[Photo by Anna Wolf]
Design*Sponge is a daily website dedicated to home and product design run by Brooklyn-based writer, Grace Bonney. Launched in August of 2004, Design*Sponge was declared a “Martha Stewart Living for the Millennials” (NY Times, 2008) and features store and product reviews, city, product, and gift guides, diy projects, before & after furniture and home makeovers, home tours, recipes, videos and podcasts, and trend forecasting. In addition, Design*Sponge is dedicated to covering student design, national and international design shows. The site is updated constantly throughout the day (with an average of 6-10 posts a day), and attracts a core group of devoted readers. Design*Sponge currently has 60,000 daily readers and over 55,000 readers reading via RSS. Click here for PRESS on design*sponge.
*Please note: Design*Sponge does not accept free samples, products or compensation for editorial coverage*
Design*Sponge editor Grace Bonney has a unique angle on the industry, working as a contributing editor at Domino Magazine and CRAFT magazine, and as a freelancer with top publications like House and Garden, New York Home, Food and Wine, In Style, Better Homes and Gardens, New York Magazine, CITY Magazine, Time Out New York Kids, Archinect, The New York Post, Everyday with Rachael Ray and others. In addition, she wrote a weekly design column for the Philadelphia Inquirer for two years and has worked as Style Editor of HGTV’s Ideas Magazine.
In addition, Grace has been a featured guest on Good Morning America and the Martha Stewart Radio Show and has been invited to speak with wide variety of organizations ranging from design schools to professional trade organizations. Recent engagements include: “Design and the Media” (RISD, 2007), “Getting Your Work Online” (SCAD, 2007), “Design and the Internet” (AIGA, 2007), Design and Marketing Online (FIT, 2008), Design Panel Discussion (SURTEX, 2008), Design Panel Discussion (Interior Design Show (IDS), Canada, 2009)
Grace also runs a national series of meetups for women running design-based businesses called the D*S Biz Lady Series. Grace hosts and speaks at these events designed to connect local designers and provide free advice on the subjects of PR/marketing, legal concerns, business/financial decisions and wholesaling. Meetings have been held in Brooklyn, Chicago, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles and Boston.
Design*Sponge also hosts an annual D*S Scholarship to support up-and-coming art and design students. So far over $16,000 in prize money has been awarded to students across the country.
Design*Sponge is proud to introduce our editorial team:
Amy Azzarito has joined Design Sponge as a senior editor. She graduated from the Parsons/Cooper-Hewitt with a Master’s in the History of Decorative Arts and Design. She recently published an essay about the evolution of French cuisine for Paris-New York: Design Fashion Culture, 1925-1940 and is currently working on an essay about Countercultural Architecture. She writes Past and Present, a column that translates design history into present-day usefulness. When not researching design history, she tends to her bees, who live on a Brooklyn rooftop, and to her two cats, Loki and Freya, who allow her to live in their Brooklyn apartment.
Lauren Smith and Derek Fagerstrom of The Curiosity Shoppe have joined D*S as weekly craft editors. Every Wednesday afternoon they will post a new project called “DIY Wednesdays” for those looking for DIY fun. You can view their column archives right here.
Writer and photographer Kristina of Three Layer Cake has joined D*S as a weekly food editor. Born in the South, Kristina now lives in Rome and works in the field of humanitarian assistance. She spends her free time learning photography, trying new recipes and playing with her border terrier, Crash!. Every Friday afternoon she will post a new recipe called “In the Kitchen With” from one of our favorite independent designers. You can view her column archives right here.
Graphic designer and travel maven, Anne Ditmeyer of Prêt à Voyager has joined D*S as a contributing editor. A background in art history, anthropology and photography combined with a love of travel has offered opportunities to find wonderful design in the most unlikely places. A native Virginian, but Francophile at heart, Anne currently absorbs the charm of Baltimore. You can view her column archives right here and here.
Sarah Ryhanen has joined Design*Sponge as a contributing editor. Sarah Ryhanen opened Saipua in 2006 with her partner Eric Famisan. They make olive oil soap and arrange flowers at their small shop in Red Hook. All the good things that happen there stem from Susan Ryhanen, the Saipua matriarch who one fortuitous day 11 years ago mixed lye with olive oil and some herbs. The rest is monkey business with a cattle dog named Nea and Scooter, a toothless cat. You can view Sarah’s monthly column archives right here.
Artist Kate Pruitt has joined Design*Sponge as a contributing editor, sharing DIY projects with us every wednesday. Kate lives in Oakland, California and has a background in art/art history and recently left her job creating window displays to pursue her own work full time. Growing up in New Hampshire, Kate spent a lot of time building machines out of paper and scotch tape, and thus discovered her first DIY impulses. Click here to view some of Kate’s columns on D*S!
Officially dubbed the can-do kid at the age of 5, Amy Merrick of An Apple a Day is the happiest when in the middle of a good, old fashioned project. Her girlish enthusiasm for antiques, flowers, bits and bobs, gardens, americana and old timey crafting make her a dab hand in the blogosphere, as a freelance stylist and a general tinkerer at her home in brooklyn, new york. Amy has joined Design*Sponge as an editor, running two new columns: “Living In” (where she rounds up products inspired by great books and movies) and Made With Love, a new diy column.
Ashley English has earned degrees in both holistic nutrition and sociology. Life has provided her with numerous career paths, including working as a medical assistant and nutritional consultant, manager of a bed and breakfast, wine and beer sales rep, and baker and caterer. Additionally, she has worked over the years with a number of non-profit organizations committed to social and agricultural issues and she is currently a member of Slow Food USA. Her new series of books focusing on local, seasonal food—Homemade Living—will debut April 2010 from Lark Books. Ashley and her husband live in Candler, NC, with their menagerie of chickens, dogs, cats, and bees, where they are converting their land into a thriving homestead. Visit her at http://small-measure.blogspot.com. Ashley will be running a “Small Measures” column at D*S every Friday- click here for her column archives.
Alissa Parker-Walker and Ryan Walker are the co-creators of the online boutique Shop HORNE. They currently live in Philadelphia, PA where they spend most of their time working at HORNE, finding small, no-frills BYOB’s that emphasize inventive and delicious food, watching movies at their favorite theater, The Ritz, and playing with their beautiful niece, Rylan. While Ryan appreciates the nuances and intricacies of many different styles of alcoholic beverages, Alissa likes to stick to a few tried and trusted favorites. This combination gives them a unique and well-rounded perspective that they put to good use in their column – Behind the Bar.
Studio Choo has joined D*S with a weekly floral and gardening column called We Like It Wild. About Studio Choo: Studio Choo started with a sneeze. A very small sneeze. Jill’s sneeze, to be exact. It was so small Alethea remarked upon this tiny sneeze and thus “Choo” became a shared nickname between the two back in their days working at Rose and Radish floral and design gallery in San Francisco. A few years and many arrangements later, Jill and Alethea decided to open their own floral studio and the eponymous Studio Choo was born. Studio Choo co-owner Alethea Harampolis has spent time as an estate gardener in Seattle where she managed the wet and wild rolling hills of the city’s rich and famous. After working in other boutique flower shops perfecting her art, she is finally back living in her native Bay Area and adding a rock star edge to Studio Choo’s arrangements. With her mother, aunt, and uncle all running their own flower shops while she was growing up, it now seems only natural that Jill Pilotte would do the same. After spending her childhood in Rhode Island learning the difference between roses and ranunculus, she graduated with a degree in illustration from Parsons School of Design and moved to San Francisco to try life out west. She spent several years as a Creative Director at Rose and Radish and continues to runs her own independent craft business, Small Stump, in addition to being a Studio Choo co-owner. Lia Thomas is a librarian by trade and still works (almost) full-time at libraries throughout the Bay Area. She helped form Small Stump with Jill in 2006 and she has performed copywriting and product research for Rose and Radish. Lia now assists Studio Choo with special projects, events, research, and writing.
Stephanie Todaro has joined the Design*Sponge team to work on special projects and oversee our weekly Biz Ladies and City Guides columns. Although born in Chicago and raised in Los Angeles, Stephanie has been lucky enough to live all over the US, including DC and New York. She earned her master’s degree in journalism from New York University in 2008 and now lives in LA where she works at a magazine publishing company and sits in traffic all day. She has a slight (actually, major) obsession with all things stationery-related and likes to collect garden gnomes.
Halligan Norris has joined the Design*Sponge team as a DIY contributor! Halligan lives in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia with her husband Adam Smith. By day she is the Junior Designer for a Philly based jewelry design firm. She also wears the hats of homemaker, crafter, artist, and full time fun-seeker. She shares an art studio and gallery with 9 of her talented friends called Part Time Studios.
