Design Observer

Archive
Books + Store
Job Board
Comments
About
Contact

Observatory

Departments

Audio
Books
Collections
Dialogues
Essays
Gallery
Interviews
Miscellaneous
Opinions
Poetry
Projects
Reviews
Slideshows
Today
Video

Topics

Advertising
Architecture
Art
Books
Branding
Cities / Places
Community
Culture
Design History
Design Practice
Ecology
Economy
Education
Fashion
Film / Video
Food/Agriculture
Graphic Design
Health / Safety
History
Ideas
Illustration
Info Design
Infrastructure
Internet / Blogs
Journalism
Landscape
Literature
Magazines
Media
Museums
Music
Nature
Obituary
Other
Peace
Photography
Poetry
Politics / Policy
Popular Culture
Product Design
Public Art
Religion
Reputations
Science
Social Enterprise
Sports
Sustainability
Technology
Theory/Criticism
TV / Radio
Typography
Urbanism

OBSERVED

It's the Dreaded Killer Jellyfish of Graphic Design Favors: now available as a poster! [MB]

David Pearson, the man behind the legendary Penguin Great Ideas series, designs beautiful handmade covers for the books of Cormac McCarthy. (Via AceJet.) [MB]

From his Abstract City blog, a collection of maps invented by the always amazing Christoph Niemann. [MB]

Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in Cambridge, NYC, Nashville, SF, Chicago, Cincinnati, DC, Atlanta and London. Companies hiring include Kaplan Test Prep, Clementine Paper, Bryant Park Corporation, Lowe's, Samsung, Alien Skin Software and Digitas. Post your job today. [JSC]

Greg Kindall's gallery of book trade labels. Exquisite. [JH]

Honest movie posters. (Via Kottke.) [MB]

When Herbert Matter got the job to design a new logo for the New Haven Railroad he literally went through hundreds of sketches before arriving at the final logo. [MB]

Finally! The South by Southwest festival announces the first ever competition to honor film and television titles. The inaugural list of nominees include Tom Barham at Curious Pictures, Brian Dixon, yU+Co, and Geoff McFetridge. [MB]

Design studio CHIPS (partly responsible for Too Hot For the Internet), teams up with Complex to compile their 50 Favorite Moments in Photoshop History. [JSC]

Look out, Art Director Ken! Joan Holloway, often called a living Barbie doll, is now available as an actual Barbie doll, along with fellow Mad Men Bruce Sterling and Don and Betty Draper. [MB]

SOM's Bruce Graham, the architect credited with creating modern Chicago, dies at 84. [MB]

"Hello, my name is Mister Glasses, and I'm an architect." The lonely struggle of the designer of the McKinny Factory Home and the Duluth Sanitarium. (Thanks to John Cantwell.) [MB]

Chris Mottalini has been photographing the demolition of homes designed by Paul Rudolph. This collection (follow the link for "after you left, they took it apart") is a beautiful record of the lack of appreciation for midcentury modernism. (Thanks to Nate Huyler.) [JSC]

An I.Q. Test for aficionados of modernist furniture: Donald Judd, or Cheap Furniture? [LW]

Announcing the School of Visual Arts MFA Design Criticism Lecture Series, Spring 2010, featuring Design Trust for Public Space director Deborah Marton, GSA director of Design Excellence and the Arts Casey Jones, documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit and author David Barringer, among others. Also, get ready for the first D-Crit Conference. [MB]

"Command Records was founded in 1959 by Enoch Light, a classical violinist, bandleader, and sound recording engineer. Enoch Light’s daughter, Julie Light, first made the connection to Albers — she studied with him at Black Mountain College." Josef Albers, album cover designer. (Via Quips.) [MB]

"Signage — the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to." (Thanks to Kurt Koepfle.) [MB]

Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in Boston, SF, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, NYC, Hong Kong, Chicago and Minneapolis. Companies hiring include Bureau Blank, Adam & Co., Hummel International, Nike, SCAD, Time Inc. and Carnegie Mellon. Post your job today. [JSC]

Congratulations to H5 and producer Nicolas Schmerkin, whose film Logorama won the Academy Award last night for best animated short subject. [MB]

A (remarkable) audio guide to split second Olympic finishing times. (Thanks to Jeffrey Kittay.) [MB]

Steve Heller reviews visual books about maps, including Mapping the World: Stories of Geography,, a beautiful history of cartography; The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, featuring pieces by Abigail Reynolds, Jeannie Thib and Greg Colson; Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and Design of the Métro, "a definitive history appropriate for die-hard subway and map devotees;" Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities, improbable, incomplete, incorrect — and funny — maps, from the blog of the same name; Unimark International: The Design of Business and the Business of Design, on the firm that designed, among other things, iconic signage and maps for the New York City Subway; and War Rugs: The Nightmare of Modernism, on the "eerily beautiful, decidedly disturbing" (and sometimes geographic) rugs produced by Afghan and Pakistani tribal workshops and refugee camps. Slideshow here. [MB]

The fifth annual call for entries for the Winterhouse Writing Awards is now open: deadline is June 1. $10,000 main prize given to a writer under 40 for an exemplary body of work and $1,000 student prize. This year's jurors are Paola Antonelli, Steven Heller and Rob Walker, with Jessica Helfand as Chair. (Read about last year's winners here.) [WD]

Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in NYC, Seattle, Chicago, SF, Miami, London, DC, Santa Fe and Cambridge. Companies hiring include Madison Square Garden, Amazon, Kakai, Target, EnergyHub, H&R Block and Continuum. Post your job today. [JSC]

How John Dugdale, a blind photographer, shot the ad campaign for the Broadway revival of "The Miracle Worker." [MB]

Jane Dillon, the best product designer you've never heard of. [MB]

"I never knew a designer that got hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a logo. Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace." Paula Scher on what they don’t teach you about identity design in design schools. [MB]

America's name-brand designer receives National Medal of Arts, is touched by Obama. [JL]

The Walker Art Center and AIGA Minnesota announces the 24th annual Insights lecture series featuring Eddie Opara, Peter Buchanan-Smith, Irma Boom, and Stefan Bucher. Presentations will be webcast live on the Walker Channel, where other talks since 2005 can also be viewed. [AB]

Design Observer's Job Board has new jobs in Cambridge, NYC, Chicago, Vancouver, Sarasota, Charlotte, Seattle, Arlington, SF and Kalamazoo. Companies hiring include Harvard Graduate School of Design, The New York Times, Chase Design, Martha Stewart, Evite, Kaldor, Opower and Behringer. Post your job today. [JSC]

George Lois tells the stories behind his twelve favorite classic Esquire covers. (And a little more on the subject from the DO archives.) [MB]

TWITTER

Please wait while Design Observer tweets load.

Steven Heller

Becoming a Designer in the Age of Aquarius

What’s the point of reviewing a design book that is over 40 years old, long out of print and tied to the style and technology of 1968? Well, S. Neil Fujita’s Aim for a Job in Graphic Design / Art (Richards Rosen Press, New York) is a fount of professional intelligence for an emerging field. It is also a slice of lost graphic design history worth reprising.

READ MORE | COMMENTS (6)

Adam Harrison Levy

Death’s Bloom

From 1913 to 1971 five thousand one hundred and twenty one mentally ill patients were cremated on the grounds of the Oregon State Hospital. Their remains were sealed in copper canisters. In 2000 they were removed from their institutional crypt, placed on plain pine shelves in a storeroom, and were left virtually forgotten until David Masiel heard of their existence and photographed them.

READ MORE | COMMENTS (14)

Eric Baker

Today, 03.06.10

Here are Today’s images.

READ MORE | COMMENTS (2)

Alexandra Lange

Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough

When I told an editor recently that my dream upon graduating from college was to be an architecture critic, she laughed. Not at me (I don’t think), but at the idea of aspiring to a job that might be doomed.

READ MORE | COMMENTS (70)

Eric Baker

Today, 02.27.10

Here are Today’s images.

READ MORE | COMMENTS (6)

Mark Lamster

What Am I Doing Here? Tall Buildings and High Anxiety in Las Vegas

A few weeks ago I spent three days in a new entertainment complex, CityCenter, in Las Vegas. What follows here is not a traditional review, but a diary of my experience in that time.

READ MORE | COMMENTS (34)

Jessica Helfand

Prisoners of Logic

Filled to overflowing with the cryptic residue of my addled mind, my sketchbooks accompany me wherever I go: they’re my mobile studio. At turns wildly chaotic and compulsively neat, they’re densely packed with questions, yet vexingly devoid of answers. If there is a palpable representation of lunacy, this may well be it —though a more forgiving description might be that they’re eclectic, which is to say they’re all over the place. In sum, they are honest, if random, representations of the way I think. What they lack is consistency.

READ MORE | COMMENTS (12)