During this year’s Salone Domus posted this interview with the color designer Beatrice Santiccioli. 3st and Beatrice collaborated back in our olde days when ESSE was a Gilbert paper. When asked about working on Esse, Beatrice has this to say:

“I created different palettes, imagining brighter, more intense colors—a different direction from what existed. I asked myself what could be a perfect color for a designer now, so I was looking for colors that would tell a story that made sense for today and yet would last about five years. Initially I developed several palettes that were influenced by the sources of inspiration around me—everything from various pink objects to pictures of landscapes.”

Beatrice Santiccioli on Domus

Last week Rick was on Design Chat with Ryan McGovern. It was a great session with 60–70 people online that covered subjects ranging from the founding of 3st to Rick’s dogs. You should watch it, it’s informing and entertaining. After you’ve seen this one, head over to designchat.info to watch the rest.

3st’s John Pobojewski and Bud Rodecker are on Humble Pied today. They remind us to be fearless and remember that design is for people by people. Take a minute and jump on over to humblepied.com and watch all of the great tips that our friend Mig Reyes has collected.

The Thirst office will be featured in the forthcoming book Studio Culture: The Secret Life of the Graphic Design Studio from Unit Editions. It shows off images of Thirst office space, a sampling of our work, and an interview with Rick Valicenti. Below is a sample of the interview.

At what stage in your career did the urge to have a studio hit you? Was it there from the start?

Twenty years ago Thirst was founded on the desire to pursue ‘art with function’. When I went on my own in 1981, I was a relatively fresh designer, president of the STA (Society of Typographic Arts) and a new father with a desire to be certain that a paycheck was regular. It took roughly six years for me to discover and come to understand that there is a thin line and a big difference between being a designer who is a preferred vendor and a designer who has a consultant’s seat at the table. In 1988 I no longer wanted to be the preferred vendor. It was this motivation and clear image of the creative life I wanted to design that Thirst came to be.

Pre-order Studio Culture for more insights into the world of Thirst and other fantastic design firms.

Unit Editions is the new publishing company formed by Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy, dedicated to producing high quality books on design and visual culture.

Studio Culture is the first book to be published by the new company. It lays bare the inner workings of 28 studios from around the works, plus contains essays, rare photographs and commentaries.

We are located in Richard Wright’s auction house and it is here that we delight in being surrounded by the best of 20th and 21st design furniture and objects. Recently Richard delivered a very transparent interview on Design Glut where he discusses the history of Wright’s catalogs.

For the layout of the catalog, we did so many firsts – big, bold graphics on the cover, pictures crossing over two pages, supergraphics, and more of an open grid system…

To catch the wave from Richard’s interview we’d like to remind you that Thirst was responsible for the design and implementation of the Wright Identity Program, and that thousands of catalog and web pages are designed every year at Wright by only one designer and one programmer thanks to Thirst’s automated workflow and grid system.