Graphic Design

Kohl's Corp. is opening its first-ever California design center in Santa Monica with an eye toward spotting West Coast trends while also expanding its New York design office. The 6,000-square-foot design studio, opening Monday, will house a team of 20 graphic designers who will focus on creating prints and embellishments for a variety of brands for the department store chain. "We will be on the ground gathering trend information, and we certainly respect L.A. as a major fashion hub," said Peggy Eskenasi, Kohl's senior executive vice president of product development.

I Heart Design Remarkable Graphic Design Selected by Designers, Illustrators, and Critics Edited by Steven Heller Rockport: 216 pp., $45 What makes a particular design — the familiar Coca-Cola bottle, say, or the vivid yellow Kodak film box — significant and unforgettable? That's the question that "I Heart Design" aims to answer. Steven Heller, a former art director at the New York Times, asked 80 experts in the field — including designers, typographers and academics — to each pick an influential example of graphic design that resonates beyond the context in which it was made and place it within the historical framework of the discipline.

The largest retrospective of the works of Dutch minimalist Piet Mondrian in nearly half a century is on exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris through March 21.  Master of the black grid on white canvas set with bold panes of primary colors, Mondrian helped to change the face of modern art. His influence was felt not only in painting and sculpture but in graphic design, fashion and architecture. Besides 100 of Mondrian's paintings, the first part of the exhibition re-creates the artist's Montparnasse studio, a 3-D rendering in interior decoration of his signature designs.

For director Alex Gibney's new documentary "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer," Josh Norton, a founder of the motion graphics company Bigstar, produced versions of historical New York Post articles, archival photos and the movie's main title sequence, drawing inspiration from the real-life headlines surrounding the prostitution scandal that brought down the former governor of New York. "A lot of times, headlines from newspapers are there to reassert the authenticity of the film itself and to make things really simple and plain," he said.

What distinguishes Walter Herrington's Pasadena home is not so much the 1950s architecture, which is quite lovely, nor the vista of the arroyo, though that's beautiful too. What sets apart the dwelling are his possessions, more specifically the graphic way in which he displays them ? not surprising given that his business, the Tulino Design Group of Hollywood, is a design packager and photographer for the home products industry, with clients such as Bed Bath & Beyond, Costco, Lamps Plus and Nambé.

Elisa Rishwain Luxury shoe designer Elisa Rishwain, 65, who designed luxury shoes under the Elisa Ferare nameplate, died April 25 at her home in Los Angeles after a three-year battle with cancer, her son Brian said. Born in Stockton on Oct. 28, 1944, to Italian immigrants Stefano and Jennie Ferrari, she operated the Giovanna Ferrari women's clothing boutique in Stockton. In 1988, after divorcing, she and her three children moved to Los Angeles, where she engaged in a range of activities that included interior design, opening an antique furniture store, opening a clothing and jewelry boutique, and acting.

The rolling kitchen cart called the Butcher is actually an old television stand set on casters, topped with butcher block and decorated with the silhouettes of 22 knives painstakingly stenciled across the front and side of the cabinet. It's just one of the clever pieces by Purpose Restoration, a four-person workshop that transforms unloved old furniture into new, one-of-a-kind functional pieces. The company was founded a year ago by Jason Fox, 35, who says he left a job overseeing the construction of stores for fashion retailer BCBG "to do something creative" with his hands.

You know you've reached a career pinnacle when an award is named after you. So it was only fitting that the Alex Award, created for excellence in entertainment package design, was named after Alex Steinweiss, the father of modern-day album covers. Although familiar with his work, Grammy Award-winning art director Kevin Reagan admits he knew little of the artist's life when asked to present a lifetime achievement award to him at the inaugural "Alex" award ceremony in 2003. The two soon became friends, and Reagan, fearful that a generation of iTunes listeners would never appreciate the man responsible for classical album designs, decided to pay homage to the artist with a career retrospective book, "Alex Steinweiss, the Inventor of the Modern Album Cover," an extensive collection of Steinweiss' artwork spanning six decades.

Adobe Systems Inc., the world's biggest maker of graphic-design programs, plans to cut 680 jobs, or about 9% of its global workforce, as the company copes with a lingering sales slump. Adobe will record $65 million to $71 million in pretax expenses, including costs for shutting offices and severance pay, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday. Adobe expects to report additional costs related to its $1.8 billion purchase of Omniture Inc. last month. Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen is dealing with a slowdown in demand for software from advertisers and other creative professionals.

Newt Heisley, a commercial artist who designed the Vietnam-era POW/MIA flag that came to symbolize the nation's concern for military personnel missing or held prisoner in modern conflicts, has died. He was 88. Heisley, who was a World War II pilot, died Thursday at his home in Colorado Springs, Colo., after years of failing health, said Jim Heisley, one of his two sons.