Sight Unseen Launches ‘Offsite Online’ Design Fair.

3D rendering by Supaform for Sight Unseen Offsite Online.

New York-based online magazine Sight Unseen know that’s up. This week, the editors Jill Singer and Monica Khemsurov launched their first-ever entirely digital design fair: Offsite Online. A curated, web-based presentation of new furniture and objects by nearly 100 designers, brands and students, Offsite Online, officially went live on May 18th, followed by four weeks of related programming across Sight Unseen’s channels until June 12th.

The event aims to provide support to designers in a time when, due to the global pandemic, they find themselves cut off from nearly all avenues for sales and promotion. Many were ready to launch their 2020 collections when retail stores were shuttered and design fairs cancelled for the foreseeable future. Sight Unseen’s own 2020 Offsite fair, scheduled to take place in May at Skylight Modern in Manhattan, was put on indefinite hold, inspiring the editors to pivot to a digital exhibition model instead — harnessing the visibility of their existing online platform to create a much-needed creative and commercial outlet for the design community.

“The pandemic may have prevented us from holding a physical Offsite fair this spring,” said Singer and Khemsurov, “but moving the fair online allows us to unite the contemporary design community and give it a much-needed creative and commercial outlet — as well as redefine what a design fair can be in the digital age.”

One particularly original aspect of Offsite Online is the use of 3D renderings to bring some of the featured designs to life in the absence of a physical fair presentation — as well as in many cases, the inability to produce a styled photoshoot during the quarantine. Sight Unseen brought in two of the design world’s most up-and-coming digital artists, Stefano Giacomello and Charlotte Talyor, to create 3D rendered “photo shoots” of several of the collections in the show.

That said, though some products will be displayed as renderings, Offsite Online is not an exhibition of conceptual works — every single piece in the fair either exists as a real object or will exist as soon as the pandemic ebbs and production starts back up again.

Related: Sight Unseen OFFSITE at New York Design Week.

[Images courtesy of Sight Unseen.]