If your neighbor is using a Scott's four-step program and your lawn looks like hell, you're going to want to do something, too

reports a significant increase in homeowner spending on lawn care products, from $6.5 billion to $8.5 billion between 1993 and 1998. Bruce Butterfield, market research director for the association, which is based in Burlington, Vt., attributes the increase to the strong economy, but also to a change in lawn-owner attitude.

If you're serious about your lawn, if you're an aficionado of grass, you refer to it as 'turf,'

Even this summer's drought in the New York region hasn't appreciably slowed the latest love affair with lawns.

The most important thing about lawns is feeding them.

has spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars, including a $3,500 underground sprinkler system

The most important thing about lawns is feeding them.

GT275 sit-down mower with a 48-inch cutting deck,

Of course, they can walk on it,'' he says. ''It's a lawn.'' And yet this is more than a lawn. It's as nearly perfect an expanse of uniformly green turf as one is likely to find outside of England, and for the last seven years it has been his passion.

his is the really green, rolling, luxuriant one, the one with mowing lines like straight brush strokes up and down a fine piece of suede.

Imagine that the Boris Bike docking stations outside railway stations and in key public spaces might incorporate general cycle parking. Thus the Cycle City would bring with it a new building type – the multistory cycle park. Fietsenstalling, a multistorey cycle park outside Amsterdam’s Centraal rail station, with its Escher-like pattern of steel decks that suspend over the canal, is a dramatic model. Its very presence is didactic. It is persuasive.

For security reasons, much of the Square Mile was closed to vehicular traffic; the streets were preserved for the pedestrian and the cyclist. What I remember about that day was the sense of calm, how quiet it was, and how generous the streets actually felt.

In our auto-centric world, we have unprecedented levels of health problems - obesity, diabetes, etc - all associated with our sedentary lifestyles. Cycling should mean a fitter population and a longer life expectancy, which would take pressure off the National Health Service and bring huge economic benefits. It would of course also reduce energy consumption.

Cycling offers us, for the first time in more than a century and a half, the chance to build an infrastructure that will bring with it significant public health improvements.

in order to enable the politicians and the public to recognize the scale of the opportunity, the change it might bring to our cities and our lives.

The docking stations bring tangible cycle infrastructure to the city streets. In-carriage and separated cycle routes have begun to proliferate. Disused railway lines are being harnessed as leisure trails, and in some cases these were working well for commuters too.

There are now more than 8,000 Boris Bikes and 550+ docking stations in Central London. And the trend’s not anomalous to London: Wikipedia reports that there are 535 cycle-share schemes in 49 countries, employing more than half a million bikes worldwide.

The 2010 launch of the “Boris Bike” - London’s cycle hire scheme, named after mayor Boris Johnson – was the clearest indication to date that cycling was no longer just for a minority of fanatics but a healthy, efficient and sustainable mode of transport that city planners wanted in their armoury.

to feel there is extra work that must be done in order to prove their ability and their value as a colleague.

TypoBerlin (2009: 5% female presenters) or Atypl (2009: 12%), as well as in various type foundries (Linotype 2005: 12.3%; Myfonts.com 2008: 14%). Today an equal number of women and men are studying type design—so we can expect or at least hope for a levelling of the playing field.

“Right now, my classroom is probably filled with 80% women. And yet when I go out into the world, or when you hear from business owners or from creative directors, it’s not the same percentage. What is that, why is that? We can only guess.”

[Look at] salary discrepancy between males and females in education. Almost every institution I’ve looked at, the women earned on average anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 less in the same positions [held by men]. So that inequality we experience generally out in the world is also reflected in education.

I’d like to see females become more confident in publishing their process, ideas, and experiences. I see this as a continuity of tradition that we have inherited from the artists and designers who fought hard for us to sit at the table.

It’s important that these women get the recognition, because they were and are part of the history that’s shaping graphic design. Everyone needs to learn about them and their work, especially young designers. If not, then there’s just this big gap that doesn’t tell the entire story of graphic design.

Take for example Jacqueline S. Casey. She is primarily responsible for bringing the International Typographic Style to the US, and her work is just as brilliant as Muller-Brockmann’s, Crouwel’s, Ruder’s…. But for some reason, her name is left out most of the time

Why does design history still teach about male designers 80% more than women designers? Why do we have 80 % women in the student body (in our [RISD] department) and 80% men in the faculty?”

In the UK it is lower, although the Design Council research found that 70% of design students in the UK are women, but 60% of the industry is male.

In the design field, many women may have been assistants or “office girls” and so few held the top titles, such as art director or creative director.

Whistler

The mural is both funny and gorgeous, but its expression of personal pique disrupts the room’s serenity like a street noise in the night.

Victorians’

van Gogh and Cézanne

gold and blue

She is the subject of my favorite of his paintings, “Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink,” from 1871-74, which is now in the Frick.) Their dining room was already superb.

blue-and-white

But department stores didn’t really update their format to suit changing customer tastes until the 1930s. Bullock’s in Los Angeles pioneered this movement when it hired young New York interior designer Eleanor LeMaire to modernize its downtown flagship store in 1926.

Eleanor LeMaire was in charge of overseeing the interior design of the Bullock’s Wilshire, which was all about the emotional experience of the store, which opened in 1929. Jocks Peters was one of the most important designers on the project, and Henry Sachs painted the ceiling mural. (Via TenOver6.com)

The first Macy’s department store (at left) opened in New York City in 1858. The store moved to Herald Square in 1906 (right) and expanded to 2.2 million square in 1924. (Via Ephemeral New York)

Before this change, department stores would have everything behind the glass case, with just one sample out. You’d have to ask the salesgirl, ‘Hey, do you have any other colors?,’ and she would search the stockroom for you. The new stores would have had everything out so shoppers could walk around, see it all, and then choose something on their own and take it to the sales counter.”

Victorian department stores were not only sectioned off into myriad departments, they were also dark, crowded places, with merchandise stuffed in imposing glass cases and dense wood furniture. That’s why when Loewy debuted his vision at the Gimbels in downtown New York with a pastel color scheme and “invisible” fixtures in 1948, it caused a stir.

At his namesake firm Raymond Loewy Associates, the esteemed industrial designer—who’s known for redesigning Coca-Cola vending machines

With the booming middle class and the introduction of credit cards, the shopping experience is much more about what you can have.”

Ultimately, Loewy didn’t just alter American style or tastes, he changed the way Americans consume.

The Met would not estimate the cost of the total refurbishment, as research and planning are still under way. But some experts said the project could not be accomplished for less than $500,000.

Gilding such an enormous frame will require more than 12,500 3.5-inch square sheets of gold leaves, 1/250,000th of an inch thick, at a cost of more than $12,000.

“The crossing was a pivot point in a crucial campaign that rescued the revolution from failure,”

“Washington’s Crossing.” Leutze’s highly romanticized rendition captures a desperate effort, a turning point in American history, when on Christmas night in 1776 George Washington crossed the Delaware River with 2,500 troops in a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers.

She explained that conservators are refining a plan to remove layers of varnish for the painting’s first surface-cleaning in decades. Currently the image is yellowish; at places in the blue sky clots of dirt and debris suggest a nonexistent flock of birds. And the prophetic morning star above Washington is barely visible.

Mathew Brady

1851

Washington Crossing the Delaware