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Observatory

Bob Hicok

Life

"A line will take us hours maybe," wrote William Butler Yeats. "Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,/ Our stitching and unstitching has been naught." Few things take more work than the illusion of ease, which should make the tossed-off appearance of Hicok's "Life" seem impressive not just for the felt effortlessness of his lines but for the ease with which they lead you through a range of experience. How could "drinking tea" and "eating lunch" be interesting?

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Rob Walker

Street Life

In praise of a specific variety of street art: Works and projects that treat the lowliest, semi-invisible features of the built environment as creative prompts. When successful, such street art not only transforms specific overlooked elements of the streetscape, they offer an alternative way of look at the streetscape in general. That's delightful.

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Francisco Laranjo

The Whitney Identity: Responding to W(hat)?

Immediately after the release of the new visual identity for the Whitney, social media rapidly reacted. “Great,” “bold,” “sweet,” “I'm really excited,” “I’m jealous” or simply “Love it!” were some of the initial glowing endorsements of the work designed by Experimental Jetset (EJ). However, what has been largely overlooked is EJ’s description and rationale for the project, which is a masterclass of ambiguity and ambivalence, one that builds upon gratuitous justifications, inconsequential buzzwords and the studio’s recurrently sought refuges.

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Alexandra Lange

That Personal Touch

After a 20th century of logos made with geometric symbols and shiny gradients, scripts are supposed to signal nostalgia, personal connection, with-love-from-me-to-you. Just look a recent attempts by News Corp., Instagram and Felt. But when anyone can make their handwriting into a font, has script lost its meaning?

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John Foster

Alaska Yukon Gold Rush Era Photo Album

Between the years of 1896 and 1899, over 100,000 prospectors flooded the Alaska Yukon region in what many then called “the Last Great Gold Rush.” Books and movies have told of the mass hysteria that hit the region during that time. When it was all over, very few struck it rich, with only about 4,000 prospectors finding any gold at all.

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Owen Edwards

The Best Management Memo … Ever!

Everyone reading this post has, at one time or another, written a memo that seemed especially inspired and cleverly effective. Well, be not proud; I happened to witness the most masterful memo ever written, a mere eight words that changed a culture — instantly.

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Alexandra Lange

Praise the Partner(s)

Salute Denise Scott Brown because she deserves it, and because she may indeed be, as Martin Filler put it in the New York Review of Books in 2010, “The World’s Foremost Female Architect.” But let’s not forget the second part of her quote: "Let's salute the notion of joint creativity."

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Alexandra Lange

Home Improvement

Last week, the editors of The Wirecutter launched The Sweethome, extending their no-nonsense, one-recommendation-per-category approach from tech products to the home. The combination of the two categories fulfills a digital need I spotted long ago, and links to a number of discussions previously on Design Observer. I interviewed Sweethome editor Joel Johnson about audience, details, and the place of aesthetics in talking toaster ovens.

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John Foster

A Philatelist’s Dream

This week, I take you to a wonderful online museum called Memory of the Netherlands, where I discovered a collection called “150 Years of Design for the Dutch Postal Service.” Thinking I would find an archive only of printed stamps, I discovered something far more interesting — the preliminary sketches, production notes and overlays that tell a far different story. For me, some of these examples slip away from their hard realities and take on the momentary context of fine art collage and drawing.

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Rick Poynor

The Irresistible Attraction of Self Storage

Concealed receptacles no bigger than wardrobes. Cavernous hangars the size of a four-car garage. The unfathomable mystery of locked doors, unknown objects left, sometimes for years, in darkened repositories, and secret chambers that must remain off-limits to all but the key holder, if they are visited at all. Self storage centers are places of private and public fascination and I always knew that one day I would succumb.

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Mark Lamster

The Family Store

A melting pot. A quilt. These are convtentional metaphors for the modern city, but if you ask me, a better choice is the sandwich. What's more urban than a sandwich, ideally a pastrami on rye, from a good deli? Throw in a Dr. Brown's and a pickle and you've really got something: a combination of flavors that together make something complex but with a little bite to it, something that may not be entirely good for you but sure tastes great and how could you live without it? That's a city defined right there.

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Alexandra Lange

The Fork and the World: Design 101

If you had to explain design to the uninitiated, where would you start? With tales from the literal trenches, where, in 246 BC, standardized bows and arrows allowed Ying Zheng to become the self-styled “First Emperor of China”? Or would you begin and end closer to home, exploring the design histories of the kitchen drawers and appliances you see before you, from fork to spoon to spit? Two recent books, Hello World and Consider the Fork, try different variations.

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John Foster

Chinese Propaganda Posters

In the the 1950s and 60s, the heyday of what was then called Red China by the West, millions of posters like these were placed in shop windows and factory walls throughout the mainland — all designed to spread fear of U.S. Imperialism and promote the ideals of Communism.

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Rob Walker

The Hyperdocumented Sunset Strip

Google Street View Hyperlapse gathers imagery into high-octane virtual road trips. That is, it's a tool for exploiting a machine-ennabled visual archive. Here's a (not-so-serious) experiment in using it to revisit "Every Building On The Sunset Strip," creating a short, disorienting journey that never ends.

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Joshua Weiner

At the Next Hospital

I admire the poem for its spareness, for the way the sadness of the pain of the body is simple and blunt like the wish to be known. It feels beleaguered, hollowed from impersonality. The loose ends of clues are as unlikely to lead anywhere as the exhausted thoughts of a patient. The poem really does feel like being a patient in too many hospitals.

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