Liquid Treat

Put your money where your eye and your heart is by shopping at Design with Benefits, a new online store. “We partner with companies, promote design efforts, and sell products that embody design activism and ethical values at the core of their businesses,” says Florida-born, Chile-based architect Tania Garbe, whose motivation to found the site was the challenges she encountered while working on design projects overseas. Purchase products such as handcrafted wooden radios, elephant art created to benefit endangered Asian elephants, and copper jewelry made from a salvaged Frank Lloyd Wright roof confident that each month, a percentage of Design with Benefits' net profits is donated to a remarkable public interest project.

Stop, collaborate, and listen with Apollo, a handy app that promises "a better way to work together" for a range of creative types and their clients. Developed by UK-based 27stars, the free app offers a Web-based (login, with a single click, from anywhere), nothing-to-install approach to online proofing and other project tasks, making it ideal for graphic and Web designers, photographers and anyone else working collaboratively with images, documents, digital sketches or other documents.

Turn that frown upside down at "The Happy Show," an exhibition of designer Stefan Sagmeister's work that opens March 20 at the Pacific Design Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. "I am usually rather bored with definitions," says Sagmeister. "Happiness, however, is just such a big subject that it might be worth a try to pin it down." And today in New York City, the Jewish Museum opens "Six Things," the first exhibition of Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh's newly founded design firm, Sagmeister & Walsh. Both shows offer up experiments with potential happiness inducers ranging from meditation and cognitive therapy to playing with water balloons and spelling out maxims in jaw-dropping flights of typographic fancy.

Get your sketch on with Trace, a simple and beautiful yet incredibly useful iPad app created by the architects of the Morpholio Project. Free to download, the sketch utility allows users to instantly draw on top of imported images or background templates, layering comments or ideas to generate immediate, intelligent sketches that are easy to circulate. "Tracing over something is absolutely the foundation of the app," says co-creator Toru Hasegawa. "Layers of trace paper are not the same as 'layers' in Photoshop or other tools. Here, they are the stacking of ideas, as opposed to the organizing of files."

Watch an artist navigate a host of creative challenges in the documentary Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child, available on DVD March 19. Filmmaker Lisa Kirk Colburn follows Helnwein, a charismatic cross between Alice Cooper and Christopher Walken (with an Austrian accent), as he takes on the role of production designer for the Israeli Opera production of The Child Dreams. Helnwein arrives in Tel Aviv with a grand vision that he fights to preserve amid logistical limitations, opera star egos, Israeli labor laws that put the kibosh on child actors, and a stubborn yet brilliant lighting designer named Bambi. "I treat the staging like a canvas," says Helnwein of adapting his hazy-haunting figuration to a new art form, "but it's three-dimensional and everything moves."

How will we leave our mark? That's the question posed by the Blank Sheet Project, a project of Paris-based Arjowiggins Creative Papers in collaboration with D&AD and One Young World. This year, the initiative is asking creative types worldwide to share their views about the future of design with the Blank Sheet Time Capsule. Adding your "personal vision of design and creativity in 2023" is easy; the only requirement is to start with a blank sheet of paper, regardless of whether you end up with an object, an image, a movie, or something in another creative, artistic format. Submissions received by June 30 will be showcased in an online gallery through the end of the year and then taken down and preserved for "rediscovery" in 2023.