Hey design students, are you still playing the field of summer internships? Think you're ready for the major leagues? Then bat around this opportunity: Major League Baseball is seeking a graphic design intern in its midtown Manhattan office. The all-star intern will support MLB's design services department, which we like to think involves drawing and hobknobbing with Mr. Met (our favorite mascot) but in fact entails everything from assisting in production of environmental design related to the All-Star Game to retail marketing and point-of-purchase design. Bring your PhotoShop, Illustrator, and InDesign skills, but probably best to leave your trusty mitt (and performance-enhancing drugs) at home.

Learn more about and apply for this graphic design intern, Major League Basebell job or view all of the current mediabistro.com design/art/photo jobs.

What do you get when you put three design-minded Bostonians into an 118-year-old former movie theater that is also now home to an environmental design studio and an architectural firm? Something grand -- more specifically, a store called Grand nestled in Somerville's historic Union Square neighborhood. Opened in January by Jonathan O'Toole (CEO and operations manager), Wendy Friedman (chief merchandiser), and Adam Larson (creative director), Grand brings to the Boston area a unique combination of art, commerce, and style. The founding trio, who met while working at Rykodisc, share a love for discovering contemporary home furnishings, apparel, and gifts by independent designers, and they happen to work well as a retail team. "Wendy is a master when it comes to finding new, cool, and unique products," O'Toole tells us. "Adam has an eye for design that is simply amazing. Plus, at the end of the day we're all good friends. We know each others like, dislikes, and generally trust each other to make good choices and decisions."

Designed by Larson, the store's look falls on a continuum spanning art gallery and cabinet of curiousities, with walls enlivened by two massive vinyl installations of a horse and the surface of the moon. As for what's moving most quickly off of Grand's mod shelves, SuckUK's SunJar (the solar-powered LED light in a Mason jar, originally designed by Tobias Wong) is the current top seller, O'Toole says, "closely followed by these cool screen-printed posters of Boston designed by Ork Posters" and clothing by such lines as Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and FluffyCo, the maker of O'Toole's favorite birds of prey-printed hoodie. Next up for the store is online shopping capabilities, new furniture and lighting pieces, and continued collaboration with clothing lines that O'Toole describes as "unique to the Boston market." Grand is also gearing up for its first ever sale, this Friday and Saturday, and O'Toole promises plentiful savings and Harpoon Ale to UnBeige readers who stop by this Friday night. After a few drinks, you won't be able to resist taking home a discounted litter of Harry Allen piglets.

Crack that whip. Give the past a slip. Brooklyn is whipping it, whipping it good, thanks to a new group show of "art, adventure, and music" inspired by everyone's favorite red ziggurat-hatted New Wave pop sensation: DEVO. On view through June 1 at Williamsburg's 3rd Ward Gallery, "The Super Thing: NYC goes DEVO" features 20 "Postcard Diaries" prints by DEVO co-founder and multi-tasking musician extraordinaire Mark Mothersbaugh, who began illustrating postcards to send to friends and family while first touring with the group. Another room is given over to DEVO-inspired (or at least DEVO-compatible) interactive art, including Mike Dee's layered music videos, Michael Robinson's ingenious stealthy logos, and Yuliya Lanina's indecent robotic mechanical dolls. Want to see photos of the work from the opening on Saturday? Go forward, move ahead, and check out Maro's shots over at The Village Voice. (After the jump, we couldn't resist this opportunity to post the "Whip It" video.)

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By way of Design Info, we found this little bit of funny: Flogos. We looked it up and saw that it'd been making the rounds a bit on blogs overseas, in foreign languages, so if you haven't heard of it over here in the US, then we feel we've done our part in spreading the word of absurdity. There's really nothing more to Flogos than this: balloon logos. They're custom-made, supposedly-environmentally safe balloons, built to resemble silhouettes of your logo, that are launched into the air and spread brand awareness to a wide variety of birds, high-rise apartment dwellers, and fish, when the land in the sea. Their site is a fun to maneuver around and we look forward to the day when this sort of advertising is gigantic and we're assaulted by Flogo's sky branding by day and Spacevertising's asteroid advertising by night.

Alice Fisher has an interesting story up over at The Guardian, "How the Tate Got Streetwise." It's about London getting so crazy for street art (see: stenciled spray-painted artwork and the big checks made out to Banksy) and how it must really be a viable art medium, now that the Tate Modern is giving its day in its hallowed halls with its aptly-named, upcoming exhibit, "Street Art." If you're like us and you're at all interested in reading and then repeated re-reading how these pieces suddenly went from things you'd pass on the street to stuff selling in galleries for millions and millions in just around a decade, with the real push coming over the last couple of years, Fisher's piece serves as a pretty solid primer. So go forth and educate yourself. Then either start cutting out stencils to see if you can get yourself on the street art gravy train or saving your pennies to buy something one day.

Well, as you may remember us talking about a few times in prior posts, the side against the proposed Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington D.C. have finally gotten their way, convincing the United States Commission of Fine Arts to alter the Lei Yixin plans for the statue. Although the request by the commission states that they'd like "that the sculpture of portray Dr. King as a more sympathetic figure," if you've followed the story at all, you'll likely remember that the primary reason everyone has been up in arms about the memorial is because Yixin is from China and, in a previous job, also created busts of Mao Zedong, neither of which are very popular right now.

As if to say, "We in advertising didn't mean to sell things by deceiving people into thinking their lives would be better if they purchased our products," the team of Unilver, Annie Leibovitz and Pascal Dangin are all three denying the big story floating around late last week that the Dove 'Real Beauty' campaign was digitally altered to make the models more appealing. But it appears to be more damage control by Annie Leibovitz and her posse than it does by Unilver and Ogilvy & Mather, the ad agency behind it all. Leibovitz didn't come into the campaign until two years after it started running and no one seems to want to talk about what was going on before she came into the picture, which is just about the same as saying, "Yeah, we were doing it before, but then our budget went up as the campaign got more high-profile, so we hired a big shot photographer who could hide all of their flaws in-camera." Here's a bit from Dangin, celebrated photo-retoucher:

The photos for that 2005 ad were taken by London celebrity fashion photographer Ian Rankin, not Ms. Leibovitz, with whom Mr. Dangin long has worked. Mr. Rankin couldn't be reached at press time.

"As directed by Ms. Leibovitz and Ogilvy & Mather, [the Pro-Age] photographs were retouched for dust and color correction," he said. "I did not mean to suggest that the women's shape, size, facial features or age were retouched. Consistent with the intent of Dove, Ogilvy & Mather, Annie Leibovitz, and my own guiding philosophy, the integrity of the photographs and the natural and unique beauty of the women were maintained."

Over at Nerve.com, they've assembled a list of the "50 greatest commercial parodies of all time," most of them drawn from the post-monologue slot on Saturday Night Live. The list includes many of our favorites, including the SNL spots for Crystal Gravy (#16) and Calvin Klein "Compulsion" (#29), but where is the classic Grayson Moorhead Securities parody? Dan Akroyd shilling for the Bass-o-matic takes the #1 ranking, and we're pleased to see that this ad for the First CityWide Change Bank came in at a respectable #7.

Hey Copenhagen, get ready to be deluged by rumpled sportswear, elk logos, and scantily-clad youth photographed on beaches by Bruce Weber, because Abercrombie & Fitch is coming to your town! Following last year's opening of a London store, the New Albany, Ohio-based company will open its second European flagship next year in Denmark's capital, Abercrombie & Fitch announced today. After Copenhagen, its on to Asia, where a store in Tokyo's Ginza district is set open late next year. Locations in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden are in the works.

Located at Kobmagergade 11, the 16,000-square-foot Copenhagen flagship location was "designed in the old neoclassical style typically found in Danish architecture when constructed in 1910," the company noted today in a press release. To mastermind the restoration and store design, Abercrombie has hired Selldorf Architects and its principal Annabelle Selldorf. Selldorf designed the company's massive New York City and Los Angeles flagships, although the crowd that lines up every morning outside the Fifth Avenue store and the pumping bass that greets them at 10am sharp always seems to us at odds with Selldorf's sleek modernity.

The good people at Men's Vogue were kind enough to pass word along to us of one of their newest features, which they've just launched on their site. It's called "Design Inspirations" and they talked to famous design folk, from Michael Bierut to Yves Behar to Bentley's head of interior design, Robin Page, and asked them to name five things that inspire them. It's not one of those types of pieces that are going to give you a tremendous rush of insight about anything, but it's certainly kind of fun to read the random things they picked. And without much explanation beyond just their choices, it sort of becomes something of a game, trying to figure out just why they picked what they did, like #3 from designer Marcel Wanders:

Johannes Vermeer's "Girl with the Pearl Earring"

This 17th century work by Johannes Vermeer is often referred to as the "Mona Lisa of the North," a classic work which has inspired both a novel and a film.

Um...and?

Design guru, Jeffrey Zeldman, has another piece up, rallying against HTML e-mails with recent post, "E-mail Is Not a Platform for Design." While we don't necessarily agree one hundred percent with him, because we've seen where, if used intelligently (and sparingly), you can go beyond a dull text-only message and create something more lasting, but he makes some very strong points and, like with many of his posts, the real meat and potatoes starts up in the comments, with people hashing out all the pros and cons. To us, the opinion we take from the whole thing is that there is so much awful out there, in terms of e-mail designed using HTML, that it's a nightmarish, uphill battle to make it work, because you're not only dealing with a finicky format, but that initial, negative perception as well. But we'll leave your brain alone to decide for itself.

We can't even begin to tell you the giddy thrill we had reading AdAge's story, "Dove's 'Real Beauty' Pics Could Be Big Phonies." Like most media or ad people, this writer has disliked Unilever's entire deceptive 'Campaign for Real Beauty' from the start, from their billion-YouTube-views "Evolution" video to the massive push two years ago with the "regular women in underwear" ads. So it was with deliriously wonderful schadenfreude to read that The New Yorker has exposed, via a piece about hot shot photo-retoucher, Pascal Dangin, that there was extensive manipulation to make the women in the ads seem more appealing. So now, or soon to come, everyone will be up in arms about being blindly suckered into loving the campaign for its truth and honesty. Meanwhile, Unilever and Ogilvy & Mather, the agency behind the campaign, have been laughing all the way to the bank from the very start.

In response to Bruce Nussbaum's post the other day over at BusinessWeek, asking if New York was becoming the new hub of design and innovation, Ross Popoff-Walker has a much more articulate and better reasoned reply to Nussbaum than our own. In it, he argues that yes, there might be lots of firms moving to NY or opening satelitte offices, but it's important to distinguish between the different types of design and innovation (i.e. it isn't just advertising) and how essentially academic areas are, and how those aren't moving anywhere anytime soon. Here's a bit:

It's no secret recipe that innovation comes from areas with strong academic environments -- learning hubs like Boston (MIT's Media Lab, Harvard), Pittsburgh (Carneige Mellon U and the Entertainment Technology Center), or Chicago (Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology).

In fact, Pittsburgh is a great case study -- Google opened up an office there because of the rich talent coming from Carnegie Mellon.

So yes, something is brewing in NYC -- the ad/marketing industry is undergoing a transformational shift to a design-focus -- and NYC has always been a hub for advertising.

If those Marcel Wanders wallpaper designs we showed you earlier this week are a little too William Morris-goes-to-Eindhoven for your tastes, how about the new line by Geoff McFetridge? The "graphic design auteur" and his wife, Sarah diVincentis, are behind Pottok Prints, a line of wallpapers named after a rare breed of pony that frolics about the Pyrenees. Among the image-based patterns are those featuring playful graphics of apples, dead trees, whales, and blobby monsters dubbed "shadows of the paranormal."

Paper magazine caught up with McFetridge for its May design issue and asked him about his path to Pottok. "A few different things happened that tipped the balance for me," he told writer Sarah Cohen. "I started working with a new manufacturer that runs a really clean non-toxic operation, and does great work. Also my wife runs the company so I know things are being done right. Better than if I was doing it. I'm really happy to have people have the paper, and that they are getting it directly from me. We see every roll, sample, and print that leaves the studio." While Pottok currently sells only McFetridge's designs, the company will soon expand to collaborate with other designers and artists.

"The circus is the only spectacle I know that, while you watch it, gives the quality of a happy dream," wrote Ernest Hemingway. You may recall our enduring fascination with circuses (and not just those of the mediabistro.com variety, where we hope to see you later this month), and so we're particularly excited about Taschen's mammoth, photo- and poster-laden book on the subject. Slated for June publication, The Circus, 1870-1950 is edited by Noel Daniel and written by circus historians Linda Granfield, Dominique Jando, and Fred Dahlinger, Jr. The book includes over 900 color and black-and-white illustrations, including photographs by everyone from Matthew Brady and Walker Evans to Lisette Model and get this, Charles and Ray Eames. In this excerpt, Jando discusses the circus posters that "plastered barn walls, wooden fences, and the sides of city buildings" with images of "roaring lions and tigers, charging rhinos, and furious hippos attacking natives hunting on the river Nile."

These powerful and colorful depictions became an integral part of circus magic, a tempting tease of the wonders that awaited you. The circus was the main user of printed advertising at the time. Larger shows plastered thousands of lithographic posters each day; no other industry ever came close to these numbers. A few printing companies specialized in this very lucrative business....Some designs were elaborate, others relatively simple, some were elegant, many were gaudy, but all were colorful, charged with energy, exalting the mundane, improving the extraordinary, exaggerating the extravagant. Even before you saw the actual show, the circus was already delivering its wonders far and wide with its advertising.