Speaking of designing exhibits about design, here is a great short video by Walker Art Center about their current exhibition, Graphic Design: Now In Production. It features curator Ellen Lupton from the Cooper-Hewitt, design director Andrew Blauvelt from the Walker … and lots of installation imagery of the exhibit itself. Just in time, too: the show closes on January 22.

Reading Forms, a tumblr by Yotam Hadar, collects images of well-designed exhibits about graphic design. A must-see. (Above, an installation shot from the Yale 2006 Graphic Design MFA Thesis Exhibition.) Cheers, Yotam!

Via a tweet by the well-informed Ellen Lupton.

This gigantic, temporary (for obvious reasons) ice typography by Vancouver artist Nicole Dextras goes well with the onset of chilly weather here in New York.

Via Collabcubed, Notcot, and others.

Another one I wish I’d done: Italian architect Werner Tscholl has created yet another lookout / observation deck / museum high in the mountains (here is the last one). This one, called Granat and overlooking the town of Moos, Italy, has two parts linked by a wooden bridge: one is a precipitous cage that glows at night, the other a gravity-defying, windowless exhibit gallery. Spectacular.

From Designboom.

Speaking of virtual museums, “Road Inc.” is a new iPad app from Pyrolia in France. One reviewer has apparently said “Road Inc. is the closest thing you’ll find to a dynamic museum exhibition [in an iPad, I assume] and some of the best proof that there is life beyond coffee table books.” I’ve heard similar claims before, so I wasn’t optimistic. But this time, there may be cause for optimism.

I paid $4.99, downloaded it, and went through a few cars. (As their blurb says: “The first digital object dedicated to the automobile, Road Inc. comes with 50 iconic models to unveil.”) It comes with a Ferrari “exhibit” preloaded. The rest require individual waits for downloads, but they don’t take long, and otherwise that first download would take most of the day.

This frankly gorgeous app is utterly packed with interesting content of all kinds, from original studio photography to historic schematics to essays. And it’s full of little touches. Three of my favorites: you can choose what order you use to walk through this “museum”: sorted by type (racer, supercar, etc.), price (from 7,000 to yikes, 55,000,000), or (ha!) speed (from 15.6 to 254 mph). When you download a new car, you get to whisk off a little virtual tarpaulin to unveil it. And, at least for the ones I’ve done so far, you can listen to what the car sounds like when it accelerates. That all might not be the same as the real thing, but $4.99 is a little more in my price range than, let’s say, $2,100,000 (for a Pagani Zonda). More on “Road Inc.” after I have visited the whole “museum” but my initial visit made me smile.

Via Notcot.

A new book from the same source as New Exhibition Design 01 & 02, but now looking back, is now available for pre-order. Just pre-ordered mine. Due in January. (If you don’t have the first two, get them while you’re at it. Quite indispensable recent surveys.)

UPDATE, 30 Dec 2011: Just heard that the release date has been pushed back to March. Sigh.

I don’t really need any more proof that the Dutch can out-design us all. But if I did, I could refer to Engaging Spaces: Exhibition Design Explored, a new monograph by Amsterdam “exhibition architects” Kossman.dejong. The book is big, and so are the ideas in it. Highly recommended.

Published by the rather indispensable Frame.

I was recently in Germany and picked up “Scenography / Szenografie”, a compendium of work by the formidable Prof. Uwe Brueckner and colleagues at Atelier Brueckner in Stuttgart. In US stores in February, available for preorder now.

The book is rather spectacular, further evidence of the remarkable progress of exhibition designers around the world over the past generation, particularly in Europe, where Stuttgart is a veritable hive of brilliant firms. US designers would do well to get a copy of this book and others.

Image above via Atelier Brueckner.

Made me look: this new exhibit featured in Designboom, by Thai design studio Apostrophy’s (sic), is an inflatable, LED-powered spatial game.

I’m happily addicted to e-books (and i-books, I suppose) but I’ve always wondered why a book that’s not a book is still written like … a book. (I’ve given up wondering why digital music is still released as albums.) So when I stumbled on this new iPad book, written for iPad only, and replete with iPad-only features, I was delighted. It’s not a perfect new idea, but it’s a new idea, which counts for a lot. Now it just needs to be gorgeous.

On that same note, this article on the Economist’s iPad version is a must-read.

On the opposite end of the spectrum comes this downright gorgeous iPad vintage synthesizer interface designed according to the “skeuomorphic” (i.e. real-world visual metaphor*) interface principles so beloved by Apple. In many ways, the exact opposite of the iPad-only book above. But it’s gorgeous, and that counts for a lot. Now it just needs to be new.

Some more thoughtful musings on skeuomorphic interface design here.

Would a crocheted coral reef be considered skeuomorphic?

* No, I didn’t know that word until today, either.

Via @nancyproctor and @fastcodesign.