ARMCHAIR DESIGN CRITIC
If you’ve watched late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien lately, you may have done a double take after hearing O’Brien introduce the show’s graphic designer, Pierre Bernard. That’s right, Bernard not only creates on-air graphics and illustrations for the show, he’s featured regularly in the show’s skits. The Parsons graduate began his career illustrating type for Marvel Comics and Playboy, so creating visual gags like the Santa Claus Kama Sutra commemorative stamp set is right up his alley—but being tapped to go on camera was beyond his wildest dreams. Bernard has become somewhat of a cult celebrity with his recurring bit “Pierre Bernard’s Recliner of Rage,” where he rants about cultural indecencies from Snapple’s bottle cap redesign to the lack of proper display cases for Hot Wheels cars. If you think these sound like the authentic woes of a designer, you’re right. “They are all things that are really going on in my life,” says Bernard, “as pathetic or sad as they may be.” www.nbc.com/Late_Night_with_Conan_O’Brien

ANYTHING BUT NEUTRAL
The architectural firm of Rios Clemente Hale is known for the distinctive patterns and bursts of color that wrap the restaurants, schools and public spaces they design. But not every idea made it from the blueprints to the buildings, and the principals soon found themselves with a plethora of concepts that might work better as housewares than houses. In 2001 they launched notNeutral, a lifestyle and product design company where they could take their musings to the masses. They secured a storefront on Los Angeles’ Melrose Avenue to showcase the collection, which is utterly architectural in spirit. Example: A new furniture line named Tetra draws equal inspiration from case study housing and the Nintendo game Tetris. But a recent release named City Plates takes architecture-as-product to a new level: A series of four plates feature downtown maps of four cities—L.A., Shanghai, Cairo and Berlin —sure to evoke all sorts of geography, urbanism and planning conversations around the dinner table. www.notneutral.com

ZE END
On March 17, 2007, thousands of people around the world posted similar anxieties online: “I’m still starting to get nervous. I tend not to handle endings well.” “At least with Christmas, you could run around with your new toys and start counting down the days again until next year. But with this ... it’s different.” “Is anyone else constantly refreshing the website to see the show magically appear?”

Almost every afternoon since March 17, 2006, web designer-turned-performance artist Ze Frank posted a three-minute internet show he had written, performed and edited that morning to his website. And every afternoon, thousands of people constantly refreshed the site to see if he’d posted the next one yet. March 17, 2007, was no different—except it was to be the final show. The one-year experiment resulted in 250 episodes, watched by more than 25,000 people every day, with up to 1000 comments per show, some of which Frank would read in subsequent shows. There’s a complete vocabulary of terms familiar to avid viewers, an active forum, dozens of sites named after phrases Frank coined and a separate online community of over 20,000 (and growing) registered members. Frank’s show—a mix of current events, gags, heartfelt monologues and user-contributed segments—was the first genuine online collaboration.

“We’re in a very interesting and special time—which is a little slice of time—where a lot of this stuff is happening,” says Frank, who continued to lecture widely on technology and design during the show, filming segments in his hotel rooms. “There’s a certain kind of energy that this audience is cultivating right now, and they finally have places and platforms to express it.” To prove this, he challenged his viewers to participate in open-source projects, like using a global positioning application to create “Earth sandwiches” by placing buns on opposite sides of the planet. Soon the community began initiating its own projects: Earlier this year, Frank fans successfully handed off college student Luke Vaughn from Oregon to the East Coast and back, in an effort appropriately named the Human Baton.

This organically growing online community is the envy of corporate marketers, who are looking for similar allegiance from their consumers. But the secret may be in Frank’s grassroots approach. “Do I think that a traditional brand should do something exactly like this? No, absolutely not,” says Frank. “Quite honestly, I don’t think that anyone at all should do something like this,” he laughs. But he does think there’s a lesson in here for anyone who communicates for a living. “I think this conversational element of media online is something that’s very important to explore right now. There’s a lot to learn from it.”

For now, an archive of “The Show” is being created, and the community will continue its own projects without the fearless leader. As for Frank, he’s likely off to conquer other screens, having recently secured representation from talent agency UTA … but he can’t reveal much more than that at the moment. That’s OK. His audience will wait. www.zefrank.com

SO GOOD
The Social Design Network was founded to connect designers with individuals, nonpro fits and other organizations in need of creative solutions. This year, they’ve partnered with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) to create their first design contest, challenging young designers to tackle one of three specific problems: Heated Issue, an awareness campaign educating the public on the danger of global warming; Child’s Play, an object that encourages children to cultivate their imagination and creativity; and Shelter Me, a temporary emergency shelter for deployment in a natural disaster. The winning designers in each category will be awarded $5000 and, of course, the satisfaction of knowing they made a difference. The deadline is June 17, 2007. www.design21sdn.com

FONTASTIC
Founded by two of the world’s most prominent type designers—Erik Spiekermann (interviewed in this issue) and Neville Brody—type foundry FontFont prides itself on being “a library from designers, for designers.” Its roster of typographers and more than 3500 typefaces are the focus of the new book Made With FontFont: Type for Independent Minds (Mark Batty). Written by Spiekermann and Jan Middendorp, Made With FontFont is more than a catalog; it truly answers the question, “Where do fonts come from?” from the history of the font factory, to the origins of specific typefaces, to the often-hilarious ways fonts are used once they’re set free into the world. It’s a dizzying amount of information, beautifully stuffed into 352 well-kerned pages. An accompanying exhibition, “FiFFteen,” is currently traveling the globe. www.markbattypublisher.com, www.fontfont.com/fiffteen