Category: Media

5 Design-driven Titles That Burnt a Hole in My Wallet at the Singapore Art Book Fair

SABF2016 Picks

I came, I saw, and I left broke. This is a familiar experience for lovers of art book fairs the world over. It was certainly what happened to me at the recent Singapore Art Book Fair 2016, an annual showcase of arts publishing from the Southeast Asian city-state and its surrounding region. Inspired by similar fairs in Tokyo and New York City, independent bookstore BooksActually founded its own version of this fair with creative consultancy Hjgher three years ago. After sitting out last year, the fair returned last weekend, turning the ArtScience Museum in Marina Bay Sands into a “Cabinet of Curiosities.”

➜ Read the full story in AIGA’s Eye on Design

The Seriously Lighter Side of Design Criticism

If the term “design criticism” brings to mind long, rambling essays that pale in comparison to their accompanying images and layout—you know, the serious, yawn-inducing stuff most word-averse designers feel duty-bound to plow through anyhow, this crop of recent sites—The Passable Designer, The Message is Medium Rare, and Reading Design—will jolt you out of your endless-scroll stupor and show you how critical writing about design can be smart, funny, and unexpected.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design

Zinegapore is the Hilarious, Anti-travel Guide to Singapore’s Creative Scene

Order, efficiency, and cleanliness are probably not the first things most creatives look for in their ideal place to live. So when Singapore advertising and design agency Kinetic dreamt up a guide to introduce their country to the world, they went a little crazy.

Ultimately, they came up with Zinegapore, a zany alternative take on how Singapore’s corporate-like efficiency overshadows a burgeoning creative industry that has emerged over the last decade or so.

Eschewing conventional travel guides that simply list attractions, Kinetic’s free iPad-only guide offers a highly irreverent, yet refreshingly honest guide to everyday life in Singapore. Images of banks in this international finance capital are presented (literally) as “Places of Interest.” Singaporeans’ love for acronyms are expressed in a word search puzzle, and the city’s reputation for cleanliness is turned into a game of spotting the sheer number of trash bins on its streets.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design