If you’re all about the California lifestyle and have a unique eye for design, Desert Publications needs you. Right now, the company is searching for an art director to work on Palm Springs Life, as well as a variety of online magazines and guides.

The position is freelance for the moment, but has the potential to grow into a full-time gig. Show the publishing company that you’re indispensable, and this could happen sooner than later.

To be considered, you should be proficient in InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator, and be able to convey a luxury resort aesthetic through polished design. An interest in fashion, architecture, interior design, art and culture will work to your advantage. The company will want to see your work, so refine your book and apply here.

For more job listings, go to the Mediabistro job board, and to post a job, visit our employer page. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.

You can tell that either the celebrity in question has made it so large that he now exists on another plane away from we ordinary man, or that, outside of American politics, it’s been a pretty slow, summer news week. Decide for yourself as you react to the news that this week fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was photographed without wearing his sunglasses. Are you shocked? Are you hyperventilating as you click over to Google News to check out the more than 40 news outlets (well, make that 41 now) that, at the time of this writing, had breathlessly reported as much? Or can you somehow, perhaps because you’re gifted mentally, imagine Karl Lagerfeld without his sunglasses by simply picturing him with normal looking eyes instead of a pair of sunglasses? Whatever camp you fall into, let us all remember where we were when this happened and what we were doing, because this is the sort of thing you tell your grandchildren. And then when they ask, “Who is Karl Lagerfeld?” you can answer, “He was a guy who wore gloves and made plot-less ice cream commercials.” They should understand immediately thereafter and be filled with a glowing reverence for all you have experienced.

You know that weird feeling you get when you see an advertisement somewhere for something that’s “The Official…” product of some sports team, but it doesn’t seem even remotely connected to the game itself? We’re thinking something like, “Official Furnace and Air Conditioning Repair Contractors for the Milwaukee Brewers.” It’s fine to get your name connected to a team for promotional purposes, but to call something “Official” seems like a bit of a stretch. However, if sports teams can do it, why can’t everyone else? Enter Delta Airlines, who just this week became “The Official Airline of the Whitney Museum.” Sure, there are perks, with things like their frequent flyers now getting free admission, and we suppose the travel angle sorta makes some sense, but doesn’t it still feel a bit odd? What’s next? BMW becoming the “Official Car” of the Guggenheim? Oh, wait, forget we asked that. Let’s instead move on to the back-patting by the Whitney and Delta from the press release about all this officialness:

“Delta’s sponsorship of one of New York’s most renowned art institutions is a natural extension of our commitment to New York which already includes partnerships with preeminent organizations, institutions and professional sports teams,” said Gail Grimmett, Delta senior vice president – New York. “This sponsorship enables us to help bring the arts and culture of one of the city’s great museums to residents and art lovers alike, while also providing our customers with additional benefits.”

“We are thrilled that Delta has become the official airline of the Whitney,” said Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown director. “As the Whitney is one of the world’s foremost contemporary art museums, travel is essential to us. Delta will help us to fulfill our mission to collect, present and interpret the art of the United States in the broadest global context, while raising the Whitney’s profile for countless travelers and art enthusiasts the world over.”

In this brand-new episode of “Cubes,” we get a VIP tour of Bloomberg’s Manhattan offices from Bloomberg TV correspondent Gigi Stone. Check out the video below…

For updates on future episodes of “Cubes,” be sure to follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV

Time-lapse footage of the BMW Guggenheim Lab construction in New York City.

The highly anticipated BMW Guggenheim Lab has kicked off its six-year, nine-city world tour. First stop: New York’s East Village, inside a 2,200-square-foot mobile structure designed by Tokyo-based Atelier Bow-Wow. Envisioned as a think tank, public forum, and community center, the BMW Guggenheim Lab is offering an astounding array of free programs—including a talk this Friday by Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (see also: High Line, The), a scavenger hunt for sounds of the city, a large-scale interactive group game called Urbanology (play online here), and the rather intimidating “South Bronx Toxicity Tour“—that explore the challenges of urban life. The inaugural Lab, located at at First Park (Houston at 2nd Avenue), is open free of charge Wednesdays to Sundays, through October 16. The Lab will leave its temporary NYC home with some permanent improvements (stabilization and paving of the site, fresh sidewalks, and new wrought-iron fencing and gates) before heading to Berlin next spring, where it will be presented in collaboration with the ANCB Metropolitan Laboratory in Pfefferberg, and then it’s onto Mumbai. “The Guggenheim is taking its commitment to education, scholarship, and design innovation one step further. We’re taking it on the road,” said Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, in a statement issued by the museum. “From New York to Berlin to Mumbai and beyond, we will address the enormously important issues our major cities are facing today and engage others along the way.”

Photos in video, superstructure, and installation: NUSSLI Group, Switzerland/USA. Site preparation and construction management: Sciame Construction Co. Edited by Veena Rao. Inset photo by Paul Warchol. Video and photo © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

If you recall back to the tail end of last year, when budget cuts were sweeping through the UK with an unmerciful vengeance, and sympathies were particularly heavy toward the Commission for Architecture and the Build Environment (Cabe) as they announced their government funding had been cut. Prince Charles even got a (now semi-routine) batch of flak for offering to help take over some of their architectural review duties with his Foundation for the Built Environment. However, according to a recent report by the Telegraph, perhaps the former employees, the ones who didn’t stick around when the organization merged with the UK’s more famous Design Council, did okay for themselves with some fairly generous severance packages. “Golden handshakes,” the paper calls the government-wide redundancy packages, which reportedly cost British taxpayers somewhere in the range of “almost £1 billion.” Cabe itself apparently did okay, with £2.7million spread across the 76 employees who were laid off. Building Design highlights that its former director of resources, Charlotte Cane, “received £224,000 when she left her post” and Matt Bell, director of campaigns and education, “was handed a £111,000 payout.” Whether you think it’s a good thing that the people in these creative professions weren’t thrown out on the street when the government decided to cut off their employers, or that they should have to pay back every Pound and live in shame, working in forced labor on a peat bog somewhere in the country for the rest of their lives is completely up to you. We just post about it.

Is there still any social cache in saying that you watch PBS now that there are a billion television outlets available and not just a couple of networks that you could dial in with the careful repositioning of some rabbit ears? We would assume, however slight, there surely must be (all our smart friends, for example, kept babbling to each other and everyone we met how great that new Sherlock Holmes show was). That in mind, PBS still seems to know how to get it done, even when they venture online. Such can be witnessed with the recent launch of Off Book, a 13-part, bi-weekly web series “focused on experimental and non-traditional art forms.” It launched back on July 20th, with an interesting episode on photograph that uses painted light, but they seem to have really hit their stride with this week’s release of “The World of Typography,” which features interviews with the likes of Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Paula Scher, and Eddie Opara. It’s great and you’ll find it below.

The previous episode, “Light Painting Photography,” can be found after the jump…

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Well, our pick didn’t win, the one that had the hole in the side so that a giraffe could poke its head in and see what was going on, but we suppose the important thing is that now Barbie finally has an official place to hang her many fashionable hats at night. The American Institute of Architects has announced the winners of their Architect Barbie Dream House Design Competition, Ting Li and Maja Paklar, who received a whopping 8,470 votes and took home the title. The house is pretty cool, we guess, featuring boxes upon boxes with gigantic windows and a cool overhang. However, in their rendering, they seem to be rubbing it in a bit, because while they’ve included a giraffe (always important), the poor creature has no way of poking its head in. Instead, it can just peer through its modern glass facade and wonder why it and Barbie have grown so distant. That shame aside, here’s a description of the house:

The winning house design features entertaining space and chef’s open kitchen on the first floor, along with an office / library / meeting space. There is also a terrace on the second floor. The third and fourth floors are Barbie doll’s private enclave, her bedroom and her inspiration room respectively. The roof has a green house and a landscaped garden for her domestic pets. The design elements include solar panels, landscaped rooftop and irrigation system, operable shading devices, bamboo flooring, low flow toilet and sink fixtures, and locally sourced and manufactured materials and furnishings.

Famed literary critic Lionel Trilling once described Henry James as a “social twitterer.” Sure, he meant it as an insult, but it makes us feel better about having signed up to twitter ourselves. Look to the official UnBeige Twitter feed, for up-to-the-minute newsbites, event snippets, links of interest, design trivia, and free candy (OK, we’re still working on the physics of that last one). The mediabistro.com tech wizards have added to the sidebar at right a handful of our most recent word bursts (limited to 140 characters), but you can sign up to follow all of our twittering, and start twittering yourself at twitter.com.

We’ve already run a post this week about toilet paper, so why should we stop ourselves when considering writing about more bathroom-related material? We can’t think of a single reason, other than perhaps dignity, so here we go. The company Cintas has once again brought back their contest/marketing effort with the annual “America’s Best Restroom,” wherein they let we Americans vote on what public restroom looks the most inviting. It’s design-related, sure, as would be expect, some of these bathrooms look about as nice as the come. However, this year our interest was piqued by the promotional stunt because of the inclusion of two culture-based organizations, The Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts and the Field Museum in Chicago. Because we’re sure you’ll find all of this extremely important, you can vote on your favorite until September 19th after reading up on the great short descriptions of each facility in the press release. And as this writer is based out of Chicago and therefore obviously biased toward the Field Museum, here’s that:

With two large family-friendly restrooms on the ground floor, the Field Museum features sufficient stalls and sinks, as well as eco-friendly hand-dryers. The women’s restroom has a special nursing room with a shut door, sink, and small sofa for new mothers. The women’s restroom also has a large “Tot Area” with smaller toilets for our littlest guests.