Having just launched our brand-new travel section and our sister Instagram, @designmilktravels, we are overjoyed to launch a series of travel guides in partnership with TUMI. And where else would be a better place to start than a place that’s exploding with art, design and culture: the city of Angels!
Mural by Bunny Reiss, Little Tokyo \ Photo by Gregory Han
On the surface, Los Angeles isn’t your textbook design city. The city does not present the same recognizable creative pastiche as other global destinations?where design is painted in wide and obvious swaths across the cityscape. Instead, design in LA is splattered like a Pollock painting?here and there, layered, multi-colored, sometimes indistinguishable from the background. Despite a vibrant history of music, art, architecture, and of course, movies, design in its many forms here exists as a quieter undercurrent, one defined by a design community which works just as much in collaboration as in solitary corners?tucked into industrial parks, shared mixed use studios, and other miscellaneous sections easily passed over. Yet design is everywhere, interwoven into the daily lives of Angelenos, who identify with design almost as sheepishly as we do sunshine and open space. It’s always there?sort of like the traffic. But don’t worry, like the father of one our esteemed, yet clueless residents once noted, “everywhere in LA takes 20 minutes.”
Obviously this is an extremely abbre...