My husband and I recently moved into a home built in 1930, and I was curious to see if our newer, modern furniture would flow with the style of our house and our hand-me-down, traditional furniture. I was happy to see that it all seems to work together. My confidence was further boosted, when I recently came across an interior designer in the latest issue of Architectural Digest who specializes in combining both contemporary and traditionalism together.

Jeffrey Bilhuber is an interior designer based in New York. His design firm, Bilhuber and Associates, has been designing both residential and hospitality projects since 1984.

Bilhuber was featured in Architectural Digest for his design of an old Manhattan town home built in 1870 (pictured, left). He combined the modern and diverse furnishings of the family with the classical architecture of the building.

Bilhuber does not take away from the older styles of the structure, fixtures, and furniture; he actually emphasizes each piece. He is very confident in all his designs whether bold or subtle. He has bold red curtains that match the sofa directly underneath, and wall paper that is the same pattern and color as the furniture. This helps to double the size of the room. He also hangs modern artwork next to older artwork which creates an interesting contrast. He was quoted on his website as saying, “we’re only as modern as our past,” and this can be seen throughout many of his works.

As a new homeowner and fairly recent graduate in interior design, I am very impressed with Bilhuber’s confidence in combining two different styles. He does not necessarily “play by the rules” when it comes to modernism and traditionalism, which can be difficult to pull off.

To learn more about Bilhuber and Associates you can visit their website, www.bilhuber.com.

For sports fans and chili-lovers alike, the Super Bowl is arguably a national holiday (and maybe no argument is necessary) — semi-fresh on the heels of the city’s fantastic showing for Super Bowl XVI, Gerardot & Co. is one of many burgeoning design firms hailing from the Circle City.  Located a mere 15-or-so miles north of Indianapolis, this multidisciplinary design agency specializes in place branding, product branding, and packaging design.

According to their website, Gerardot & Co. is a ”strategic branding and design firm (heavy on the strategic — smart on the design)” that loves to start from the very beginning.  Obviously, a blank slate is a best case scenario and fairly rare in the branding market, so the firm has adapted themselves to integrate into any phase of their clients’ process.  In short, their services run the gamut from a full-fledged brand integration to a fine-tuning of an existing kit of parts.

What we particularly appreciate about the agency’s work is their commitment to innovation, especially in their packaging for the Torche line of wine products.  In this rollout, they exhibited their commitment to environmental responsibility and sustainability by proposing a packaging reuse at the “end” of the products’ conceived life cycle.  The bottle comes equipped with a kit to retrofit an empty bottle into a modern tiki-torch of sorts, breathing life into a product otherwise relegated to a recycling or, worst case, trash bin.

For more Gerardot & Co., make sure to visit their website, Facebook, and Twitter pages.  As native Midwesterners, we love to see a cold-weather city perform so well and bring some love back to the Midwest.  We know we’ve been on a bit of a hiatus, but there are big things in the works for Ballista and hope to reveal them to you soon.

According to Upstatement, they “make handcrafted websites that are elegant and easy to use.” In our opinion, this somewhat downplays their contribution to the fields of visual and interactive design.

In 2011, in collaboration with The Boston Globe, Filament Group, and Ethan Marcotte, Upstatement built one of the most talked about websites of the year. The project, to design a new website for a 100 year old newspaper, took advantage of a collaborative approach and utilized emerging technology to deliver “a newspaper site  for the 21st century.”

The new Boston Globe website features a responsive design, which allows the user to comfortably view the site on the device of their choosing. The website’s layout responds to the device being used, but the experience is consistently pleasing and highly usable, and that’s what counts. Upstatement has two great articles on their blog that you should check out for additional insight into the design process.

Upstatement is Tito Bottitta, Jared A. Novack, Mike Swartz, Ari Rizzitano, John Boilard, and Bethany Heck. This small team of talented designers and developers have worked on several significant projects for museums, media outlets, and non-profits. In addition to The Boston Globe website, the Upstatement team has also produced websites for One Laptop Per Child, America’s Test Kitchen, Harvard Graduate School of Design, United States Holocaust Museum, and Dig Boston (which we mentioned in our feature of Tak Toyoshima).

To view more of this exceptional studio’s work visit upstatement.com. You can also find Upstatement on Facebook and Twitter.

Headquartered in London with built work spanning the globe, Sheppard Robson is an award-winning architectural practice founded on principles of innovation and sustainability.  The firm also has offices in Manchester, Glasgow, and Abu Dhabi, so if you find yourself in Europe and in need of an architect, there is one (relatively) close by!

According to their website, Sheppard Robson’s design approach is “defined by the exploration of new ideas, processes and technologies, and our commitment to sustainability”.  This design approach is manifested within projects in a variety of market sectors, including master planning, retail, residential, hotels, transportation infrastructures, interiors, academic, and healthcare design.  Despite being at the cutting edge of each of these sectors, Sheppard Robson made waves with its’ “Lighthouse” project, purported to be the first carbon neutral house in the United Kingdom.  Carbon neutrality has been at the forefront of global initiatives in decades past (see Architecture 2030 and the Kyoto Protocol) and it is a true accomplishment in the architectural field to design and construct a neutral building.

For more of Sheppard Robson’s work, make sure to visit their website — they have an astounding portfolio of built work, far exceeding our capacity in one single feature.  Enjoy!

Located in the beautiful San Fransisco Bay region, Bold is a web design and development studio that can tackle a wide variety of projects.

In a web studio, a mark of excellence is high quality design paired with rock-solid development skills. Bold has both in spades. The studio can handle your standard HTML/CSS/JS development, and more advanced coding like CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, and Rails. Concept development, information architecture, and user experience are also skillfully handled by Bold.

Noah Stokes and Garrett St. John founded Bold in 2010 on the following beliefs.

• the customer is always right.
• that our users should have the same experience, no matter what the browser.
• the right tool for the job is the one that provides the best long term solution.
• in doing good work, and doing it right.
• that your goals, are our goals.
• that if we’re not the right studio for your project, we’ll let you know.

There is very little that Bold doesn’t do, so be sure to check them out.

Based in Minneapolis, Brock Davis is an artist and musician currently working as the the creative director at Carmichael Lynch in the Mill City.  From his artist statement:  ”Not limiting himself to advertising, Brock’’s talents span music, drawing, graphic design, writing, works of art both serious and absurd, and a killer instinct for video games. The one constant is an exceptional track record for transforming humor and insights into work that gets a reaction.”  Good enough for us!

From a commercial standpoint Brock’s industry is advertising, but it is his design work outside of advertising that is most appealing to us at Ballista.  His portfolio features a variety of self-initiated micro-installation projects that result in variations of a “study model” (our words, not his)…almost a polished, tangible manifestation of a concept that has no reason to be carried any further but is incredibly fun nonetheless.  For example, his Gummybear Rug, Twinkie circuitry, and Broccoli House projects: in these projects, Brock has created actual models of the silly, random ideas that most people keep to themselves with a small, internal chuckle.   The levity of these micro projects are refreshing and fun, but still make a conceptual statement as a reactionary design exercise and for that, we thank you!

For more of Brock’s work, make sure to check out his website and Twitter feeds for his most recent work and musings.  As you can probably guess from the trainwreck of an attempted explanation in the preceding paragraph(s), this particular artist description was no easy task — it was actually one of the more difficult features to put into words.  For this reason, we’d like to go on record and say that we are incredibly appreciative of Brock’s work, subject matter, and want to see much, much more.

“Perhaps the one benefit coming from a completely remote, nearly unknown town in western Austrailia is that if there is nobody around you doing graffiti, you kinda have to figure it out for yourself.”                                  

- Kid Zoom

Australian born and NYC-based, Kid Zoom is a street artist that has been endorsed as a “Rembrandt with a spray can” (by legend Ron English, no less) who has exploded onto the scene with his amazing freehand painting.  Raised in Perth, Australia as Ian Strange, Kid Zoom has been heralded as the next big thing in street art, exhibiting near-medical precision in his execution of both photo-realistic and distorted pop culture paintings.  And no, not the the “medical precision” that you read about in the tabloids after a celebrity facelift…real doctors, real precision.

In our opinion, Kid Zoom distances himself from the proverbial pack in his balance of technical precision and conceptual freedom — his work has the tuned characteristics of a fine art work, while pushing the envelope with subversive and often controversial subject matter.  Whether Ian is “tagging” animals (kangaroos and bears, to name a few) or working on extremely realistic portraiture, his precision and artistic craft shine.  His most recent work is among our favorites: a full-scale replica of the artist’s childhood home, purportedly rebuilt solely from adolescent memory.  Conceptually, this is an incredibly personal and tactile representation of a memory, which has been executed to full effect and great success.

For more of the Kid, make sure to check out his website, complete with a gallery of work and a link to his blog.  For the aesthetes, the gallery will suffice, but the blog provides a great deal of background information that reveal the meaning and process behind this star’s work.  If those aren’t enough, there’s always Twitter!

Tak Toyoshima is the creative director of the Boston alternative weekly paper, DigBoston, and the creator and illustrator of the comic strip Secret Asian Man.

Tak was born in New York City and grew up on the borders of Chinatown, Little Italy, Soho and Tribeca. He later attended Boston University where he received a degree in advertising. Tak started working on his critically acclaimed comic strip, Secret Asian Man, in the summer of 1998. The strip started out appearing monthly in a local arts publication, Shovel Magazine.

Shovel Magazine was started by Tak and his wife with a group of their creative friends. Shovel Magazine had a circulation in the low thousands, but over time it’s popularity grew and it eventually evolved into Boston’s Weekly Dig, which in turn became DigBoston. The current weekly circulation of DigBoston is over 30,000 copies. Tak describes the Dig as “a hybrid of the traditional alternative newsweekly that our hippie forefathers started and new school magazine publishing blending award winning design and cutting edge content.” Secret Asian Man is still printed in DigBoston, but as we mentioned earlier Tak is the creative director for the publication, so he’s writing and illustrating S.A.M. on his own time.

Tak Toyoshima is also a contributor to New England Comics’ The Tick, a former cover artist for DigBoston, and has past experience as the creative director for BeerAdvocate Magazine. Secret Asian Man was included in Attitudes 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists and was also collected in Secret Asian Man: The Daily Days. Both are available online and in fine bookstores. You can follow Tak Toyoshima on Twitter, and connect with the DigBoston on Facebook.

Jackie Besteman is a veteran illustrator whose work has been recognized by The Art Directors Club of Toronto, Print Magazine, and American Illustration. Her vibrant, colorful illustrations and editorial work have appeared in numerous publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Marie Claire, among others.

Jackie grew up in South Africa and Holland, and her family later moved to Toronto. She attended OCAD University, and after graduating she started making illustrations for various publications, which she has continued to do for over 20years.

Ms. Besteman went digital over 10 years ago, and this transition encouraged her to experiment with her style. Jackie describes the style that emerged from that process as “Urbane Whimsy.” Bright colors, quirky patterns, imaginative settings, and unique depictions of faces and people all combine to make Jackie’s style undeniably unique.

Jackie Besteman’s work can be found at jackiebesteman.com. Additionally, some of her illustrations can be purchased as greeting cards and posters on Etsy.

Buro Sant en Co was founded in 1990 by Monique de Vette and Edwin Santhagens. The company provides a complete range of landscape architecture and urban design services, and has established itself as a leader in these fields in the Netherlands.

The SantenCo team’s success can be attributed to their talent and skill, but also to the open, collaborative process they practice. Clients, specialists, and end users are involved early and often during a project’s lifespan. With this approach, the company has excelled in the development of urban landscapes that provide useful and meaningful space to their communities. The team can truly tackle any assignment from master plan to detailed design, and they have contributed their efforts to projects including, parks, campuses, squares, shopping areas, boulevards, gardens and estates.

The company strives to produce functional and simple designs, but sustainability is equally important. Buro Sant en Co often incorporates wind energy, green roofs, up-cycled materials, native flora and fauna, and runoff cleaning features into their designs.

You can find out more about this forward-thinking landscape architecture and urban design company at santenco.nl. Buro Sant and Co can also be found on Twitter, but unlike the website, which provides an English translation, Dutch fluency is required.