AIGA (The Professional Association for Design) does a yearly survey called AIGA 365: The Year in Design. They’ve chosen a whole series of top examples for 2008 to put into the archives, all sorted into 10 different categories. From their writeup:

AIGA’s suite of competitions is widely recognized as the most discerning statement on design excellence today, extending a legacy that began 90 years ago. By means of the competitions, AIGA creates a chronicle of outstanding design solutions, each demonstrating the process of designing, the role of the designer and the value of design.

Their 29th Annual Year in Design is online now, and I’ve sifted through the 10 categories and pulled out some of my favorite selections. And so, for your enjoyment:

Brand and Identity Systems Design: Bretenic Limited Stationary System

Here’s a piece of work from a Toronto design shop that uses good copy and comical prose to illustrate why a lawyer and specialist is good to work with. It’s well-presented and direct, and the approach of the piece matches the approach of the client, which is funny and down to earth.

Corporate Communications Design: Take Action Postcards to the Edge

There weren’t a ton of wonderful examples in here, I found, but this set of postcards about dissidents being persecuted in other countries is concise, catchy, and embodies a spirit of design slightly different than much of the NGO “design ghetto” (if such a thing exists, and from my impressions it sort of does).

Editorial Design: New York Times Magazine

These guys don’t quit. I’ve written about their extremely skilled lead designer before, and these two nominations here are making me think about a subscription. Consistently, eye-catching, and beautiful to look at, week in and week out. I missed the recent food issue, which I’m sure was full of various mouth-watering things alongside some fantastic articles.

Experience Design: Detroit Institute of Arts Interactive Installations

Although I can’t vouch for this, not having been to the museum, the idea of watching a period meal being served while you sit at a kind of virtual table, as a way of presenting silverware and other period flatware and furniture and cooking habits, is kind of awesome. Plus it’s easily the best way to answer that eternal question we’ve all grappled with: “how can I make my 18th century flatware collection relevant to contemporary youngsters?” Now you know.

Information Design: The Normandy Campaign

I wish computer technology was at this stage back when I was sent to museums on various school trips, although I remember the series of blinking lights and various switches that moved things were equally as enthralling as this interactive touch-screen map of the Normandy campaign probably is. Everything is fun when you’re a kid. Ah hell, it still is.

Motion Graphics: TV Land Refresh

This category, I’ve got to say, is lacking a touch–the nominations were fine, but not mind-blowing, and from a design standpoint I just don’t think Modest Mouse’s Dashboard video needs to win a prestigious design award. I know it’s motion graphics, but that’s a wide category, considering what I eventually chose at their best selection: this refresh of the TV Land network, which is clean, contemporary, and not annoying. For a retro network that shows nothing but old reruns, it’s great, actually. No old TVs with rabbit ears sticking out of them or bouncy retro graphics–although I’m an unabashed fan of vintage things, showing Brady Bunch reruns doesn’t mean you have to embrace the tv-in-the-60s aesthetic for your entire network.

Packaging Design: Ultrasilencer

Well I wanted Criterion’s Breathless DVD set, but the Ultrasilencer takes it. When the hell are you ever going to get a Vacuum Cleaner with modernist Helvetica styling on all its packaging? This wins my personal award for “making Jordan kind of interested in a product he wouldn’t otherwise give a crap about.” Thanks to this design I seriously started thinking that maybe this product was some kind of revolutionary thing, until I realized the object I was thinking about was a vacuum cleaner.

Promotional Design and Advertising: Planet Propaganda

The posters of Planet Propaganda, collectively, win this one. This is a massive category and it’s kind of ridiculous to choose one, especially since I just complained about ‘honorifics’ in another article, but hey, I’m not actually handing out awards here, just picking my favourites.

Typographic Design: Sculpture Today

This ‘Paper Alphabet for Sculpture Today’ is fantastic. Typography done with paper that looks beautiful. Plus the “C” looks like my cherished Commodore 64 logo.

Book Design: Underachiever’s Manifesto

While there are a ton of quality choices here, the Underachiever’s Manifesto gets my vote. It was a tossup between this and a few others (All the Sad Young Literary Men I really like), but the “mistake is the whole point” simplicity of the cover won me over.

2006 saw the launch of Illustrative, a new festival/exhibition in Berlin that celebrates illustration and graphic art. Having taken place this year in Zurich between the 18th and 26th of October, it drew 35 different artists, and showcased over 400 works.

Its main thrust is described as “documenting the influence of illustration and graphic arts on other disciplines like book illustration, fashion and textile-arts, pottery, and animated movies.” The point is to trace how illustration and graphic art feature in, or are essential parts of, the many facets of ‘contemporary art’.

What this really means is you’re getting a ton of great illustration gathered all in one place. And as an excellent sideline, the exhibition hosts a Young Illustrators Award, in three separate categories that include Illustration, Book Art, and Animation.

A funny thing: even though I’m writing on design all the time, I’m still often in the dark when it comes to the genre terms “illustration” and “graphic art”. That’s fine: part of the point of their recent resurgence is the inability to pin contemporary illustration down into one, specific category, as was possible 100 years ago.

Take a look at this interview with Pascal Johanssen, one of the two Berlin-based curators of Illustrative, who outlines what “contemporary illustrative art” means to him:

It’s a new art movement. Unlike classic illustration it is a mix of influences from comic art, graffiti, fashion, advertisement, set design for computer games or animation. This form of illustrative art is marked by very different creative impulses and thus can be design or art.

He also describes the fundamental differences between what he sees as the previous generation of illustrators and today’s. I’ve never really thought about things in these terms before:

The parent generation for me is represented by illustrators like Tomi Ungerer. These have been willful, charismatic drawers. They were close to political caricatures, which was in accordance with the common operational fields of illustration back then. Today´s illustrators are mainly avant-garde regarding innovative means of design.

And finally, he’s asked in which direction illustration is moving at the moment. His answer is probably prescient, but it’s strange–I’ve been hearing a version of this answer, across several disciplines, for some time now. Read on:

Game Art will come up. This will be an art genre which will not only copy the aesthetics of computer games, like Eboy, but uses the graphical, narrative and technological means emerging from computer games and making them possible. Something new will develop in this field.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read that games are the new, growing, soon-to-be-fundamental frontier for: advertising, literature, interactive experience, socialization, social networking, and entertainment in general. No one actually knows if it’ll happen, but for the moment I see games as still, essentially, games.

Yeah, there are massive networks like World of Warcraft. There are games everyone in the world plays, like Grand Theft Auto 4. There are games like The Sims 2. But they’re still just games. There are still stores that sell only video games, all staffed by the same 5 dudes that ran them when I was 10. Or at least it seems that way.

I’ll save a further exploration of that subject for another day, but it strikes me that Johannson’s answer here is actually not overblown like many of the video-games-are-taking-over-all-media claims: the area in which games and art will strongly converge might indeed be one where the very facility of young designers with video games (and the technologial means that bring them about) could actually create an entirely new field of art, and a big one at that. Just a prediction.

One can’t miss event during the exhibiton–especially for anyone interested in vintage art or just wonderfully detailed design–was Roman Bittner’s talk on his “Ancient Cities of Tomorrow” series. These are e-boy like illustrations taken to another level and really, really captivating. Check out his studio here.

Anyway, if you were lucky enough to be wandering around Zurich in October, staring at mountains and drinking their water straight from the clean, fresh rivers, hopefully you caught up with Illustrative.

I’m one of those relatively new wine drinkers that knows next-to-nothing about actual wine, but just enough to pretend that I know what I’m doing when selecting one. If I’m with a group of people who don’t usually buy wine, they defer to me. This is about as good an idea as closing one’s eyes and selecting a wine at random, but hey, I’ll take the extra responsibility.

This is mainly because it lets me do that certain type of wine-browsing–you know the one–where you walk along the racks, picking up certain bottles, turning them over, and muttering comments to yourself that you hope your friends take for informed musings on a particular vintage. If they only knew I was just saying “this one is a red one…” or “this one is from France…”

Despite my solid sommelier credentials, I’m not above occasionally choosing wine based on its packaging. I once bought a bottle of Ontario wine with a twist-off top because it had a bunch of well-designed raccoons on the bottle. It wasn’t that good (at least… I don’t think it was that great), but what can you do when faced with an awesome bottle?

That’s the question I might have to ask myself when I finally happen upon these products in-store, three examples of great design applied to the wine bottle. Our first example is a Shiraz called Boarding Pass, and comes from Australia’s R Wines. It’s a top example of creative packaging design as applied to a pretty constrained medium–if you want to be taken seriously as a wine producer, wild innovations in bottle design and shape usually mean you’ll get looked over by serious buyers. This is a perfect compromise: the design is fresh and original, and the playful luggage tag around the neck is a great touch. I’d go out of my way to buy this just so I could take it somewhere.

The second bottle to catch my eye comes from Spain–it’s the Baud-designed Lazarus Wine, with its packaging done entirely in Braille. Another great piece of work that would have my cash if I walked by it on a rack, no questions asked. Again, it’s tricky with wine, as most innovative design skirts the original/gaudy line, and subtlety is crucial in putting out a bottle that’ll catch the eye without drawing a follow-up groan.

My last candidate isn’t a bottle design at all, but rather these custom wine tags from popptags. They’re funny, honest, and letterpressed on recycled paper. There are tons of well-written, witty cards out there now, but these are both seriously funny and beautiful to look at. I’d go nuts if I got a nice bottle of wine with a tag on it that said “Nothing Says Thank You Like a Bottle of Wine I Know Nothing About.” Plus “The Wine Store Guy Said This Was Good” is a printed version of the exact line I spoke when recently giving someone a bottle. I think my friends and family know what they’re getting this year–yes indeed, a bunch of hilarious tags attached to thick $5.00 bottles full of red liquid.

Concrete Art by Transparent House: This is beautiful work on a hard concrete surface. Transparent House applies a floral pattern which “adds warm contrast and highlightes the cold austerity of the material.” Besides large stickers or paint, I’ve never seen anything that actually works so nicely with a plain old concrete surface before. This would work beautifully in a studio.

Cassette Tape Closet by Creative Barn: While they’re only selling one of these, it’s a great idea. Reminds me of John Cusack’s insane record collection, organized on various shelves, in High Fidelity, for some reason. I know they don’t really have much to do with each other, but there was something about those shelves that hit the same sweet spot that this closet does.

Shelflife by Charles Trevelyan: Here’s a wonderful, chaotic bookshelf with an integrated chair and miniature table/footstool built in, done by Viable London and available soon. It’s hard to execute anything with the words ‘3-in-1′ and not have it turn out ugly, so three cheers for this.

Mikado Bookshelf by Edition Compagnie: If you’ve got a big empty wall and want a bookshelf that isn’t boring, try this one. It doesn’t maximize the space it takes up by any means, but it’s fun to look at. Can’t say whether after 1 year of this I’d start longing for straight lines again, though.

Sunday Paper by David Stovell: These are rolled-up newspapers turned into stools. Re-using stacks of yesterday’s papers–without a ton of effort, anyone can do this–to make something useful is a great idea, especially since the distance between ‘a bunch of newspapers’ and ‘a useable stool’ seems kinda long. And yet it isn’t. Extremely simple and smart.

Lightboxes by Pedlars: Nevermind the price ($550 each), these are home versions of those boxes you see in various radio and television studios, or perhaps films which have scenes set in various radio and television studios. Solid and heavy with a light inside. Your fledgling home studio needs the ‘On Air’ one today.

Here’s a better-late-than-never roundup of all the worthwhile pixel art I found throughout September. Next month I’m going to expand this feature to include every kind of interesting piece of video-game art (mostly 8-bit of course) I come across, since that’s sorta what I do anyway. For example, the above image really has nothing to do with pixels and everything to do with the NES. It comes from supermandolini. Without any more delay:

ffffound points us to this fun, misleading Atari Game Box. Speaking of Atari, check out these Atari Modern Classics, which re-create today’s games as classic old game boxes. You remember, when everything was a “Video Computer System Game Program” because those words, strung together like that, just sounded great?

Yeah, you gotta plug it in and the scale sorta ruins the whole point of it, but this “high definition” Lite-Brite from Bandai lets you use 1600 LEDs to make the design of your childhood dreams, plus it comes with software to let you plan out and preview things first. You know, because this is such a serious undertaking and all.

Here’s a beautiful video, called “Dot Matrix Revolution”, which chronicles (well, sort of) a history of the computer using pixel art. It’s by a Canadian group known as SuperBrothers. Better quality here.

Last month’s feature had a bathroom re-done entirely in 1×1 tiles along these lines, and now we’ve got it taken to the next, commercial step: get your finest-Italian-ceramic Tetris Tiles today.

Those two guys behind MythBusters rigged up 1100 paintballs to some kind of gigantic, insane gun and fired them simultaneously. It made a kind of painting in about a tenth of a second and is, if nothing else, funny.

Here’s an art installation by Antoinette J. Citizen in which an entire room is made into a Mario Brothers level, complete with sound effects coming out of the interactive boxes. I’ll take it for some obscure basement room in the gigantic suburban house I’ll probably never have.

Finally, NerdyShirts gives us this Nintendo Family Tree on a shirt, and we’re done for now. More next month!

The National Design Museum (also known as Cooper-Hewitt) gives out some design awards every year, and since 2006 they’ve also been holding a public contest in which people on the internet are asked to both nominate and vote for the best ‘design’ of the year. 

The umbrella is pretty large on this one, so we see both the Obama logo, Al Gore’s ‘we’ Logo, and the Design Observer website (which is, of course, quite worthy of whatever award it gets).

Helvetica: The Movie is also up there, and a whole lot of other worthwhile nominees, but the one that I find the most interesting is the Design Awards are So Over t-shirt. It’s just another snarky slogan of dismissal slapped across a chest, but the writeup tries to make some amends: 

This is a real campaign created to spur discussion. Why not here, one of the most prestigious institutions dedicated to design? Are design awards good for design or just designers? Why not let the public decide?

I thought about this a bit after the nobel prizes were announced the other day, and especially after both Philip Roth and John Updike weren’t awarded anything in literature. There was a certain amount of expectation leading up to the nomination, plus a widely circulated article about how American literature isn’t very ‘relevant’ anymore, but then the awards were announced and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won. A few people said who?, and then we moved on.

David Kenner had a good comment about the nobel process, and I think his last paragraph is relevant to these Cooper-Hewitt design awards. We all know awards ceremonies are sort of BS, and we know “people’s choice” awards don’t generally fare much better, either. But both are mainstays in every industry, including design.

The Literature Prize is awarded by a committee selected by the Academy, founded by the Swedish King Gustav III in 1786, while the Peace Prize is awarded by a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament. In any other context, the idiosyncratic tastes and political beliefs of these elite Scandinavians don’t exactly make headlines. Why the entire world pauses to honor the selections of an otherwise unknown group of people remains a mystery.

In the end, the Nobel Prize reveals more about society’s collective obsession with honorifics than it does about the world’s great leaders and writers.

Awards give us a framework, however arbitrary and irritating it may be, to talk about the merits of a piece of work. A group of people vote and decide “this is #1, this #2, and so on,” and then we immediately disagree and get down to clarifying our reasons why, at least for the time being. Will we always have random juries voting on the strengths of one thing or another, or will aggregators like metacritic, with their algorhithms of critical weight and coverage, eventually automate the job for us? 

Some kind of metacritic awards ceremony would be counter-productive, of course, as we can see the results build online. There’s no real surprise, and that’s probably the ultimate point–waiting and wondering whether a certain big piece of work is goign to get an award or not is almost the entire point. Whether marshalling every corner of the world’s creative class into a quest for ‘honorifics’ is a worthwhile pursuit–well, that’s another story.

Details on the Cooper-Hewitt People’s Design Award:

Every year, Cooper-Hewitt gives out design awards chosen by a jury of distinguished design gurus—but do you agree with the experts?

Now you can make your design voice heard by voting for the 2008 People’s Design Award. Whether it’s handmade or mass produced, high end or low brow, if it’s an example of good design, we want to know about it! On this site, you can browse and search for designs that have already been submitted, or nominate something new.

Cast your vote for your favorite design before 6:00 p.m. EST on October 21, 2008, and check back on this site on October 23 at 10:00 p.m. EST to see the winner announced live at the National Design Awards gala in New York City.

Francesco Franchi is a Milan-based designer whose work we first picked up through a link to some of his recent work. I was most impressed by the shots of thesis, called Il Re Designer, which is generously exhibited all over his site.

A word about Italian University: here, a lot of work is put into the ceremonial presentation of theses. Graduation is a very big, formal deal (check out this excellent post on how far this tradition goes back). As a result, even the measliest little print shop stuck in the back of an alley and cluelessly selling DVD-Rs for 5 euros each, will bind your thesis in full, glorious hardcover style. They’ll even take your messy, unorganized word .doc and sort it all out for you, too.

This means when you’re doing a masters at a big-time Milanese University, and this masters is in communication design, and you fancy yourself an Italian designer–you had better make that thesis damn beautiful.

The title is a play on words: “il redesigner” means simply “the redesigner”, but when you separate the word “re”, as he’s done, it becomes “the king designer”. Something like “the designer as king” makes more sense in English, which fits in with his argument that the design of a newspaper is fundamental to its meaning, and should be integrated into the publishing philosophy as an crucial part, rather than simply compartmentalized as the aesthetic presentation of content.

Beyond academia, Franchi has also co-designed the layout for the less-business-y insert to Milano’s big time business paper, Il Sole 24 Ore. It plays with the beginning article from the newspaper’s title (it just means ‘the’), creating an acronym for Intelligence in Lifestyle. I don’t tend to give much time to business papers here in Italy, but maybe I’ll start picking this one up on Fridays and see just what Intelligence in Lifestyle actually means.

Amid much fanfare opens the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City’s Columbus Circle. Until 2002 this museum was called the American Craft Museum, but that name was too much glue-and-sparkles or old-furniture for a fickle youngster like me, and probably for most of the people who might be drawn towards what’s actually inside the building. Hence the re-branding.

Having just opened, they’ve launched their inaugural exhibition, called Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary. It’s a series of 50 exhibitions that refashion a bunch of materials into new pieces. From what I can gather this isn’t any kind of large-scale statement on recycling material or the terrible vagaries of consumption, which is a welcome approach. It’s far better to treat the show as art first, and allow the social implications of the work to rise up from the viewer’s response, rather than having it spelled out as an overarching (and thus slightly boring) theme.

But check out fine art critic Roberta Smith’s review of the show in the New York Times:

There is a simplistic political thrust to a lot of this work, but environmental sensitivity is mostly nil. Some questions for the artists here are: Thought about your carbon footprint lately? Are more iterations of this tired Surrealist idea needed? Are you really giving the objects you’re using a second life, or just enabling them to last longer and take up more space?

If I’m reading her right, she’s asking that any exhibit with a “simplistic political thrust” at least deal, using a modicum of subtlety, with a top political issue of the day. If you’re going to call your exhibit Second Lives and make other political points with it, at least say something smart about the environment, she suggests. The museum, on the other hand, says that “while the focus of the exhibition is neither on sustainability nor recycling, the works in the exhibition are a catalyst for thought and discussion about these issues.”

Now reading, talking, and doing things about consumption/carbon footprints/etc is a heavy, important thing for all of us to pay big amounts of attention to, but when art exhibitions are yoked into the service of environmental concerns as their primary raison-d’etre, something is lost in the process. Being virtuous and thinking morally about the environment are beautiful things, but I have yet to be convinced they’re ideal frameworks for an art exhibition. There’s still time to change my mind, but for now I like the museum’s subtle approach.

And besides, Smith’s final verdict? “I recommend a visit.”

Some of the more notable exhibits on show include:

Trinity: Grandma, Spike, Bubbles (2007) by American artists Andy Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth. These custom chromed chandeliers are designed in traditional neoclassical form, but are made of hypodermic needles, gelatin capsules and Swarovski crystal which reflect drug culture themes. While seductive in their beauty, the chandeliers are a chilling reminder of a darker side of contemporary life.  (from the museum’s website; photo credit: Schroeder Romero)

There are also a couple that are just straight-up aesthetically pleasing to gawk at. They also both happen to be made of vinyl, which might explain my attraction. One is shown above–Paul Villinski’s My Back Pages, in which his records take off and fly away as a series of butterflies. It’s good. The other, “Sound Wave” by Jean Shin (check out the Times for the photo) is a giant wave molded out of old records.

If you’re in New York City soon, stop by–you’ll see a load of original design in a wonderful space. Smith says “the opening displays, it must be granted, reflect an institution that is wild with delight at having for the first time a real museum building of its very own.”

An additional note: the MAD acronym and entire re-branding campaign was done by the famous Pentagram agency, who have a great blog post on the big spread of work they’ve done for the launch.

The easy answer to this article’s title is “Disney”, but it’s not exactly that simple. Joseph Menn recently published an article in the LA Times that caught my eye: it’s all about the copyright specifics concerning the famous Mouse, the biggest fictional character in history. Although the legal thicket surrounding copyright law is rather tiring for anyone who isn’t a law student, the idea of maintaining copyright “in perpetuity” is a pretty interesting concept to think about (since it, well, prevents the public domain from ever expanding), and ideally copyright should be a distant-but-important concern for any designer or creative type. Ideally.

So it turns out that over the past several years, several legal scholars have been trying to prove that due to a mis-filing of copyright on the original “Steamboat Willie” title screen, Disney was never able to properly copyright the source of its character. While the character is still registered as a trademark, some of the original 1920s cartoons and their versions of Mickey have, if you follow the scholars’ logic, “fallen” into the public domain.

Disney calls the new claims “frivolous,” implying that the silly obscurity of the argument can be (and certainly will be) easily dismissed in court. It gets interesting when you discover, however, that Disney has resorted to similar legal contortions several times–often in order to argue the very same thing: that works supposedly under copyright are actually in the public domain (often around the time Disney released a film based on the work, of course).

The most notable example is the copyright on “Bambi”, a work I had no idea was based on an Austrian book. Disney successfully argued Bambi was part of the public domain by the 1950s, the reason being that its original copyright notice was published 3 years too late. Writes Joseph Menn:

In the 1930s, Salten’s [the author of Bambi] rights were assigned to Disney, which made the famous 1942 movie. When Salten’s heirs renewed the copyright in 1954, they correctly listed 1926 as the year of Bambi’s first copyright.

But in a 1994 dispute over royalties with a small publisher that had acquired the Salten family’s rights, Disney lawyers said the 1954 copyright was void because it was filed three years too late — based on the fact that the story was first published in 1923. A federal judge sided with Disney, ruling Bambi was in the public domain.

Of course we all know big companies with massive legal teams and heavy financial interests to protect can easily use obscure parts of the law to argue their case, and the amount of firepower they can put behind those arguments is never short of impressive. The legal costs can bankrupt whoever might step up.

Disney has a somewhat illustrious history with recent copyright legislation: the casual name for Sonny Bono’s 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act is the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, both due to the timing of its passage and heavy industry lobbying from its main benefactor. When it passed, several opponents called it “corporate welfare” for the deference it gives to copyright holders.

Eventually, the act was brought before the US Supreme Court in a suit that called it unconstitutional. The plaintiff was Eric Eldred, one of the co-founders of the famous Creative Commons. While his suit was defeated 7-2, one of the dissenting opinions (.pdf) explains the problem with the act:

The older the work, the less likely it retains commercial value, and the harder it will likely prove to find the current copyright holder. The older the work, the more likely it will prove useful to the historian, artist, or teacher. The older the work, the less likely it is that a sense of authors’ rights can justify a copyright holder’s decision not to permit reproduction, for the more likely it is that the copyright holder making the decision is not the work’s creator, but, say, a corporation or a great-grandchild whom the work’s creator never knew.

The general argument for liberalized copyright laws goes something like this: some of the greatest works of art in history were created from other sources, so eternal copyright will bankrupt a large number of future artists, way down the road. As lawyer Chris Sprigman explains:

Borrowing is ubiquitous, inevitable, and, most importantly, good. Contrary to the romantic notion that true genius inheres in creating something completely new, genius is often better described as opening up new meanings on well-trodden themes. Leonard Bernstein’s reworking in West Side Story of Romeo and Juliet is a good example.

Have your own views on how long a copyright should last? Share your comments!

Sarah McLellan and Kristina Ortega have discovered a whole new form of artistic jewelry. In Autumn of 2007, these two pre-med students decided to change majors and go into design. Inspired by their science backgrounds and knowledge of organic chemistry, but driven by their love for fashion, (and Bill Nye the Science Guy.) they started Mctega. What makes Mctega’s pieces so aesthetically exciting are the contrasts found in them. No two are alike and all of them are absolutely exquisite.

Mctega’s collection looks like beautiful disorder. Consisting of shapeless geometric chunks of crystal, gold, copper foil and toy animals, every single one is chaotically put together with the greatest of care and dexterity. Each piece of jewelry is hand-made and unique right down to the materials used; polypropylene, polyester resin and injection molding among other things. The best part: With a price tag of $100 - $325, Mctega allows any fashion-privy chick to order a custom piece without completely breaking the bank.

These two friends decided to start creating jewelry because it presented a new challenge. They are quite the duo; always pushing each other and encouraging each other to take risks and try new things in their art. McLellan and Ortega say that they love coming up with ideas and then trying to figure out how to make those ideas come to life in a piece of jewelry. “It’s a lot more research and trial and error then we thought it would be, but the best thing we allow ourselves to do is make mistakes. They have lent themselves to some of our best pieces.”

The Los Angeles based Mctega-girls have also been thinking about creating a clothing line. It’s not clear when they will be able to start working on it. However, the creation of a clothing line has been one of their goals since Mctega’s inception. “We thought it was much more manageable to work with jewelry first.” The girls say. Right now, they are both working full time jobs to support their artistic-genius alter-egos. But, they say they can’t wait until they can work on their Mctega projects full-time.

Mctega was recently made the cover of Nylon Magazine. You can find more about these intelligent designs on their website at Mctega.com or at Mctega’s MySpace.