In 1990, UCLA creative director InJu Sturgeon went to a 75-year-old Paul Rand with a request that the world-famous designer was not used to hearing at this point in his career: Design the cover of the catalog for UCLA's little-known continuing education program—and do it for free. After much persuasion, Rand agreed, and a snow-covered orange graced the school's winter catalog. Twenty-seven years later, over 70 designers, illustrators and artists have donated their one-page takes on learning and Southern California, and the covers have become a famous gallery of work by the biggest talents on the planet. Sturgeon continues to recruit contributors twice a year, but now designers hardly ever think twice before saying yes.
http://www.uclaextension.edu/mastercovers/

Take a close look at most designers in action, and it's likely you'll see one thing in common—that thin black notebook wedged carefully in a back pocket or peeking out of a messenger bag. The Moleskine is the unofficial sketchpad of design, so when the company wanted to launch a new line of City Notebooks, they tossed 70 of them to artists, illustrators, architects and designers to personalize at will. The results are collected at Moleskine City Notebook Experience, where videos flip through the finished products, bringing the journals of folks like Cynthia Rowley, Michael Graves, Ron Arad, Karim Rashid, Paula Scher and Maira Kalman to life.
http://www.moleskinecity.com

California Institute of the Arts has long been churning out famous grads from its graphic design education powerhouse tucked into a hillside north of L.A. But the most exciting CalArts work was previously limited to school walls: CalArts students, charged with creating posters for visiting artists and school events, would create gorgeous screen-printed works usually only seen by other students and faculty. Until now. A new exhibition, shown in Paris and now L.A., collects experimental poster work from 1986 through 2004. If the student work is this good, you can only imagine where these designers are today.
http://posters.calarts.edu/