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Best Friday Five Posts of 2013

Every Friday, we ask a different designer or design professional to share five things that keep them inspired or that they love in our Friday Five column. The answers are always surprising, enjoyable, and little peeks into the minds of creatives. Take a look back at the most popular posts from 2013:

12.27.13 | By
Best Friday Five Posts of 2013

10. Lars Beller Fjetland
Raised on the west coast of Norway, designer Lars Beller Fjetland honed his Scandinavian skills, always marrying his fascination of function with natural materials. In 2011 while still in school at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Beller Fjetland set up his own office, Beller, and completed his degree the following year. Rooted in a belief that his products must, “achieve a sense of both timelessness and longevity through an immediate, honest functionalism in form and aesthetic,” while also being sustainable and sophisticated.

9. Donna Wilson
Donna Wilson hails from Scotland but set up shop in London after graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2003. Starting out, she created odd knitted creatures that sold out immediately and since then she’s expanded her business to include a collection of curious cushions, colorful blankets, cozy scarves, gloves, and hats, and an assortment of whimsical wares, just to name a few. Each enchanting piece is made by her hardworking team that knits, sews, packs, and sends off each design to shops and individuals in some 25 countries.

8. Ariel Ashe of Ashe + Leandro
Ariel Ashe, interior designer and principal founder of New York City architecture and interior design firm Ashe + Leandro, started her professional life as an intern at Saturday Night Live. Perhaps not the expected path for a chic city designer who was named by Architectural Digest as a design talent to watch in its prestigious AD100 issue. However, Ashe did, after all, study scenery and lighting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

7. Ryan Korban
Ryan Korban is the darling of downtown New York City decor. So much so, this self trained interior stylist has collaborated with his fashion counterpart, Alexander Wang. And his celebrity clientele reads like a list of the cool kids: Jessica Stam, James Franco, Vanessa Traina, and Natasha Poly. His approach is romantic, mixing old world ideals with moody undertones. He incorporates the ornate and rich with the brazen, stripping them of expected connotations and reinventing them entirely. The result is fresh, magical, and brooding.

6. Christopher Jobson of Colossal
Christopher Jobson is the creator and editor of Colossal, a blog that explores art, design, photography, and other forms of visual expression. Three years after launching, Jobson recently left his job as a web designer to blog full-time and open an online shop. Jobson also brings art to the pages of Wired Magazine, Mental_Floss Magazine, and Slate. He currently lives in Chicago with his wife and son but spent the other half of his life in central Texas.

5. Minjae Lee
Minjae Lee is a young South Korean artist whose work is filled with powerful colors, aggressive scenes, and a clever blend of beauty, innocence, and fragility. A self-taught artist, Lee uses old-fashioned tools, such as markers, pens, crayons, and acrylics, to create his illustrations.

4. Ed Ware of All Lovely Stuff
Ed Ward is a designer and developer who has worked for clients such as Established & Sons, Habitat, and Mathmos, and also founded All Lovely Stuff. His office works on product design, including sourcing and product development, interior projects, as well as commissions. Since last year, All Lovely Stuff has been developing a collection of objects that offer a smile along with good function, affordably.

3. Stefan Sagmeister
Stefan Sagmeister is is a New York-based graphic designer and typographer whose firm Sagmeister & Walsh creates identities, commercials, websites, apps, films, books, record covers, and objects. Born in Austria, he studied at the Pratt Institute on a Fulbright Scholarship, worked for Leo Burnett in Hong Kong, then returned to New York to establish his own business in 1993.

2. David Irwin
Born in N. Ireland in 1986, David Irwin graduated in Three Dimensional Design at Northumbria University in 2007. He completed a fellowship on the Designers in Residence Programme at Northumbria’s School of Design in 2010, and then went on to establish his own industrial design studio in 2011. Irwin works for leading manufacturers and design-led companies including Habitat, Deadgood, and Juniper, to create contemporary furniture, product, and lighting designs.

And the most popular Friday Five of 2013 is (surprise, surprise!)…

1. Karim Rashid
The global designer dips his creative hands into many design pots working with countless companies to bring his innovative and drool-worthy creations to life. Without a doubt, he leaves his recognizable signature on everything he touches, from hotels, lighting, high-tech goods, furniture, to well, pretty much everything. He’ll leave you wondering when he has time to sleep. (Don’t worry, I’m sure he’s designed a really cozy bed for when he has slumber time). Luckily for us, we get a peek inside his unbelievably clever mind to see what keeps this prolific designer continually inspired.

Caroline Williamson is Editor-in-Chief of Design Milk. She has a BFA in photography from SCAD and can usually be found searching for vintage wares, doing New York Times crossword puzzles in pen, or reworking playlists on Spotify.