A week of Wired! The Design Issue...Part 3

Kavulla: The feature on Etsy discussed how the company is easing up many of its policies so that successful shop owners can continue to thrive on the website. The most thrilling part about this story was having actual Etsy vendors create objects for us to illustrate the company's metamorphosis. 

Wired Design Director Leo Jung: We liked the idea of visually showing the crafty artisan making it to the "big time." With that in mind, we reached out to a number of Etsy shop owners, like 69 year-old great-grandmother, Ann Mensch, who handknit typographic doilies, to create the artwork for the story. 

Doily by annsneedleworks.etsy.com, 

Metal sign letters by throwbackdesigns.etsy.com

Photography by Zachary Zavislak

THE FEATURES: GORILLA GLASS

Kavulla: The short version is that this is the glass that is on the iphone.

Brilliant large format photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg, a former MD who is famous for his dramatic photographs of surgeries got incredible access to the factory in Corning, New York, where gorilla glass is created. Max shot the glass in every state; powder, molten and even magnificent shots of the tools used to test it's breaking points. Senior Photo Editor Carrie Levy brought Max on board for his very first (but not last) wired shoot 

Wired Senior Photo Editor Carrie Levy: "Max just seemed to be the perfect Wired photographer. As a former doctor, of course he is wild about science but also knows how to approach a story from the journalistic perspective our magazine requires. When I contacted Max he expressed how excited he was to finally get a call from Wired. This kind of response is a treat because you know the collaboration will be inspired.  You can see that inspiration in the extraordinary images he turned in."

THE FEATURES: SKYSCRAPERS

Kavulla: This was an amazing story about a Chinese construction company that erected a skyscraper in 15 days by manufacturing individual pieces that snap together on site. The upcoming project being to erect the world's tallest building in 7 months. We knew we wanted to shoot the factory as well as various construction sites and stages of the process. However we also wanted to show the technical aspect and details of every step of the construction. 

We hired Jason Lee to mirror the process we were capturing photographically.

For the opener we combined these 2 approaches by shooting the site of the future tallest building in the world overlaid with Jason's detailed rendering of the structure.

Tim Leong, Director of Digital Design: The story was about this new wave of Autodesk software that brought complicated technology to the masses for cheap -- from sculpting to 3D rendering to printing templates for cardboard versions. I downloaded a bunch of their apps to my iPad and started playing around. After discovering that Im actually quite terrible at digital sculpting I happened to notice a great Tyrannosaurus Rex render as one of the default examples. Celine Grouard then did a fantastic job coordinating with Autodesk to output more of the same T-Rex from various angles in all the various programs. In the end I was really happy we were able to run something visually interesting that also communicated the thrust of the story. And dinosaurs.