Design For Life Not Magazine Covers!

I was at my local bookshop today and saw the design magazine Icon. They asked Brit designer Jasper Morrison to design their front cover. The result is a minimal white cover with his scribbled handwriting on it saying design for life not magazine covers! Wow what a statement. I remember graphic design guru Vince Frost telling me don't design for design sake. When you look at the tactile photos of Jessica Backhaus you soon realize there is real beauty and inspiration in the most surprising and ordinary places. The stupid thing is most magazines would pass on showing you this kind of home . If I had a penny for each house my editors passed up to be featured in their magazine because they did not tick certain boxes I would be a very wealthy girl. I have been wondering lately how many gems have been lost in the old rejection pile. I think it's time for a revolution! Just as rock-chick Beth Ditto bared all and looked HOT on the front cover of Love magazine it's time to see homes with real soul making it on the cover of the big glossies looking as seductive and alluring as Beth! With a photographer with a great eye like Jessica it can happen. I would love to know what you would like to see in your magazines.

Creative Space: Urban Homes of Artists and Innovators

I wanted to introduce you to this fantastic book produced by London writer, Francesca Gavin. She is currently Visual Arts Editor at 'Dazed & Confused'. I have worked in magazines for many years concentrating on the design aesthetic of the home. This is great but the problem is they don't really define what the home means to most of us. I have been saying for the last couple of years that looking inside a person's home is a fantastic cultural barometer in what the latest crazes are to how a person is feeling and thinking.

This book Creative Space: Urban Homes of Artists and Innovators features interiors created by people who shop in Colette in Paris, live on the Lower East Side in New York and travel to Tokyo; the domestic spaces are often DIY and strongly reflect pop culture. Filled with post-modern collectibles, vintage junk finds, camouflage and graffiti, clothing and toy collections, contemporary art resting in bookshelves and crammed onto walls, these homes are an antidote to the sterility of minimalism.

Looking at these interiors city by city, among the 30 homes featured in the book are those of the artist and designer Julie Verhoeven and Maharishi founder Hardy Blechmann in London, graffiti artist Fafi in Paris, artists Ryan McGinness and Wes Lang in New York, innovative creatives Jaybo and Lucio Auri in Berlin, Barcelona filmmaker Roger Gual and Tokyo's cult photographer Yasumusa Yonehara and artist Aya Takano. The spaces they inhabit and work in give a real image of today's avant garde.

Pictures are from Laurance King