Nike Woven Air Footscape Launch

by Ami Kealoha

East meets West. Form matches function. Sport inspires lifestyle. Nike brings it all together with Joga Bonito, their massive new football (aka soccer) campaign that includes today's debut of the woven Air Footscape in Milan. Cool Hunting was on-site for the occasion (courtesy of Nike) and sat in on a roundtable discussion with Richard D. Clarke, Nike's global creative director, and Peter Hudson, global creative director for Nike football, to get a sense of the exhaustive design process—nearly three years long from start to finish—that went into creating the line.

Continuing Nike's 35-year old tradition of high-performance gear, the designers worked extensively with football players worldwide to refine innovations meant to cut down interference with the athlete's body. While performance comes first—as Clarke put it, "good design is good design."—Nike sent teams that logged weeks in each country (a total of 14 teams altogether), researching design history and culture, to come up with details to uniquely represent each nation—a consideration that makes sense given football's reign as the most popular sport worldwide.

Artwork, Bearbricks, Air Force Ones and lots more information after the jump.

Yearbook Dutch Design 05

by Ami Kealoha

Thanks to radical design innovation in the country’s universities and access to government grants and urban planning policies that put design on par with development, design flourishes in the Netherlands. Pages in the Yearbook Dutch Design 05, published by Episode Publishers, capture the best results from current practice in graphic design, product design, fashion, and architecture. Three essays about the current by state of Dutch design accompany the photos.

"Where There’s Smoke" by wunderkind furniture designer Maarten Bass graces the cover. The flames are actually a piece being burned for Baas’ line of burned furniture preserved under clear epoxy, produced for Moss. Work by 38 designers and studios fill the pages with wild yet functional ideas. Experimental Jetset is celebrated for their subtly innovative, Swiss-influenced graphic work. Tord Boontje's floral filigree lighting expands the imagination in the product design category.

This book might be the next best thing to doing post-graduate studies at Jan Van Eyck Academie or Utrecht University.

Available online at Episode Publishers.

Contributed by Kristopher Irizarry

Jenny Holzer: For London

by SummerSeventySix

If you're in London over the next week, then come dusk, you'll see the projections by Jenny Holzer gracing some of the city's better-known buildings, like City Hall, Somerset House and The Barbican. Holzer's now in her fifties, and cut her teeth in 1970s New York, where she posted her truisms all over the city. Since then her "high-class graffiti," as its been called, has employed various types of media in cities all over the world, and has become grander and grander in scale.

These latest works in London are her first here since the 1980s, and form part of the Beckett Centenary Festival. The words being projected are taken from the works of Samuel Beckett, as well as other celebrated poets. They'll be turned on between 7:30pm and 11pm, and run for a week from 7 April 2006.

Also on Cool Hunting: Jenny Holzer: For New York, Jenny Holzer at Helmut Lang

The Cabestan

by Evan Orensten

The Cabestan is a collaboration between two of horology's bad boys, Vianney Halter and Jean-François Ruchonnet's DMC Group (who also designed the Heuer Monaco V4).

Inspired by old Curta calculators, this watchmaking marvel has a vertical tourbillon and an unusual fusée-and-chain movement. Time is shown on the barrels; no dial and no hands. You wind the watch by attaching a "wrench" to the two top cabestans (the knobs on the side).

Available later this year, 135 of these beauties will be made in gold or platinum. Oh, and start saving now. They cost around $220,000 and are available from Vianney Halter.

Read the full story here and view a large image of the watch after the jump.

Jason Benjamin

by Lost At E Minor

Recently voted by Australian Art Collector as one of Australia’s 50 most collectable artists (alongside Brett Whiteley no less), Jason Benjamin has been exhibiting both locally and internationally (New York, London) since 1989. His artworks are evocative and vibrant, feeding off the unique colour palette of the vast Australian landscape. Kevin Spacey owns two of them. But they’re not for those on a budget—he was the youngest Australian artist to sell a work for $50k. Nice work if you can get it!

More photos after the jump

Alison Jackson

by Evan Orensten

Like Garry Winogrand crossed with Jeff Wall, Alison Jackson creates jarring pseudo-documentary photos. Instead of stills cinematically staging the serenity of a night janitor mopping or a chaotic car crash, Jackson stages serene chaos with counterfeit celebrities caught in private moments. In one piece, look-alikes of David Beckham and Prime Minister Tony Blair talk poolside. Blair stands in a Speedo, Beckham is wrapped in a women’s spa robe. Another image from that series is seen above, with the "Prime Minister" frolicking in the pool amidst a wardrobe malfunction.

Regardless of who the person she is shooting actually is, Jackson does well in capturing a universal fleshiness that emerges in private moments. Many spy on the subject, as a from-the-back photo of Prince Harry trying on a crown while standing nude in front of a mirror. In others. a subject faces the camera as if the picture was a companion to a Vanity Fair gut spill or more on the mark, an Old Masters portrait.

Private, her popular book from 2003, features a collection of Jackson’s humorous yet sad commentary, like the Beckham clone, this time in the bathroom pulling down his pants to rubberneck at his name tattooed on his bum. The buns of real David Beckham are, without a doubt, more taut than the artist’s model. Like recognizing flaws on a Canal Street Coach purse, noticing everyman flabbiness is part of the game in her work. Throughout, work rips away at celebrity obsession and notions of authenticity in photojournalism.

Expect more of the same in her new book, out this summer from Taschen, simply titled Alison Jackson.

Contributed by Kristopher Irizarry