, Ferran Adria, James Dyson and Steve Jobs-as food for thought.
Also, do check out SF Design Week’s free Apple Workshops and ongoing events. See you around town!
