Essays: Observatory: Design Observer

01.30.12: Owen Edwards

Designers Leap, Users Lag
Trying to meet the challenges designers and engineers set for us is pretty much hopeless, though we can have a lot of fun trying.
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01.27.12: The Editors

New Season of Design Matters with Debbie Millman
Announcing the newest season of Design Matters with Debbie Millman, premiering with a video of Design Matters Live filmed by Hillman Curtis. Debbie Millman discusses the launch of Malcolm Gladwell's illustrated collection of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. Guests included artist and illustrator Brian Rea, and designers Paul Sahre, Josh Liberson and DeeDee Gordon.
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01.11.12: Pat Kirkham

Reassessing the Saul Bass and Alfred Hitchcock Collaboration
The evidence, scholarship and debates: Saul Bass and the famous shower scene in “Psycho.”
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01.05.12: James Biber

Vestige(s) of Empire
Comparing the repurposing of two monuments to lost Empire: London's Commonwealth Institute and Berlin's Palast der Republik.
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12.12.11: Eugenia Bell

Eliot Noyes
Eliot Noyes' under-recognized reputation deserves appreciation.
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11.28.11: Owen Edwards

Hair Apparent
Who will be the Republican hair apparent?
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11.23.11: Michael Erard

What I Didn’t Write About When I Wrote About Quitting Facebook
The author writes about the genre you could call the Social Media Exile essay.
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11.17.11: Patrick Cramsie

The World's Best-Known Portrait
The world's best-known portrait is the iconic portrait of Dr. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.
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11.10.11: Adam Harrison Levy

Disaster with a D
The famous movie Star had twice failed to show up for the interview. The crew passed the time by sending emails, making phone calls and gorging on the food. I paced.
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10.27.11: Owen Edwards

A Demanding Man: Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was more like a great architect than a corporate CEO. Yet, there are those who ask, "Isn't the ultimate measure of a human being the way they treat other people?" In the case of Steve Jobs, this requires some reflection.
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10.06.11: Cheryl Yau

Rediscovering A Stereoscopic World
The widespread allure of stereoscopy lasted throughout generations, producing an abundance of retro artifacts that eventually brought an original plastic View-Master into a flea market, where it sat among other vintage trinkets until I serendipitously discovered it.
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10.03.11: Kevin Walker

Design Research and Research Design
January of last year, I found myself with a group of new students — many of them better designers than I ever was — and I had to teach them how to be researchers.
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09.19.11: Alice Twemlow

Remembering Richard Hamilton as Design Critic
Alice Twemlow remembers Richard Hamilton, artist and design writer.
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09.14.11: Josh Berta

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Design School?
Josh Berta offers sage advice, for the burgeoning designer.
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08.30.11: Fred A. Bernstein

The Next World's Fair: A Proposal
Fred Bernstein makes a case for New York City to be the host of the next World's Fair.
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08.22.11: Adam Harrison Levy

A Clean, Well Lighted Place
Walking into Jeff Koons’s studio is like entering a medical laboratory crossed with an open plan office. It’s an ER room for art.
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08.15.11: Adrian Shaughnessy

The Politics of Desire and Looting
The part designers have played in the London riots.
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08.01.11: Jiwon Lee

What's "Crystal Goblet" in Korean?
On the scarcity of design book translations and the poor consequences for design culture
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07.25.11: Jessica Helfand

Remembering Sylvia Harris
Sylvia Harris passed away peacefully on Sunday, July 24th, 2011: she was 57. Jessica Helfand remembers her friend.
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07.21.11: Michael Erard

Notes on Getting the Daily Newspaper
Michael Erard tells of the experience of sharing the physical newspaper with his son.
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07.14.11: Owen Edwards

Packing it In
On the new FDA-required health warnings, for cigarette packs
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07.07.11: Adam Harrison Levy

Jump Cut: Thoughts on Editing
What can designers, architects and writers learn from the art of film editing?
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07.04.11: Jessica Helfand

The Look of Freedom
It was the American novelist William Faulkner who once observed that we must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. So who am I to take issue with more contemporary interpretations of commemorative form?
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06.18.11: Adam Harrison Levy

A Tattoo, A Toothbrush and A Pipe
Adam Harrison Levy writes three stories for Father's Day: about being a father, about father-hood and about his own father.
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06.16.11: Elliott Earls

Make/Do
The vainglorious Mediocrity displayed by “artists” of every stripe.
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06.13.11: Louise Fili and Steven Heller

For the Love of Scripts
“No one person ever invented an alphabet,” wrote Type-maven Tommy Thompson. Script typefaces are no exception. During the letterpress era they were in such great demand that many people “invented” them, and many others copied them.
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06.07.11: Matthew Stadler

Publication Studio: What’s It Like?
On any given day the storefront is home to book production, bookstore, endless packing and shipping, a half-dozen hangers-on, curious drop-ins, lost tourists: a composite day in the life of Publication Studio, Portland.
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05.31.11: Helen Walters

Design and Business Education: The System Is Not Good Enough
In the past few years, there have been interesting attempts from within both business and design schools to elevate the potential of design and creative thinking as drivers of differentiated value.
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05.19.11: Susan Roy

Better Homes & Bunkers: The Fallout Shelter for the Nuclear Family
An excerpt from the book Better Homes & Bunkers: The Fallout Shelter for the Nuclear Family by Susan Roy.
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05.10.11: Adrian Shaughnessy

Philosophy, Graphic Design and Virtue of Clarity
What can designers learn from exposure to philosophy?
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04.28.11: Cathy Huang

The Bibliophile
Meet Tim Young, the Beinecke Library’s curator of eight years.
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04.11.11: Alexandra Lange

Making the Modern House Home
The Miller House, designed by Saarinen, Roche, Girard and Kiley, has been largely out of sight to the design world since its publication in House & Garden in 1959. Until now that is...
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04.04.11: Constantin Boym

True East
Meditations on the Middle Eastern incense burner.
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03.21.11: Fred A. Bernstein

More Is Less
New York City officials have to decide to stop the demolition of a small, brick house, in the East Village.
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03.14.11: Phil Patton

Just My Typewriter
Commemorating the IBM Selectric, which turns 50 this year.
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03.10.11: Andy Chen

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Cub
Is design strictly a set of rules?
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03.07.11: David Antin

Bomb Hanoi: The Andy Warhol Cover
Art critic David Antin remembers working with Andy Warhol on the "Bomb Hanoi" cover of some/thing in 1966…
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03.03.11: Steven Heller

Souvenirs as Nazi Propaganda
Part three in a three part series on the design practices of the Third Reich.
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02.17.11: Steven Heller

Hitler’s Poster Handbook
Hitler’s Poster Handbook: a follow-up to “The Master Race’s Graphic Masterpiece.”
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02.07.11: Steven Heller

The Master Race’s Graphic Masterpiece
Steve Heller hunts down a Nazi graphics standards manual – it had been right under his nose all the whole time.
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01.31.11: Michael Bierut

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mentor, Or, Why Modernist Designers Are Superior
Does a strict upbringing make you a better designer?
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01.12.11: Steven Heller

My Big Fat Fast Food Feast at Eataly
A comparison of the vast differences of Italy's Eataly to New York's.
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01.10.11: Rick Poynor

Out of the Studio: Graphic Design History and Visual Studies
Graphic design history’s best chance of development now lies in an expanded conception of the rapidly emerging discipline of visual studies.
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12.22.10: Marian Bantjes

Plastics: An Apoplexy
I woke up in the middle of the night stewing about plastics. In particular, the continuing, insidious use of excessive and totally unnecessary plastics in packaging.
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12.20.10: Jessica Helfand

Sticks and Stones Can Break My Bones but Print Can Never Hurt Me: A Letter to Fiona on First Reading "The End of Print"
In 2000, Jessica Helfand wrote a letter to her daughter Fiona, giving her a primer on graphic design.
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12.16.10: Rick Poynor

Agency or Studio? The Dutch Design Dilemma
Dutch graphic design, once so original and innovative, now looks increasingly similar to everyone else's graphic design.
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12.07.10: Steven Heller and Elaine Lustig Cohen

Designer as Author
In 1954, Alvin Lustig gave a lecture titled “What Is a Designer?” at the Advertising Typographers Association of America. It was his first speech after he lost his eyesight.
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12.01.10: Rick Poynor

Where Is Art Now?
Leaving the art world to decide what art is doesn’t resolve the issue of quality.
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11.15.10: Steven Heller

Miss Branding: A Cautionary Tale
The 1957 film Blood of Dracula: A cautionary parable about the diabolical power of advertising and branding.
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11.09.10: Adrian Shaughnessy

Minotaurs in Suburban England
English designer Vaughan Oliver met Adrian Shaughnessy to show him preliminary work on a deluxe Pixies box set called Minotaur.
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11.01.10: KT Meaney

The Library: A Museum
The library at North Carolina State University is laden with gold. Books that seem "rare" or simply too special for public shelving have been, in my mind, erroneously stacked and "dewey decimaled".
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10.28.10: Andy Chen

Not Queer, But Human
As a gay man and a designer, Andy Chen believes that part of the solution of homophobia lies in creating images that redefine the very way sexual orientation is understood and discussed.
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10.25.10: Marian Bantjes & Jessica Helfand

The Bantjes Covers
Marian Bantjes exposes the long process that led to the cover of her new monograph, I Wonder.
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10.19.10: Alexandra Lange

Designing with Folk Art
Alexandra Lange examines Alexander Girard's work at the Deere & Co. Administrative Center, which he completed in the 1960's.
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10.11.10: William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand

An Introduction to Graphic Design
Graphic Design 101 by William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand.
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10.07.10: Leonard Koren

Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean?
An excerpt from Leonard Koren's new book Which “Aesthetics” do You Mean?: Ten Definitions
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09.29.10: Adam Harrison Levy

The Wood Stacker
All his work, freed him from a dependency on oil. His heat is local.
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09.18.10: Jan Conradi

Looking Back, Thinking Forward: A Narrative of the Vignellis
Vignelli Celebration: Jan Conradi on Lella and Massimo Vignelli and the opening of the new Vignelli Center for Design Studies at RIT.
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09.17.10: Steven Heller

Heller on Heller
Vignelli Celebration: Steven Heller talks about the redemptive qualities of having the same name as Vignelli's Hellerware.
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09.16.10: Jessica Helfand

The Kindness of Strangers
Vignelli Celebration: If charity begins at home, how can we proclaim new and progressive agendas of social change without examining ourselves, our students, our profession?
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09.15.10: Alice Twemlow

Massimo Vignelli’s Desk
Vignelli Celebration: Alice Twemlow snoops around Massimo Vignelli's desk.
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09.15.10: Steven Heller

Vignelli’s Herald (or Heralding Vignelli)
Vignelli Celebration: Steven Heller remembers the Herald.
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09.14.10: Michael Bierut

Mr. Vignelli's Map
Vignelli Celebration: Massimo Vignelli's 1972 New York City subway map is a beautiful example of information design that was ultimately rejected by its users.
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09.14.10: Lorraine Wild

The Black Rule
Vignelli Celebration: Lorraine Wild examines The Black Rule as a graphic device in the work of Massimo Vignelli.
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09.13.10: Michael Bierut

Lella Vignelli
In my ten years at Vignelli Associates, I came to understand the relationship between the two brilliant designers who ran the office. Massimo would tend to play the role of idea generator. Lella served as the critic, editing the ideas and shaping the best ones to fit the solution.
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09.12.10: AIGA

Lella and Massimo Vignelli: The 1982 AIGA Medal
Vignelli Celebration: In 1982 Massimo and Lella received the AIGA Medal for their many contributions to the design world, here is an article which originally appeared in the 1983 issue of AIGA Graphic Design USA 4.
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09.12.10: The Editors

Lella and Massimo Vignelli: A Celebration
Vignelli Celebration: The opening and dedication of the Vignelli Center for Design Studies, set to open September 16, 2010 at Rochester Institute of Technology.
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09.09.10: Jessica Helfand

Fat Chance
There's a long grounding for the appreciation of zaftig beauty in painting and sculpture — from the baroque beauties of Peter Paul Rubens to the geometrically rotund figures of Fernando Botero. So why is it so difficult to talk about people who are really fat?
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09.07.10: Jessica Helfand

The Real Skinny on the Real Skinny
The is the first of two essays on the visual nature of body image.
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08.15.10: Alexandra Lange

When Shopping Was Sociable
Design Research and Apple, a comparison of the two stores that have brought design to the masses.
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08.08.10: Robert Grudin

The Bakers Table
Those tables taught me something. I realized that by designing them I had turned impoverishment into enterprise. I had transcended my own inhibiting academic world and briefly explored the material presences of daily life.
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07.25.10: Michael Bierut

Jerry Della Femina, Mad Men, and the Cult of Advertising Personality
A review of Jerry Della Femina's From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor, published in a new edition on the occasion of the debut of the fourth season of the AMC series Mad Men.
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07.23.10: Alexandra Lange

Better Living by Design
In 1950, industrial designers Mary and Russel Wright published the Guide to Easier Living, a revolutionary handbook for the modern home.
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07.21.10: Christopher Mount

Wild at Heart: Tadanori Yokoo
Essay adapted from the catalog for "The Complete Posters of Tadanori Yokoo," an exhibition running through September 12, 2010, at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan.
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07.13.10: Gerry Shamray

Harvey and Me
A remembrance of comic artist and graphic novelist Harvey Pekar by an illustrator who worked with him throughout his career, fellow Clevelander Gerry Shamray.
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07.01.10: Alexandra Lange

Whatever Happened to Architecture Critique?
Sometimes it feels like everything is shrinking: the magazines, the word counts, the outlets, and especially the critics.
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06.14.10: Mary Badon

Red Light, Green Light : The Invention of the Traffic Signal
The traffic light — invented in 1912 by a policeman in Detroit — has radically impacted the way transportation rules have developed over the past 100 years, all over the world.
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05.10.10: Eric J. Herboth

Eames the Typeface
A look at the new Eames Century Modern typeface, designed by Erik van Blokland, and developed by House Industries in collaboration with the Eames Office.
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04.29.10: Elliott Earls

The Sentient and the Bag of Meat
In most cases, design education takes place within the larger context of this thing called “art school.” Students can be grouped into one of two categories: the Sentient and the Bag of Meat.
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04.19.10: Adrian Shaughnessy

Safety and Comfort: A Walk with Paul Davis
Davis has asked me to write the introduction to his latest book. I told him I didn't want to write about the usual stuff. He agreed and suggested we go for a walk instead.
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04.15.10: Jessica Helfand

Every Poem an Epitaph: The Protestant Cemetery in Rome
One does not have to be a poet to write heartbreaking words on a piece of eternal stone. Or perhaps the opposite is true, that all such memorials are lyrical remembrances — that every poem, as TS Eliot once observed, is an epitaph.
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04.13.10: Mark Lamster

The Guru Track
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, win the Pritzker Prize and Denise Scott Brown’s “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture,” becomes a topic of discussion.
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04.05.10: Charles & Ray Eames

India Report, April 1958

Fifty years ago the National lnstitute of Design was born in Ahmedabad India. It's backbone was a manifesto developed by Charles and Ray Eames.

03.29.10: Alexandra Lange

Design Blogs: The Vacuum of Enthusiasm
I want to give full credit to the men and women who were there first, and established some of the most popular, provocative and adorable blogs. But now the launch moment is over.
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03.15.10: Julie Lasky

Superbeauty
Essay on the revival of beauty in 21st-century design.
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03.15.10: Andy Chen

The Lines That Divide
The debate continues over who will be the new Head of Department for the Communication Art & Design course at London's Royal College of Art.
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02.23.10: Steven Heller

Becoming a Designer in the Age of Aquarius
On rereading S. Neil Fujita’s 1968 job manual, Aim for a Job in Graphic Design/Art.
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02.19.10: Jessica Helfand

Prisoners of Logic
For five or six years now, I have led a double life as a painter. Until recently, I viewed this other identity as a kind of dirty secret.
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01.26.10: Meredith Davis

Who Owns Student Work?
The prevailing opinion at many design schools is that faculty and the university have some “ownership rights” in the output of any class. In other words, students don't own their own work. An opposing viewpoint.
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01.26.10: Andy Chen

Left Me Speechless
Our work should not merely address the political injustices wrought by discriminatory laws: it should register the sense of loss inflicted on those who suffer them.
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01.12.10: Michael Bierut

Designing the Unthinkable
For more than fifty years, there have been arguments against nuclear proliferation. The Doomsday Clock translates all the arguments to a simple visual analogy.
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01.11.10: Sarah Williams Goldhagen

Moshe Safdie
Review of architect Moshe Safdie's Mamilla Alrov Center in Jerusalem.
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01.08.10: Rachel Berger

A Makeover for the BART Map
Unlike the notorious 1972 Massimo Vignelli redesign of the New York City subway map, the new BART map didn't make much of a splash in graphic design circles.
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01.08.10: Alice Twemlow

Howling at the Moon: The Poetics of Amateur Product Reviews
Amazon reviews can be seen as an example of a democratizing impulse in design criticism.
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01.07.10: Julie Lasky

I.D.'s Executioners
Julie Lasky, shares her experience at ID magazine.
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12.14.09: Steven Heller

Harsh Words from T.M. Cleland
Design criticism may be comparatively new, but critical designers are not.
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12.14.09: Michael Erard

Notes on Being Born on Soil
At times you hear stories about patriots in exile who want their children to be born in the motherland and supplement by putting dirt from said place under a woman who is giving birth.
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12.03.09: Alexandra Lange

Making Kids Modern: Or is it Their Moms?
An informal experiement aims to determine whether or not kids have an interest in the likes of Alexander Calder or Alexander Girard.
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12.01.09: Alexandra Lange

Skating on the Edge of Taste with Warren Platner
Viewed today, the work of 70s and 80s interior designer Warren Platner seems just one reflection away from disco, one black room away from S&M. Each of his projects comes with the question, can he hold himself back? Can he convince us that brass is back? Is there any such thing as bad taste?
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12.01.09: Steven Heller

Christmas Schmaltz
I adore Christmas schmaltz — the sounds, the smells, and the graphics. I don’t mind that the clichés of the season pop up earlier and earlier every year.
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12.01.09: Owen Edwards

Busted by Colombo, or, the Impediments of Style
The restrained high style of the ad men in Mad Men has revived a painful memory of one of my life-changing moments.
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11.18.09: James Wegener

Metabolic Dark City
In 1993, the City of Darkness, or the Walled City of Kowloon was demolished. To the 35,000 people living in this dense urban slum, the change was the end of a lawless existence.
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11.04.09: Alexandra Cardia

From Cabinet: Jacket Required
In April 2009, one of the earliest known dust jackets was found at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.
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11.03.09: Steven Heller

Why Does John Baeder Paint Diners?
John Baeder's goal for the past three decades has been to record on canvas and paper just about every diner and roadside eatery.
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10.27.09: Jessica Helfand

All Things Matter
His name was Herbert Matter, a man even the ornery Paul Rand described as possibly the least pompous person on the planet. When I was a junior in college, he taught me how to make a Photogram. He was 74 years old.
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10.25.09: Michael Bierut

Designing Obama
Although much has been made — rightly so — of Barack Obama's ingenious and adaptable "O" logo and the rigorously executed graphic campaign that surrounded it, the candidate himself was his own best logo. A preview of the introduction to Designing Obama, a new book from Scott Thomas, Design Director of New Media for Obama for America.
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10.22.09: Alexandra Lange

Love & Architecture
When Aline met Eero in January 1953, she was the associate art editor and critic for the New York Times. A little over a year later she would become Aline B. Saarinen.
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10.19.09: Mark Lamster

Peter Paul Rubens: Graphic Designer
In his day, Rubens was also revered as a diplomat, an architect, a classical scholar, and even a graphic designer.
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10.14.09: Steven Heller

Ramparts: Agent of Change
Ramparts magazine has been dead for almost two decades, but to look back at it, it stands out as one to remember.
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10.14.09: Alexandra Lange

Small Wonder: 41 Cooper Square
I never thought I would say this about a work by Thom Mayne of Morphosis, but I think 41 Cooper Square is too small.
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10.07.09: Owen Edwards

Irving Penn, 1917-2009
Irving Penn, who died on October 7th at the age of 92, marks the end of the great age of glamour in magazines, a remarkable period when brilliant photographers who happened to make their livings in fashion and advertising were finally recognized for the artistry of their eyes.
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10.07.09: Rachel Berger

100 Colors, 100 Writings, 100 Days
Every day for one hundred days (from October 30, 2008 to February 6, 2009) I picked a paint chip out of a bag and responded to it with a short writing.
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10.05.09: Owen Edwards

Not the Same Old Same Old
It’s hard not to agree that cars, though better designed and engineered than ever, are often pressed into plebian duty.
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10.01.09: Steven Heller

People in Glass Apartments
People in glass apartments shouldn’t throw stones or other projectiles. Nor should they engage in private acts directly in front of their floor to ceiling windows.
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09.28.09: Roger Martin

What is Design Thinking Anyway?
Most companies today rely on analytical thinking. Roger Martin applies these principles to business practices.
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09.25.09: Michael Bierut

The Figure / Ground Relationship
Designing is the most important thing, but it’s not the only thing. All of the other things a designer designer does all day are important too, and you have to do them with intelligence, enthusiasm, dedication, and love. Together, those things create the background that makes the work meaningful, and, when you do them right, that makes the work good.
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09.23.09: Karen Stein

The Plain Beauty of Well-Made Things
Judd worked as an art critic in his early years in New York as he established himself as an artist. From 1959 until the mid-1960s, his art criticism was his primary, if not only, source of income
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09.20.09: Jessica Helfand

A Stitch in Time: A Review of 9
The comically repetitive date of 090909 iss thought to be a lucky day, a day of optimism and interconnectedness. It was also the release date for the new animated film, 9.
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09.13.09: John Cantwell

The Big Screen in Big D
The brand new $1.2 billion home of the Dallas cowboys has a design feature that promises to turn football games there into a weird mashup of football and pinball.
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09.10.09: Dmitri Siegel

Lost In the Supermarket
Dmitri Siegel gets lost in the Supermarket and encounters incredibly grippy toothbushes, spouts, nozzles, Thorstein Veblen and Adolf Loos.
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09.10.09: Kerry William Purcell

The Art of Psychographics
Each and every graphic design signifies a memory. A familiar sign, map or poster can often trigger a set of associations in the viewer, a series of thoughts and feelings that have their own unique trajectory.
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08.27.09: Steven Heller

My First Taste of Political Satire
On the sad day that Ted Kennedy died I came across a tattered copy of MacBird, the 1966 play by Barbara Garson.
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08.18.09: Chappell Ellison

Compulsion: Where Object Meets Anxiety
At the age of 30, my brother turned to our mother and said, “I never thought I’d make is this far.” In his early 20s, he was officially diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
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08.17.09: David Barringer

Is There Bauhaus in IKEA?
Is there Bauhaus in IKEA? A 90-year-old design philosophy may yet have something to teach today’s corporate mega-chain.
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08.17.09: Rachel Berger

Significant Objects: #1 Mom Hooks
Significant Objects is a much-discussed experiment conducted by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker. The third of five stories is by Rachel Berger...
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08.17.09: Teddy Blanks

Significant Objects: Porcelain Scooter
Significant Objects is a much-discussed experiment conducted by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker. The fourth of five stories is by Teddy Blanks...
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08.17.09: Jessica Helfand

Significant Objects: Elvis Chocolate Tin
Significant Objects is a much-discussed experiment conducted by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker. The fifth of five stories is by Jessica Helfand...
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08.17.09: Tom Vanderbilt

Significant Objects: Marines (Upside-Down) Logo Mug
Significant Objects is a much-discussed experiment conducted by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker. The second of five stories is by Tom Vanderbilt...
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08.17.09: Adam Harrison Levy

Significant Objects: Star of David Plate
Significant Objects is a much-discussed experiment conducted by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker. The first of five stories is by Adam Harrison Levy...
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08.12.09: Michael Erard

A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention
We have a wide-ranging discussion about what is and what can't be free, which is basically about the future of profit. Maybe we should be considering a dilemma of a human nature: the future of attention.
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07.29.09: Sebastian Carter

Jan Tschichold — Master Typographer
Jan Tschichold was one of the most distinguished typographers of the last century, and has had many admirers, among whom he himself was not the least. Jan Tschichold — Master Typographer is, as its title suggests, intended as a tribute to it's subject, but it is one which would have displeased him greatly.
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07.29.09: Owen Edwards

Remembering Julius Shulman
Looking back on an afternoon of chocolate, pastrami, and Scotch with modern architecture's iconic photographer.
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07.29.09: The Editors

On Comments
Reader comments are an important part of our site, with many visitors enjoying them as much as the original articles. So keeping the discussion as interesting as possible is to everyone's advantage. Here are the rules for comments at Design Observer.
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07.29.09: Steven Heller

A Good Trademark: A Historical Perspective
Textile Brand Names Dictionary, included were more than 4,000 names of fibers, yarns, fabrics, and garments registered with the United States Patent Office between 1934 and 1947.
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07.29.09: Jessica Helfand

Can Graphic Design Make You Cry?
How can you create anything visually compelling if you don't engage at some fundamentally human level — a place where memory and feeling are as valued as form and execution?
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07.28.09: Alexandra Lange

Kroon Hall
With its vaulted roof, communal spaces, and casual materials, the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies’ new Kroon Hall is designed to float Yale into the 21st century, training the world’s future green leaders along the way.
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07.25.09: Eric Baker

Today, 07.25.09

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07.18.09: Eric Baker

Today, 07.18.09
Each morning, before starting work, I spend 30 minutes looking for images that are beautiful, funny, absurd and inspiring. Here's Today.
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07.06.09: Steven Heller

When Satire Was More Than Funny
In 1901, Samuel Schwarz founded a satiric visual weekly, titled L’Assiette au Beurre, expressly poised to attack the functionaries who made their fortunes off the sweat of the citizenry.
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06.23.09: Steven Heller

Take Me Out to the Old Yankee Stadium
The new Yankee stadium, like most retro stadiums, bears the burden of being faux, a recreation, like a Disney version of reality. It works and it doesn’t.
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06.21.09: Michael Bierut

Spoiler Alert! Or, Happy Father's Day
Dad couldn't help it. He was a natural born spoiler.
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06.19.09: Michael Bierut

When Design Gets in the Way
When it comes to fulfilling simple human desires, can design get in the way? A call for more incrementalism in design.
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06.15.09: Alexandra Lange

The Beauty of a Park
The High Line in Manhattan, whose first section opened Monday, would seem to be Olmsted’s nightmare.
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06.09.09: Eric Baker

Free Books
Everyone loves a good book, of course, but lets not forget that the books were FREE! 600 books given away in one day on the streets of New York City.
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06.08.09: Steven Heller

Mad Music
In 1962, I spent hours listening to Mad magazine’s first LP (Big Top Records), Mad “Twists” Rock ‘N’ Roll. Owning the record made me feel like I was part of a club, which latter evolved into the sardonic, ironic sixties youth culture. It brings me back to a time before art, design, and humor had to be sophisticated to be good.
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06.03.09: Alan Rapp

Personal Space
Robert Sommer’s Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design was published in forty years ago, and its compact title concept — an invisible but perceptible security zone surrounding an individual — caught on. But where is Sommer now? A recent study in Perception finds that listening to music on headphones alters our sense of sociospatial relations. Until these more contemporary strands of inquiry result in a truly new analysis of how we perceive our interpersonal zones today, Personal Space is now available in a new edition, with some additional commentary by Dr. Sommer, from Bosko Books in the UK
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06.03.09: Jessica Helfand

Open Letter to Design Students Everywhere

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05.28.09: Angela Riechers

Hot Ticket

To see a play or movie, or ride the Twentieth Century Limited, you needed a ticket, and the development of ticket-dispensing machines paralleled the growth of popular culture.

05.12.09: Steven Heller

How Much Is That Artifact in the Window?
Many of us have bought design objects for pleasure and / or scholarship. We’ve paid varying amounts — high and low. But what or who determines the value of a design artifact?
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05.12.09: Jason Grant

Cultured Graphic Hygiene
Regardless of how difficult, disobedient or messy their subject, museum posters are courteous and clean. Is there any reason why graphic design for museums shouldn’t be the measure of their exhibits?
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05.07.09: John Cantwell

Trump, The Logo
The logo above the Trump Tower's main entrance, huge and gleaming in 34-inch brass block letters, bluntly announces Donald Trump’s presence on the street. It’s crude, perhaps, but undeniably effective. In a neighborhood filled with names like Bergdorf, Cartier, and Tiffany, none is more prominent than Trump’s.
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04.29.09: Thomas de Monchaux

The Mystery of Peter Zumthor
Thomas de Monchaux on architect Peter Zumthor's disarming, and perhaps even dangerous, appeal. Pritzker Prize Winner 2009.
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04.21.09: Michael Erard

Cedars
The wake of dead trees is thick behind me, and the others weep and gnash their teeth. Larger trees I leave for some chainsaw to come; I'm a writer, not a lumberjack. Michael Erand on cedars.
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04.21.09: Steven Heller

Father of Shrek, Grandfather of Tweet
William Steig was the father of vanity license plate abbreviations and the grandfather of the Instant Messenger, SMS, iChat, and Twitter shorthand.
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04.19.09: Margaret Wertheim

Susan Boyle and The Beauty of Crochet
I want to reflect here on Susan Boyle's massive appeal from a very personal point of view, for I have spent much of the last three years managing a project that harnesses the creative energies of hundreds of middle-aged female "nobodies": Crochet Reef Project
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04.15.09: Michael Sorkin

On Paul Auster
The annual Lewis Mumford Lecture has become an intellectual rite of spring for urbanists, architects, and students of both. Here is Michael Sorkin's introduction to novelist and filmmaker Paul Auster.
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04.09.09: Jessica Helfand

What's The Story?
And what becomes of all those dead tweets, anyway — all those long-expired, evaporated updates?
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03.31.09: Adam Harrison Levy

William Klein: Contacts
William Klein made a rare appearance in New York recently to promote his latest book, Contacts. American by birth, he has lived most of his life in Paris. He is now 81.
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03.27.09: Adrian Shaughnessy

Ten Graphic Design Paradoxes
I’ve just finished writing a book about graphic design. There are entries on kerning, the wisdom of using only lowercase letters, and the merits of Univers. But mostly it’s a book about the soft stuff — the stuff that we deal with every day and tend to take for granted.
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03.23.09: Steven Heller

Japanese Face Masks
You may recall seeing in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, scores of surgical face-mask-wearing passersby navigating their ways through the dense futuristic metropolis that is a cross between Tokyo and LA. So I was totally surprised to find on my first trip to Tokyo that not only is it the custom to wear such masks everywhere, it's big business too, with a nod to graphic design.
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03.17.09: Sarah Couto

The Year Playboy Died
It is often forgotten that the rabbit figure depicted on the early covers of Playboy was very much male, as seen in the January 1954 edition of the magazine. Typically he was an unbridled man, out and about, in good company. The rabbit is first shown in the guise of a woman, upon the opening of the Playboy Club in 1960.
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03.16.09: Kenneth Fitzgerald

I Believe in Design
In each of the communities I’ve lived I’ve encountered one of these trucks. It’s always a white van, hand-inscribed by paint or permanent marker with a variety of Biblical verses and religious admonitions....
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03.16.09: Mimi Lipson

A Place For Ribs
The Broad Street Diner may be the worst diner in Philadelphia. When I first moved here, I was excited about having a 24-hour diner on my block. I imagined Saturday morning pancakes, late night snacks on my way home from louche outings. Boy, did I ever have a lot to learn.
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03.11.09: Jessica Helfand

My Facebook, My Self
But as projections of ourselves, one's Facebook identity, made visible through one's photo albums, inhabits a public trajectory that goes way beyond who and what we are.

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03.11.09: Steven Kroeter

Untitled by Anonymous: An Ode to Branding
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines “brand” as “a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer.” That’s a good place to start, but “goods or services” might be more accurate...
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03.03.09: Gabrielle Esperdy

Less Is More Again — A Manifesto
We have amazing electronic tools at our disposal; culture has modernized at staggering, computer processed speeds. But the tools are abused and cultural change is stupefying. Things are over-designed because new tools must be exploited; here, design says “look what I can do!”
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03.02.09: Alexandra Lange

Standard Operating Procedure
From the earliest days of the High Line hoopla, the park’s future was literally entwined with that of Andre Balazs’s first ground-up hotel, the Standard New York. The reason the Standard is so good is that it is a 21st Century mash-up of one of Marcel Breuer’s most destructive ideas and one of Morris Lapidus’s best tweaks of the U.N. model of modernism.
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01.21.09: Steven Heller

The Good Books
Why can’t American publishers produce a series of good — no great — books on graphic culture like Die Bibliophilen Taschenbücher? Published in 1979 by Harenberg Kommunikation, Dortmund, Germany, each small usually full color volume was based on a visual theme, including American absurdist postcards, German political posters, French cigarette advertisements, vending machine cards, Soviet Posters, and Liebig’s Fleisch Extract advertising cards
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01.21.09: Steven Heller

That Pesky Television Test Pattern
What came first, television or the television test pattern? The origin of the pattern is a story of form following function. Aesthetics were irrelevant to the primary purpose, and the technical draftsmen who anonymously designed it could have never predicted that decades later it would become a nostalgic icon.
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01.21.09: Alexandra Lange

Rebooting the Festival Marketplace
The plans for New York's South Street Seaport aren't terrible. But the question to ask, now that the project is one hold, is: does New York need a fake fair?
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01.20.09: Dmitri Siegel

Paper, Plastic, or Canvas?
Dmitri Siegel explores the explosive popularity of canvas totes and the history of the plastic bags they aim to replace. From Anya Hindmarch to Ireland's PlasTax, Siegel examines the role of design in sustainability.
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01.06.09: Murray Moss

Design Hates a Depression
"Design tends to thrive in hard times," says The New York Times's Michael Cannell. No, it doesn't. It tends to suffer.
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01.05.09: Virginia Smith

Two Dutch Logos
There are so many graphic designers in The Hague that it was a surprise when the city commissioned its logo from Anton Corbijn, a music video and film director.
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01.05.09: Kerry Saretsky

Movable Feast
We all must eat; we all must drink. Together, these form the two most basic requisites of our existence. The restaurant is the watering-hole, the center point, the necessity. And yet restaurants do not just serve dinner; if you read between the lines on the menu, you’ll find they offer dinner, and a show.
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01.01.09: Mark Lamster

Yankee Stadium: Remembered
Memories of Yankee Staidum vary for every fan, but the feeling of pure American nostalgia is the same for all.
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12.24.08: Michael Bierut

Designing Through the Recession
Here are three things that happen to designers in a recession, and five things they can do about it.
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12.17.08: Jessica Helfand

Ten Things That Need to be Redesigned
Lottery tickets, the hearse, monopoly money, IRS forms, airport design, children's ski jackets, political lawn signs, TV remotes, blister packaging and the state of New Jersey are examined for their design flaws.
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12.03.08: Steven Heller

My Dada
Way back in 1965, as a fifteen years old, I was an early EVOtee. I had stumbled upon one of the first issues at a newsstand. The cover, which I remember vividly, had a photo collage of a serpent emerging from battle fatigues worn by America's commanding general in Vietnam, William Westmoreland. Haunting is not a strong enough word to describe the impact that this had on a teen just a year or two out of Valley Forge Military Academy, where, surprisingly, I had learned about the military impossibility of winning the war.
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12.03.08: Steven Heller

Draw Me Schools Of Commercial Art
Scores of advertisements, like the famous "Draw Me!" matchbook cover, offered willing aspirants the big chance to earn "$65, $80 and more a week" in "a pleasant, profitable Art career." Although the ads often shared space at the back of cheesy pulp magazines with offers to learn, well, brain surgery at home, they offered a legitimate way for anyone with a modicum of talent, limited means and an existing job to train in their spare time for a new profession.
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11.29.08: William Drenttel

A Design-Oriented National Endowment for the Arts
A proposal for a design-oriented National Endowment for the Arts.
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11.23.08: Chris Pullman

What I've Learned
After 35 years working for the same company, WGBH in Boston, legendary design director Chris Pullman reveals the ten things he learned.
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11.14.08: Steven Heller

History of Aggressive Design Magazines
Graphic design evolved during the late nineteenth century from a sideline of the printing industry into an autonomous field with its own lore, icons and personalities. The missing link in this evolutionary process is trade magazines. These magazines did not just reflexively report the current trends instead some aggressively codified key methods and mannerisms that in turn defined a profession.
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11.07.08: Jessica Helfand

Graphic Design Spam
Have you received any graphic design spam in your mailbox lately?
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11.03.08: Andrew Blauvelt

Towards Relational Design
Is there any overarching philosophy or connective thread that joins so many of today’s most interesting and increasingly diverse designs from the fields of architecture, graphic, and product design? I believe we are in the a third major phase in modern design history, moving towards an era dominated by relationally-based design activities.
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10.27.08: Steven Heller

In Praise of the Anthropomorphic
Today I’m going to go out on a limb. I’ve decided that the next big thing in illustration, is one of the oldest conceits ever: Anthropomorphism, “the attribution of uniquely human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings, natural and supernatural phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts.”
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10.23.08: Michael Bierut

The Four Lessons of Lou Dorfsman
For over 40 years, Lou Dorfsman designed everything at CBS from its advertising to the paper cups in its cafeteria. Getting great work done in giant institution is supposed to be hard. How did he make it look easy?
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10.22.08: Tom Vanderbilt

Fanfare for the Common Commuter
I’ve become a regular morning commuter on the city’s splendid Metro — the first in the world to employ only rubber tires on its cars. It didn’t take long for me to notice, as the trains departed, a curious trilogy of tones that echoed, along with the hum of the engine, through the concrete-chambered station. The notes, I realized with a start, were the beginning of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.
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10.15.08: William Drenttel

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Working with Amnesty International, Woody Pirtle designed a series of posters that spotlights 12 of the individual articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We celebrate these, today, the 60th anniversary of the UDHR.
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10.15.08: Dmitri Siegel

Design by Numbers
Dmitri Siegel discusses Stephen Baker's new book The Numerati and how data-mining and personalized content may impact design.
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10.12.08: Michael Bierut

26 Years, 85 Notebooks
Since 1982, I have never been without a marble-covered composition book. I am now in the middle of Notebook #85. Together, these notebooks create a history of my working life that spans three decades.

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10.02.08: Jessica Helfand

The Posters of Padua
In the sixteenth century the University of Padua initiated a custom that has prevailed to the present day — a custom which boasts, as it turns out, a very prominent design component.
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10.01.08: Steven Heller

Charles Peignot: Man Behind the Faces
This is but one example of Charles Peignot’s influence on type and typography, which made his professional life so important to the history of design...
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10.01.08: Alexandra Lange

JetBlue Terminal 5 (and TWA Terminal)
It feels like JetBlue has lost its sense of surprise in its middle age.
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09.30.08: Adam Harrison Levy

The Inventor of the Cowboy Shirt
A few years ago, I found myself lost inside a shopping mall with Jack A. Weil, better known as Jack A, the man who, in 1946, invented the snap-buttoned cowboy shirt.
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09.30.08: Michael Bierut

Mad Men: Pitch Perfect
AMC's ad agency drama Mad Men, from the producer of the Sopranos, is beginning its second season. Like The Sopranos, the show finds human drama in an unexpected setting. And where The Sopranos had whackings, Mad Men has client presentations.
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09.16.08: Gong Szeto

Lehman's Bankruptcy Statement
I'm just a designer, but it doesn't take a genius to read a bankruptcy statement. Take a look at the Lehman Brothers statement dated Sunday, September 14, 2008. Read the whole thing down to exhibit A and the list of creditors — this is an historical document.
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09.15.08: The Editors

Books Received: Fall 2008

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09.15.08: Jessica Helfand

Second in a Series: Completions
The series, when shown on a single surface, carries with it a kind of implicit satisfaction that a series disseminated over time does not.
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09.14.08: Michael Bierut

David Foster Wallace, Branding Theorist, 1962-2008

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09.04.08: William Drenttel

Whose Flag?
Nearly a decade into a new century, I believe it is unacceptable for a design organization, foundation, board of directors, magazine or other enterprise, to mount an initiative with an all male panel of judges. Such behavior is no longer acceptable and should not be tolerated by a community of designers (or any other community).
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09.02.08: Thomas de Monchaux

Remembering Yves St. Laurent
So what can we learn from the presence of fashion within design, and of design within fashion? For example, and more precisely, what can we learn from the work of Yves St. Laurent, the iconic French fashion designer who passed away this Summer?
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09.01.08: William Drenttel

Hurricane Watch: Gustav Emergency Relief

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08.28.08: Alice Twemlow

A Look Back at Aspen, 1970
The 1970 International Design Conference at Aspen provided the setting for a collision between two very different conceptions of design. The IDCA board members who organized the conference and a number of art and environmental action groups, many of which where from Berkeley, California and had made the 1,000-odd mile journey to Colorado in chartered buses.
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08.28.08: Adrian Shaughnessy

A Layperson's Guide to Graphic Design
Graphic design has been likened to a wine glass. When we drink wine we barely notice the glass it’s served in. It’s the same with graphic design: people absorb the messages that graphic designers use their skill, training and ingenuity to make, yet rarely stop to think how the message is constructed or how it affects the viewer.
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08.26.08: Steven Heller

Where Have You Gone R. Cobb?

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08.19.08: Jessica Helfand

Biblionomatopoeia
What do you call book jacket design that manipulates the book jacket itself in an effort to illustrate the content of the book? Answer: biblionomatopoeia.
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08.18.08: Steven Heller

Canned Laughter
The verbal and visual puns of porta-a-potties are copious throughout this indispensable industry. Manufacturers and suppliers go to great lengths to make the portable toilet experience clean and sanitary, as well as warm and cute. Portable toiletry is only second after hair salons (i.e. Mane Street, Clip Joint, Hair Today, etc.) for warm and cute, albeit excruciating, pun names. And yet this is a dirty job, so why shouldn’t those who attend to our bodily hygiene have the opportunity to practice a little wit and double entendre?
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08.11.08: Glen Cummings

Athos Bulcão, The Artist of Brasilia
Athos Bulcão was a public artist, interior designer, muralist, furniture and graphic designer who collaborated with Oscar Niemeyer and others to define Brasilia — one of the 20th century’s most radical and controversially received urban experiments. Bulcão died on July 31 at the age of 90, and left behind an astonishing body of work.
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08.07.08: Jessica Helfand

First In A Series: Cartophily
Mostly unified by their one-to-two format, cigarette cards revealed countless variation in topic and scope, style and personality, seriousness of purpose and goofball whimsy. If the ardent collector defines the amalgamation of disparate items by retaining a fundamental organizing principle, then what is it, exactly, that guides the maker? And enthralls the viewer?
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08.04.08: Steven Heller

Clipping Art, One Engraving At a Time
These books, universally known as clip art books, some edited by Dick Sutphen and many others published by Dover and Chelsea House, were owned by almost every American illustrator, designer, and art director who found solace in them when an idea was needed but their imaginations were not entirely up to the task. This is a personal remembrance and homage to them.
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07.31.08: Michael Bierut

There is No Why
The year's best design movie is not about a typeface. It's Man on Wire, the new documentary about Philippe Petit's 1974 high wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center.
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07.23.08: Tom Vanderbilt

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do

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07.20.08: Michael Bierut

My Handicap
I've come to know a little bit about demographics, customer profiling and market segmentation, and I can tell I'm supposed to care deeply about golf. But I don't.
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07.17.08: Paula Scher

It's How You Said It
Paula Scher: "The problem with the New Yorker's controversial Obama cover is not that it's dangerous and tasteless. The problem is that it isn’t dangerous or tasteless enough."
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07.14.08: William Davies King

Collections of Nothing

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07.14.08: Jessica Helfand

Annals of Ephemera, Part III: Aging 2.0
Paper has a finite life span. It yellows and oxidizes and eventually disintegrates. But today, there are a host of specialty materials that protect and preserve paper so that, unlikely as it may seem, ephemeral materials may have found their very own fountain of youth.
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07.11.08: William Drenttel

I Was A Mad Man
Mad Men takes place in 1960. Just seventeen years later, I went to work at an ad agency and became a Mad Man. This is my story...
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07.08.08: Andrew Flamm & Michelle Hauser

Folk Photos
The onset of the digital revolution has made the period for using film finite. Processed prints are becoming obsolete. With the immediate option of discarding an unintended image, a rich library of our unselfconscious selves will no longer be recorded. But it lives here, in these beautiful, poetic and tactile objects.
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07.07.08: Randy Nakamura

Steampunk'd, Or Humbug by Design
In this time of cultural recycling, Humbug is a word perhaps best used to describe Steampunk, a subculture supposedly born out of a mash-up of DIY (do-it-yourself), Victoriana, punk, science fiction, Japanese anime and the urge to re-skin one’s computer as 19th century bric-a-brac. If the number of recent articles in the mainstream press is any reliable barometer, Steampunk is the next big thing.
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07.02.08: Steven Heller

Vanity Fair Type: 1930 Style

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06.30.08: Jessica Helfand

Reflections on the Ephemeral World, Part Two: Food
Ever since the 16th century Italian Mannerist painter Archimboldo made portraits from the detritus of his dinner, the relationship between the visual and the edible has been something of a puzzle. Welcome to the world of foodistry: design with food.
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06.30.08: Steven Heller

Homage to Velvet Touch Lettering
It was the wee hours of Monday morning some months back when my computer died while I was designing a brochure that had to be finished later that day. Without a computer what could I do? Dependency is a horrible thing. But rather than self-indulgently wallow in misfortune, I walked over to a flat file where I stored dozens of old press type sheets. It had not been open for a decade.
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06.30.08: Becky Neiman

Taking Things Seriously XIII

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06.30.08: Paul Maliszewski

Taking Things Seriously XI

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06.16.08: Andrew Blauvelt

City and Suburb: Worlds Away?
The mutual dependency of city and suburb is both physical and psychological. City dwellers and suburbanites need each other to reinforce their own sense of place and identity despite ample evidence that what we once thought were different places and lifestyles are increasingly intertwined and much less distinct.
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06.16.08: Ettore Sottsass

When I Was a Very Small Boy
Ettore Sottsass: "Everything we did was entirely absorbed in the act of doing it, in wanting to do it, and everything we did stayed ultimately inside a single extraordinary sphere of life. The design was life itself, it was the day from dawn till dusk, it was the waiting during the night..."
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06.05.08: John Thackara

We Are All Emerging Economies Now

I recently received an invitation to discuss design and development with a wonderful group of design peers in a beautiful location. But I have decided to decline the invitation. Why?

06.05.08: Steven Heller

Branding Youth in the Totalitarian State
Youth may be wasted on the young, but under the totalitarian state they were not forgotten. For the state to prosper, youth was turned into a sub-brand that both followed and perpetuated the dominant ideology. Graphics played a huge role in making this happen in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union.
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06.05.08: Alice Twemlow

Graphic Design at the Museum
The work of Graphic Thought Facility, a London-based graphic design consultancy, is on exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago until August 17. It’s the first time the Art Institute has staged a show solely on contemporary design...
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06.05.08: Andrew Blauvelt

Over the Rainbow
June marks the start of a month-long series of LGBT Pride celebrations in cities around the United States and the world, as well as the 30th anniversary of the rainbow flag — the de facto symbol of the LGBT community. While the visual and media focus of the celebrations have been the parades, the most enduring element is perhaps the rainbow.
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06.04.08: David Stairs

The Little Logo That Could
If it seems too hyperbolic to say that Obama stands as one of the most cleverly branded candidates in our history, look closer. Otheres have attempted to lay claim to the fifteenth letter of the Roman alphabet with mixed success. But to date, no one has been remotely as successful in so short a time as the Obama has with his campaign.
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05.30.08: Jessica Helfand

Reflections on The Ephemeral World, Part One: Ink
An elegy to the makeready — those sheets of paper, re-fed into a press to get the ink balances up to speed, leaving a series of often random, palimpsest-like, multiple impressions on a single surface — in the digital age.
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05.28.08: Julie Lasky

Cranbrook Commencement Address
"I come to you, like all commencement speakers, as an emissary from the future." The commencement address delivered by Julie Lasky at the Cranbrook Academy of Art on May 9, 2008.
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05.24.08: KT Meaney

Greening the Grocery Store
It turns out that the "recycling symbol" at the bottom of my yogurt container had nothing to do with its recyclability. So why was it there? My curiosity led to findings around which I built a design class.
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05.22.08: Steven Heller

O.H.W. Hadank
Paul Rand held Hadank in the highest esteem because he practiced modernist formal principles even though he did not follow its dogma or style. And most important, as Rand said “Hadank was then and always an original. A profile of O.H.W. Hadank by Steven Heller...
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05.19.08: Dmitri Siegel

Credit Where Credit Is Due...Or Not
Dmitri Siegel explores the various practices of design attribution.
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05.16.08: Jessica Helfand

Iron Man: The Screen Behind the Screen
Iron Man is the fulfillment of all the computer-integrated movies were ever meant to be, and by computer-integrated, I mean just that: beyond the technical wizardry of special effects, this is a film in which the computer is incorporated, like a cast member, into the development of the plot itself.
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05.15.08: Rosamond W. Purcell

Taking Things Seriously XII

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05.13.08: Michael Bierut

Fitting
Charles Brannock only invented one thing in his life: that metal thing in shoe stores that the salesman uses to measure your feet. Is it the most perfect invention of the 20th century?
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05.08.08: John Bowers

A Lesson from Spirograph
1967's "Toy of the Year" was the embodiment of controlled emotion in the face of that decade’s social unrest and conflict: John Bowers remembers The Spirograph.
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05.06.08: The Editors

Chicago International Poster Biennial
Contemporary posters published within the last two years are eligible for the Chicago International Poster Biennial and may be submitted by any poster designer in the world with no entry fee. Physical entries must be received in Chicago no later than May 27, 2008.
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05.03.08: Jessica Helfand

National Scrapbooking Day
"Scrapbooks (like these) remind us that creating an album from saved matter does not necessarily provide an accurate self-portrait..." An essay by Jessica Helfand from her new book on the occasion of National Scrapbooking Day.
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05.01.08: Steven Heller

The Sky Is Falling
Where once the sky is falling scenarios would not, as Dr. Flicker said, “happen for billions of years yet,” the doomsday clock is steadily ticking away. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go back to the days when fiction was not fact.
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04.25.08: Teddy Blanks

Errol Morris's Problem With Photography
Standard Operating Procedure is a gorgeous, pulsing stopwatch of a movie, and like all of Morris's best work, its structure is based on a rhythmic series of revelations.
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04.22.08: Adam Harrison Levy

The Passion of George Lois
How adman George Lois chronicled the sixties with his cover designs for Esquire magazine, with a peek behind the scenes at the legendary famous Muhammad-Ali-as-St. Sebastian photoshoot.
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04.18.08: Adrian Shaughnessy

The Design Observer Playlist
I’ve never worked in a design studio where music wasn’t played pretty much constantly. Nor can I recall visiting a studio where music wasn’t being played, or where designers weren’t wired up to headphones and bobbing rhythmically to unheard sounds. What is it with graphic designers and music?
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04.14.08: Luc Sante

Taking Things Seriously X

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04.10.08: Steven Heller

Underground Mainstream
Today, designers for mainstream advertising companies, weaned on alternative approaches, have folded the underground into the mainstream and called it cool.
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04.07.08: Lorraine Wild

100%
So, it’s 1966 and two guys are hanging around their Los Angeles apartment, musing about the sort of things that people mused about in the Sixties. The aesthetic philosophers in question were the artist Ed Ruscha and the artist/comedy writer/composer/performer Mason Williams...
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03.31.08: Michael Bierut

The (Faux) Old Ball Game
Since 1992, every ballpark in America has been designed on the nostalgic model of Baltimore's Camden Yards, including the new parks for the Yankees and the Mets. Why is it impossible to build a baseball stadium that looks like it belongs in the 21st century?
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03.28.08: Matthew Peterson

The Cuckoo Bird and the Keyboard
Designers are famously nauseated by novices' use of neutral quotes — or dumb quoes — in place of true quotes. Why do we care so much? Should we?
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03.27.08: Joshua Glenn

Taking Things Seriously IX

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03.24.08: Steven Heller

The Magic of the Peace Symbol
There was probably no more galvanizing nor polarizing emblem during the 1960s than the peace symbol. And perhaps few symbols have had origins surrounded in as much mystery and controversy
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03.21.08: Jessica Helfand

Viewer Discretion Advised
One of the great ironies of contemporary culture is the degree to which pro-forma warnings read as largely invisible. “Viewer Discretion Advised” tells us we’ve been warned...
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03.19.08: Matt Soar

Fail Again, Fail Better
So, what of productive failure with respect to graphic design and typography? The idea of failing again and again for a reason? Does it somehow help to define the limits of professional practice?
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03.12.08: The Editors

Marc Rabinowitz: Prostitution Facts
In spite of the tawdry glamour of "high-priced call girls," let's remember that this supposedly victimless crime takes a vast human toll that goes far beyond the embarrassment of powerful men. Marc Rabinowitz’s project invites us to imagine prostitution’s stark statistics...
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03.11.08: Michael Bierut

Would It Kill You To Smile?
Thoughts on the enduring influence of bershon, "how you feel when you’re 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture."
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03.06.08: Chip Kidd

The Learners
Chip Kidd's new novel, The Learners: A Novel. An excerpt courtesy of the author....
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03.04.08: Steven Heller

Swastika Humor?
Trivializing the swastika is not a crime, but it can be dangerous, particularly since it continues to be used as a weapon of hate. Perhaps this book would have best been titled, “We Have Ways of Making You Wince.”
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03.02.08: John Keen

Taking Things Seriously VIII

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02.21.08: Alice Twemlow

Some Questions about an Inquiry
“Critical design” is design that, through its form, can question and challenge industrial agendas; embody alternative social, cultural, technical or economic values; and act as a prop to stimulate debate and discussion amongst the public, designers and industry. As critical design gathers momentum, where is graphic design?
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02.17.08: Rick Poynor

Lost America: The Flamingo Motor Hotel
I found this old photo in a box at the back of my attic. It shows a motel in Flagstaff, Arizona where I stayed for a couple of nights in May 1978. I was 20, it was my first visit to the US, and for three weeks I had been touring around on Greyhound buses.
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02.14.08: Jessica Helfand

Animal Magnetism
Magazines are the sole industry in which you cannot help but judge a book by its cover.
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02.11.08: Michael Bierut

The Smartest Logo in the Room
The birth, death, and debate around one of Paul Rand's last logos: the "crooked E" he created for Enron.
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02.09.08: Chika Azuma

Chika Azuma: Taking Things Seriously VII

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02.07.08: Adrian Shaughnessy

Look and Feel / Nip and Tuck
If clients are happy to refer to the output of graphic designers as look and feel, where's the harm?
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02.01.08: The Editors

Fifteen Minutes of Fame
If graphic design's become so edgy as a profession that we're getting name-dropped in hit movies, maybe it's time to get serious about how we're really being portrayed.
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01.31.08: Jessica Helfand

Woody Allen's Typography

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01.30.08: Jessica Helfand

Gone, Baby, Gone (Things, Part II)
From July 19, 1977 to February 28, 1981, the security staff at New York's Roosevelt Raceway kept a fastidious record of lost property. The result — 152 pages of wayward mittens, misplaced wallets and hundreds of personal items — is as much a record of the social history of a generation as anything I've come across in a long time.
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01.27.08: Dmitri Siegel

Learning from North Philadelphia
Dmitri Siegel visits Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour's post-modern classic Guild House in Philadelphia and rereads Learning from Las Vegas.
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01.24.08: Steven Heller

Wilhelm Deffke: Modern Mark Maker
The modern corporate logo was born in Germany shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, the direct descendent of burgher crests, coats of arms, trade and factory marks. One of the most prolific of these mark makers is barely recognized in design histories today, except for the occasional footnote. His name is Wilhelm F. Deffke...
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01.21.08: James Traub

Art Rogers vs. Jeff Koons
James Traub on the Art Rogers vs. Jeff Koons legal case, perhaps relevant to recent discussions about Richard Prince's art.
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01.19.08: Beth Daniels

Beth Daniels: Taking Things Seriously VI

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01.16.08: Andrew Blauvelt

The Work of Task
The presence of Task asks, How do you make a magazine for the post-critical, post-movement moment of contemporary graphic design?
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01.12.08: William Drenttel

Polling Place Photo Project 2008
We are pleased to announce that the Polling Place Photo Project is continuing into the 2008 presidential primaries and election, supported by a new partnership of The New York Times, AIGA and Design Observer.
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01.11.08: Cheryl Towler Weese

Is Apple Soft on Crime?
Here's the real question: could a climbing crime rate and the rise of the iPod be related? Has the iPod's design increased its likelihood of theft, and if so, what role could Apple's designers play in developing solutions?
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01.08.08: Michael Bierut

Will the Real Ernst Bettler Please Stand Up?
In the late 50s, Swiss designer Ernst Bettler created a series of seemingly harmless posters that brought down a drug company with a Nazi past. It's a great story, but it never happened. Why do we need to believe in Ernst Bettler?
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01.06.08: Thomas Frank

Taking Things Seriously V

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01.03.08: Jessica Helfand

Remembering Paul Rand
This essay, a rememberance of Paul Rand, is taken from Michael Kroeger's book, Paul Rand: Conversations with Students, which will be published on January 3 by Princeton Architectural Press.
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12.31.07: Carol Hayes

Taking Things Seriously IV

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12.27.07: Steven Heller

What's In A Name?
In only a few short years, blogs have significantly evolved. And if blogs, and the people who engage with them, are to be respected, then we should all know who everyone is, and everyone — whoever and whatever they have to say — should not hide behind the digital veil.
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12.25.07: Greg Klee

Taking Things Seriously III

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12.22.07: Michael Bierut

The Most Hated Holiday Song in the World
Ten years ago, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid attempted to create the most irritating song in the world. It's now available online, and it's perfect for the holidays!
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12.19.07: Steven Heller

It's Easy to Criticize. . . Not
Convention was disrupted last Thursday night in New York City at Designism 2:0 when the sometimes "self-congratulatory" nature of the Art Director Club's social conscience-raising event was upended by Vanity Fair media critic Michael Wolff's unforgiving critique of design's do-goodery.
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12.16.07: Adrian Shaughnessy

Graphic Editorship
Fuel's realization that they possessed the transferable skills and instincts to publish thought-provoking books with editorial depth, has allowed them to create a publishing venture that offers a fresh take on visual culture.
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12.13.07: Dmitri Siegel

Taking Things Seriously II

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12.13.07: William Drenttel

Taking Things Seriously I

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12.10.07: Joshua Glenn

Taking Things Seriously
Everyone we know reverentially displays in his home or workspace at least one oddball, funny-looking, apparently worthless item as though it were a precious, irreplaceable artifact.
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12.03.07: Jessica Helfand

Things, Part I
In an age characterized by elevated environmental awareness — reducing our carbon footprint, enhancing our sustainable output — we remain obsessed with our attachment to the material world.
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11.30.07: Steven Kroeter

Design Thinking, Muddled Thinking
What does it mean when Harvard Business School makes a list of top design schools? Two words: muddled thinking.
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11.27.07: Tom Vanderbilt

Discipline and Design
On a sweeping and fully realized scale, Richard Ross's photographs probes the disciplinary dynamics in the cruel hidden places you would expect them, and in the banal everyday places you might not have even noticed them.
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11.24.07: Steven Heller

Curse of The "D" Word
Do you make things look nice? Do you spend more time worrying about nuance and aesthetics than substance and meaning? Do you fiddle with style while ignoring the big picture? If your answers are yes, yes, or yes, then you are a decorator.
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11.21.07: Jessica Helfand

Thanksgiving Day

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11.11.07: Michael Bierut

How To Be Ugly
Whether reactionary spasm or irrevocable paradigm shift, the new trend is making design that looks ugly. The trick is to surround it with enough attitude so it will be properly perceived not as the product of everyday incompetence, but rather as evidence of one's attunement with the zeitgeist.
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11.07.07: Jessica Helfand

Type Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
Designers make choices about the appropriateness of type based on any number of criteria, and "liking it" is indeed one of them. But is that enough?
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11.04.07: Nichelle Narcisi

Except You
Nichelle Narcisi, winner of last month's Command X competition at the AIGA Next Conference in Denver, presents "Except You," her proposed campaign to raise the voter participation rate for 18 to 24 year olds.
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11.01.07: Elizabeth Tunstall

What If Uncle Sam Wanted You?
What if I decided to apply design thinking to the U.S. military? What roles could design thinking play in war? A recent The New York Times article, "Army Enlists Anthropologists in War Zone," makes these questions especially relevant today.
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10.25.07: Adrian Shaughnessy

The Designer's Virus
Perhaps he was right and I was wrong? Perhaps it is dumb of me to believe that the only design worth bothering about is design born out of a mixture of personal enquiry and intelligent intuition? I realized I was suffering from the designer's disease: empathy.
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10.23.07: Michael Erard

Babel's Nobel
Observers seem to track the nations, not the languages, of the 104 Nobel-winning writers. Yet parsing the list of 25 languages that they wrote in turns up many interesting instances of disproportion.
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10.22.07: Michael Bierut

Déjà Vu All Over Again

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10.16.07: Jessica Helfand

Science and Design: The Next Wave
Scientists probe and manipulate and channel and divide; they split and fuse and spike and engineer; but most of all, they look. As a designer, to spend any time with scientists is to become at once profoundly aware of our similarities and devastated by that which divides us.
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10.14.07: Steven Heller

Topanga, I Hardly Knew Ye
I've always wondered why anyone with taste would pay thousands of dollars to publish one of those text-heavy, type-awful, full-page magazine advertisements void of any semblance of graphic design nuance or sophistication.
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10.11.07: The Editors

Design Observer Party: Denver, October 12
It is now a Design Observer tradition to host the best party at the AIGA Biennal Conference. This year's event is in Denver at The Milk Bar @ The Shelter. Friday, October 12 from 9:00pm to 2:00am. 1037 Broadway, "South of Colfax Nightlife District."
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10.09.07: Michael Bierut

Rest in Peace, Herbert Muschamp
Officially published for the first time as a posthumous tribute: a loving parody of the writing of the late, great architectural critic Herbert Muschamp.
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10.06.07: William Drenttel

A Plea to The New York Times: Index Your Art
Why does the art that adds so much to the texts published in The New York Times disappear? Why cannot The New York Times simply index the art that it publishes, at least leaving the bibliographic tracings of the work in their newspaper?
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10.03.07: William Drenttel

Wood That We Could
Remember back in the late 1980s, when Minneapolis was a hotbed of creative energy? Back when brochures were tied together with braid and twigs? Minnesota was making a play for the next big thing: the North Woods look. Well, it's back...
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10.01.07: Jessica Helfand

Stan Brakhage: Caught on Tape
For Stan Brakhage, that concentration resulted in extraordinary explorations of many things, including the life cycle of a moth, caught on adhesive strips of tape, and subsequently captured on film where it regained — however briefly — the magnificent illusion of mobility. For designers, faced by budgets and clients and deadlines, the luxury of so much isolation seems a distant, if not an altogether perverse paradigm. But are these intentions really so mutually exclusive?
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09.26.07: Steven Heller

Decorative Books: The End of Print
Back in 1956, The Times promotion department provided a viable answer in the form of its 65 Ways to Decorate with Books in Your Home, a book/zine with a reasonable $1 cover price. Steven Heller looks here for answers to repurpose of these venerable materials into useful life-enhancing goods.
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09.21.07: Michael Bierut

May I Show You My Portfolio?
My art school portfolio has sat in a box, largely untouched, in the closets and basements of the three places I've lived in the last 27 years, sort of like a slowly decaying design time capsule. A few weeks ago, I opened it up for the first time in a long time.
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09.18.07: Dmitri Siegel

Designers and Dilettantes
Dmitri Siegel discusses graphic design authorship and the impending release of Elliott Earls' new film, The Sarany Motel.
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09.15.07: Meredith Davis

The Cult of ASAP
Before long, many designers burn out by promising unrealistic turnaround on projects, working at levels that don't accommodate a balanced life, and closing down any time for reflection on the work they're doing and on the world around them. I believe as educators, we need to consider how we introduce students to reflective practice, how we actually slow down and pace the physical execution of work in order to design smart.
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09.10.07: Rob Kimmel

Coney Island Bin Laden
In 2004, the paper targets at the Coney Island shooting gallery featured a hand-drawn Osama Bin Laden.
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09.08.07: Jessica Helfand

Back To School
Yet once Graphic Design is introduced in the classroom, how do educational offerings differ? Herewith — and in the spirit of "la rentrée" — is an extremely random sampling.
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09.05.07: Michael Bierut

You're So Intelligent
Wanting to be taken seriously, designers yearn to be respected for their minds. Yet they take their real gifts — a miraculous fluency with beauty, an ability to manipulate form in a way that can touch people's hearts — for granted.
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09.04.07: Jessica Helfand

Awarelessness

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09.01.07: Teddy Blanks

Olia Lialina & Relics of the Lost Web
Today, the comparatively prehistoric graphic vocabulary of the early web has either been forgotten, or is simply regarded with the facile mockery that comes of 20/20 hindsight. Instead, they are an important part of internet history, and have, intended or not, a strange beauty.
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08.30.07: Steven Heller

The Designer As Gumshoe
The aim in this essay is not to raise mass consciousness about gum pollution. Over the past year, I've been something of a gumshoe, investigating and documenting patterns of gum goop, and talking to perpetrators and victims alike. Now I'm ready to share my findings.
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08.26.07: Alice Twemlow

Design Criticism's Winding Road
To what extent does design criticism inspire a reaction; to whom is criticism addressed and what happens as a result of it being read? This article discusses the way in which an excerpt from a review of a 1955 Buick unexpectedly inspired a painting by one of the world's best-known Pop artists, Richard Hamilton.
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08.23.07: Jessica Helfand

Another Myth Brilliantly Debunked
The Folding Paper Box Association of America would influence more than just packaging regulations: a half century before the Poynter Institute would claim authorship for its revolutionary Eye-Trac research, the FPBAA was already tracking viewers' visual responses to packaging...
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08.20.07: David Stairs

Why Design Won't Save the World
After ten months in Africa, I recently visited the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum to see Design for the Other 90%. Here, I thought, was an exhibition I could enthusiastically embrace. Unfortunately...
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08.14.07: Adrian Shaughnessy

Tony Wilson: The Postmodern Mythmaker
Tony Wilson, founder of Factory records, died August 10. Wilson had many claims to fame: he was a successful television presenter; a music industry impresario of flawed and maverick genius; and he was one of the shrewdest patrons of graphic design there has ever been.
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08.11.07: William Drenttel

The Presidential Rash
It was reported this week by the Huffington Post that President George W. Bush has had Lyme Disease since last August — when he got the "characteristic bullseye rash" on his left shin. So what does a Presidential rash look like, anyway?
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08.09.07: Steven Heller

Confessions of a Book Catalog Reader
I read publishers' seasonal book catalogs the way some people go to the movies, in part to watch the trailers for coming attractions.
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08.02.07: Rob Giampietro

The Fonts of Summer
Why not summer fonts? I can't think of a good reason why not. Like all things summer, a summer font need only follow a few simple rules. Be catchy. Be simple. Be happy. And be gone soon enough to belong to a single summer only. It's the Summer of Grouch. ITC Grouch, that is.
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07.30.07: Adrian Shaughnessy

Barnbrook Bible: A Graphic Autobiography
Jonathan Barnbrook's new book, Barnbrook Bible, ranks amongst the most ambitious personal projects undertaken by any graphic designer...
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07.28.07: William Drenttel

Project M
It is clear that in the last decade, the rural poor in America have gotten poorer. But having safe water is not something most of us think of as a problem in our country. If you'd like to help, Buy A Meter.
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07.25.07: Michael Bierut

Donal McLaughlin's Little Button
In 1945, architect-turned-graphic-designer Donal McLaughlin designed a lapel pin for a conference in 1945 that became one of the most widely seen symbols in the world: the emblem for the United Nations. Tomorrow is his 100th birthday.
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07.21.07: Steven Heller

Leon Friend: One Teacher, Many Apostles
Leon Friend (born in Warsaw in 1902) was a career art teacher at the Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, New York, with a special passion for what he called graphic design. This is his story and his influence.
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07.17.07: Jessica Helfand

Harry Potter and The Enchanted Letterforms
The most recent theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix includes a paradigm shift that warrants particular recognition, for the simple reason that this may be the first film in which mere letterforms, once the purview of the production designer, break free and actually join the cast.
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07.16.07: The Editors

Two New Contributing Writers
We are delighted to introduce two new contributing writers to our line-up: Steven Heller and Alice Twemlow will be posting regularly from now on.
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07.13.07: Peter Good

Remembering Sol Lewitt (1928-2007)
I first met Sol Lewitt in 1986, when he and Carol and their young daughters moved to Chester, Connecticut, a small town on the Connecticut River where I have a graphic design studio. We met at an opening at the Chester Gallery...
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07.10.07: Jessica Helfand

Cock-a-Doodle-Don't
Where food is concerned, the relationship between what things look like and how we respond exists at its most primal level: what is a gut reaction, after all, if not something that attacks your gut?
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07.07.07: Richard Turley

Off the Grid
When you abandon most of the rules, how do you define a mistake? How to art direct a newspaper from the middle of the muddy Glastonbury music festival.
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07.02.07: Steven Heller

Silas H. Rhodes, Founder of SVA
Silas H. Rhodes, chairman of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, died last Thursday at 91. He was a progressive educator who established a uniquely collaborative learning environment that delicately balanced creative independence with academic rigor.
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06.29.07: Alice Twemlow

When Did Posters Become Such Wallflowers?
What was odd about many of the posters Alice Twemlow judged in a recent competition was that they didn't promote an idea, event or product; their only purpose seemed to be entering numerous annual poster competitions.
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06.26.07: Jessica Helfand

Why Is This Font Different From All Other Fonts?
Earlier this spring, our local art-supply store closed its doors. The promise of discount art supplies looms large, so off I went. There was a paltry selection of picked-over goods, until a chipboard assortment of "birthday letters" caught my eye. Birthday letters? I think not. This is Faux Hebrew.
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06.19.07: Steven Heller

Martin Weber in the Third Dimension
You may not have heard of Martin J. Weber, but he was a graphic artist, typographer, art director, and most important, inventor of various photographic techniques that gave two-dimensional surfaces the illusion of being reproduced in three dimensions.
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06.17.07: John Hockenberry

My Life with A Dad Designer
On the University of Cincinnati diploma that hung in my parents' bedroom it said that Jack Hockenberry was an industrial designer. It said nothing about what an industrial designer actually did. It sounded very important, and when asked, my dad would tell me his job was to "figure out how to make things."
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06.13.07: Tom Vanderbilt

On the Squareness of Milk Containers
Do you know, or have you ever wanted to know, why milk containers are square and soft drink containers are round? This and other questions of design are answered in Robert Frank's new book The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas.
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06.11.07: Michael Bierut

Everything I Know About Design I Learned from The Sopranos
Last night, after eight years, 86 episodes, and untold quantities of gobbagool, The Sopranos finished its run on HBO. And this is what we've learned, from a design point of view.
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06.06.07: Adrian Shaughnessy

The 2012 Olympic Logo Ate My Hamster
Designers often bemoan the lack of coverage given to graphic design in mainstream media. Yet when design catches the attention of journalists and commentators it usually results in a vicious mugging rather than hearty praise.
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06.03.07: Dmitri Siegel

Andrea Crews: Fashion Provocateur
Dmitri Siegel writes about Parisian fashion/art collective Andrea Crews.
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05.31.07: William Drenttel

Al Gore for President
Writing as a designer, as a writer, as a husband and father, but most of all, as a human being — I believe we should draft Al Gore to run for the Presidency of the United States.
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05.28.07: Jessica Helfand

My Dirty Little Secret
Gardening is its own infuriating design challenge. You fret and you rethink and you second-guess yourself constantly, and then for one delirious, thrilling moment something blooms and you feel utterly triumphant. And then it dies and you are back where you started.
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05.24.07: Michael Bierut

Why a Book?
Introducing 79 Short Essays on Design, a 272-page book about design with 80 typefaces and no pictures.
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05.20.07: Eric Nevin

Love Letters to Sub-Antarctic Islands
Assigned a page of an atlas for a graduate class in graphic design at the Yale School of Art, Eric Nevin created a log of love letters to the islands of the sub-Antarctic. The writing charmed us and the history adds something to our understanding of this desolate part of the world.
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05.17.07: Jessica Helfand

Ad Reinhardt, Graphic Designer
Ad Reinhardt fretted about the meaning of life. He agonized about the purpose of painting. He questioned everyone, critiqued everything, and worked incessantly. In other words, he was a graphic designer.
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05.12.07: Michael Bierut

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface
Why choose a particular typeface for a particular situation? Here are thirteen reasons.
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05.08.07: Michael Erard

Languages as Design Objects
According to new book by linguist David Harrison, "Languages can package knowledge in radically different ways, thus facilitating different ways of conceptualizing, naming, and discussing the world." If languages package information, can they be considered design objects?
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05.04.07: Alice Twemlow

The Bandwidth of Books
Publishers are publishing artists' work and the research and ideas generated from thinking about art. They are passionate about their missions, mostly locally focused and non-commercial in attitude. The quality of their work is often very high; their books well conceived and produced, and innovatively designed. But the question is, who is reading them?
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05.01.07: Andrew Blauvelt

Design's Ethnographic Turn
Although I've been thinking about ethnography and its relationship to design for many years, it still seemed significant that the subject warranted the publication and distribution of its own little booklet to every member of the AIGA. Does this mark some of turning point in the profession at large?
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04.28.07: Teddy Blanks

Small Potatoes
"I am attaching a picture of the bag of your usually enjoyable "Cape Cod Potato Chips" that I bought today. The objects sitting beside the bag were its full contents. You will notice that these include a few soggy chips and a full, shriveled potato..."
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04.25.07: Thomas de Monchaux

What If Apple Is Bad for Design?
Every commentary on the ubiquity of the iPod, or on the divertingly near prospect of the Apple iPhone, seems to emphasize that what distinguishes Apple is something called "Design." Design, or a particular understanding of it, has been good for Apple. But is Apple good for design? What if the answer is no?
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04.22.07: Jessica Helfand

The New Manifest Destiny
When does a picture solidify a news story, and when does it merely sensationalize it? Decisions about words and pictures are made by editors and publishers, designers and photographers — but they are consumed by a public fully capable of an entire range of emotional responses. After this week's events at Virginia Tech, words and pictures do a poor job of communicating outrage and pain. And no amount of compositional ingenuity can reverse what happened.
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04.19.07: Jesse Nivens

In Search of Stock(y) Photography
That's right: in the alternate universe of stock photography, attactive people outnumber fat people 84 to one. As a culture, have we taken the idea of "overweight" and completely blocked it out?
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04.15.07: Steven Heller

The Nazi Triangle
Somewhere in the bowels of the Third Reich's bureaucracy a designer who belonged to the graphics "culture chamber," the representative, official body that sanctioned Nazi designers, produced the basic templates for these camp materials and then turned them over to skilled inmates to produce.
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04.11.07: Adrian Shaughnessy

Are JPEGs the New Album Covers?
An audio file with a thumbnail JPEG of the album cover will never have the resonance — not to mention the commercial value — of a well-made piece of packaging. But if the corporate providers of downloadable music have their way, this is the future of recorded music. Who ever had a love affair with a JPEG?
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04.10.07: William Drenttel

Julie Iovine

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04.09.07: William Drenttel

Koolhaas and His Omnipotent Masters
Koolhaas recounts the story: he chose between working on NYC's Ground Zero and the Beijing CCTV project based on a fortune cookie he was given at a Chinese restaurant — in it, the goofy prognostication "Stunningly Omnipresent Masters Make Minced Meat of Memory." Instead of responding to fortune cookies, Rem Koolhaas could have changed the world.
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04.06.07: Michael Bierut

Our Little Secret
The documentary Helvetica premieres in a world where everyone knows how to do something that once only very few did: how to set type.
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04.03.07: Rick Poynor

Dancing to the Sound in Your Head
We might not appreciate advertising conducted like a saturation bombing campaign in public spaces. Yet now, to complicate things, the personal stereo is being used as a way of reasserting spontaneity, exuberance and passion in over-controlled public places.
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03.29.07: Dmitri Siegel

The New New Typography
French design duo Vier5 make new typography. The author raises questions about modernism and typography.
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03.26.07: Jessica Helfand

Annals of Ephemera: Town & Country Cookbook
Book cover designers are visual choreographers who frame miniature narratives in order to tease prospective readers into wanting more. Which often means showing less. Or not.
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03.22.07: William Drenttel

International Polar Year
In what may turn out to be the biggest international scientific project to date, an army of thousands of scientists will spend the next two years studying the Arctic and Antarctic as part of the International Polar Year, which officially begins this week.
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03.19.07: Michael Bierut

Good at Art
Growing up in the sixties, I couldn't throw or catch a baseball with authority, punch someone in the face, or shoplift. But I had something I could call my very own. I was good at art.
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03.16.07: Kurt Andersen

Heyday
Courtesy of the Kurt Andersen, Design Observer is pleased to present two excerpts from this new novel, Heyday,both involving the dazzling Polly Lucking, a strong-minded, free thinking actress (and discreet part-time prostitute). Portrayed is the tumultuous world of 1848 — and the beginnings of modern retailing, branding, trademarks and American commerce.
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03.14.07: Jessica Helfand

Art Director Ken
Art Director Ken is is a charmed, if mildly cautionary tale, for it brings to mind the potentially superficial nature in which we judge a person, an identity — indeed, an entire profession.
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03.12.07: Rob Giampietro

Comedy of Errors: Graphic Design on Wikipedia
A few weeks ago, in a moment of distracted curiousity, I decided to look up "graphic design" on Wikipedia.
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03.08.07: Dan Nadel

This is Not My Design Life Now
In the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's current triennial exhibition, Design Life Now, the selections in graphics and pop culture are conservative and long out-of-date. To Dan Nadel, 2006 looks a lot like 2000.
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03.06.07: Michael Bierut

Jean Baudrillard Dies

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03.04.07: Jessica Helfand

Lost, O Lost

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03.01.07: David Stairs

That (Other) 1970's: The Last King of Scotland
The Last King of Scotland, Kevin McDonald's film about Idi Amin's notorious presidency, opened in Uganda to great fanfare. The VIP screening took place at Kampala's Cineplex, with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Forest Whitaker in attendance. The premiere was not targeted to the average Ugandan...
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02.19.07: Jessica Helfand

The Illusion of Certainty
Artist Allan McCollum aspires to an unprecedented scale with this "Shapes" project: his goal is to make enough shapes, assuming a population of approximately 9.1 billion by the year 2050, so that everyone on the planet can have one. Shapes aside, what's truly fascinating is the idea of the system: what is it about them that we hate to love and love to hate?
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02.16.07: Michael Bierut

Cheap Music and Commercial Art
You wouldn't know it from Dreamgirls, but Motown staff songwriters Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland were examples of how art is created under pressure.
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02.12.07: Jessica Helfand

I'm Not Ready to Make Nice

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02.05.07: Adrian Shaughnessy

"I Sold My Soul And I Love It"
The current issue of Creative Review is "guest edited" by hip British advertising agency Mother. The theme, suggested by Mother, is I Sold My Soul And I Love It — a vastly contradictory statement, but one that invites debate over what it means to work in visual communication."
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02.01.07: Dmitri Siegel

Interface Space
Contemporary artists make physical versions of interface elements.
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01.26.07: David Cabianca

Why History? Why Bother
Architects list accomplishments in their biographies: the names of building projects, completed and uncompleted; competitions entered, winning or nonwinning entries. Graphic designers provide client lists. Why?
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01.23.07: Michael Bierut

Speech, Speech
The State of the Union Address is tonight. Messages, big ideas, careful details, second-guessing, refinements and revisions, anonymity: graphic design has a lot in common with political speechwriting. What kind of client do you suppose the President is?
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01.19.07: Jessica Helfand

The Karaoke Effect
The lure of American Idol, in these early weeks, lies in precisely this shaky space: that illusory bubble populated by thousands of fame-seekers who fervently believe in their own righteous, if highly fictional talent. It's cultural fallout. Just as the karaoke singer imagines him or herself live and in concert before the screaming fans, so, too, does the illusion persist once the microphone is turned off.
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01.16.07: Michael Bierut

The It Factor
In their 1983 book Quintessence: The Quality of Having It, Owen Edwards and Betty Cornfeld created an elegant and influential treatise in what makes something the real thing, a lesson that Steve Jobs has obviously absorbed.
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01.13.07: Michael Erard

Word Made Flesh
The forgotten discipline of sentence diagramming forces the structure of language to wear the clothes of images. A sentence diagram is less a map than a portrait, and in this vaudeville language is painted, corsetted and trussed.
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01.02.07: Thomas de Monchaux

Another Organicism at the National Design Triennial
Certain items on display at the current Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006 survey seem less like untouchable artifacts than the useful leavings of a thoughtful host. New organic practices may be a robust form of the domestic arts emerging in design discourse: the craft, the science, and the art of making oneself at home.
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12.29.06: Alissa Walker

War Is Over! If You Want It
When the star of the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon is asked by a reporter what he thinks Nixon should do to end the Vietnam War, Lennon stares incredulously into the camera. "He should declare peace." As if this was the most obvious solution in the world.
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12.20.06: Michael Bierut

Now You See It
There was a message hidden in the illustration on the cover of the New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago. At least I think it was hidden. Did you see it? Why didn't I?
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12.17.06: Adrian Shaughnessy

Pet Shop Boys — A Flawless Vision
During the past two decades, the Pet Shop Boys have developed a "brand image" that is nearly flawless. Other bands have moments of brilliance — the occasional great album cover or music video — but PSB pull it off repeatedly.
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12.15.06: Jessica Helfand

The Not-So-Golden Age of Zero Tolerance
When I was a student, the assignments and their expected outcomes were intentionally conceived as chore-like, specific and frankly, narrow. This was the age of zero tolerance: deviation from a designated format was neither an approved approach nor an acceptable method. Today, the opposite is more likely to be true: a student who does not expand his or her approach to a project is strongly encouraged to do so.
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12.11.06: Michael Bierut

The Graphic Glass Ceiling
A week ago, I was the moderator of a panel discussion at the 92nd Street Y with Milton Glaser, Chip Kidd and Dave Eggers. Afterwards, someone asked, "Why do you — all three of you — suppose there are so few female graphic designers — or at least so few female 'superstar' graphic designers?" There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. What would your answer be?
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12.04.06: Dmitri Siegel

M...O...T...I...O...N
The work of directors PES and Kris Moyes leads to a discussion of the history of stop motion animation.
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11.29.06: The Editors

2006 Holiday Reading List
The holidays are always a great time to catch up with reading, and to make gifts to friends and relatives. We've put together a list of some of our favorite books...
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11.27.06: Jessica Helfand

How Hollywood Nailed The Half-Pipe
Pixar and Animal Logic have mastered a particularly persuasive (and as it turns out, rather literal) form of spin that makes Road Runner look like dryer lint.
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11.20.06: Michael Bierut

New House
In 1967, just after my tenth birthday, we moved from a cramped 1940s bungalow in an older Cleveland suburb to up-and-coming Parma, Ohio. I had been walking the earth for a full decade, but that fall I felt I was finally assuming my birthright as an American: a brand new house.
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11.17.06: Jessica Helfand

Into the Pink
Co-opting a color and making it your own.
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11.15.06: Michael Bierut

Onserved: CR on Alan Fletcher

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11.14.06: Adrian Shaughnessy

Listomania
The English design group Spin has produced a publication called 50 Reading Lists, which allows the reader the double pleasure of admiring the handsome presentation of 50 lists, as well as the chance to study the reading habits of 50 graphic designers.
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11.08.06: Jessica Helfand

What Makes A Good Poster?
From Nineteenth Century broadsides to Paula Scher's posters for The Public Theatre, the history of the poster is the history of modern civilization. So why are academics so hell-bent on poster board and bad typography? Why don't they ask us for help?
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11.01.06: William Drenttel

Polling Place Photo Project
The Polling Place Photo Project seeks to advance innovation in citizen journalism by documenting local voter experiences during the U.S. midterm elections on Tuesday, November 7...
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10.29.06: Michael Erard

The G Word
Google has launched an effort to keep people from using their name as an all-purpose verb. Don't want to be evil? Then don't act as if you can win if you constrain the creative productivity of language.
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10.26.06: William Drenttel

Silk Road Typography
"This is the Silk Road at its worst: a kind of PC 1990s where each and every interest has to be fairly represented — a letter for every voice. The result is Babel, seven discordant voices singing in the wind." Commentary on new European Union 50th anniversary logo, and a look back at the 100th anniversary logo for the New York Public Library.
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10.22.06: Jessica Helfand

My Cup Holder Runneth Over
When we're not hiding behind our nail-technician-primed hands, drinking our barrista-blended beverages, IMing, text-messaging, and push-button withdrawing more money from the ATM to pay for all of these things, who are we?
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10.19.06: David Stairs

Charles Eames Among the Bullrushes
What interests me is the tendency for even uneducated Ugandans to observe and learn from their surrounding world, a fundamental hallmark of design thinking.
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10.15.06: Adrian Shaughnessy

Graphic Design vs. Illustration
Graphic design's ability to deliver explicit messages makes it a major (if little recognised) force in the modern world: it is embedded in the commercial infrastructure. Illustration, on the other hand, with its woolly ambiguity and its allusive ability to convey feeling and emotion, makes it too dangerous to be allowed to enter the corporate bloodstream. Our visual lives are the poorer for this.
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10.12.06: Michael Bierut

What's That Crashing Sound, Or, Eisenman in Cincinnati
University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Architecture and Art, DAA, DAAP, Ivory Soap, Proctor & Gamble, P&G, Clifton, Louis Kahn, Crosley Tower, Pruitt-Igoe, le Corbusier, Paul Rudolph, TaB, Jay Chatterjee, George Hargreaves and Associates, Michael Graves, Harry Cobb, Henry Cobb, Pei Cobb Fried, College Conservatory of Music, Frank Gehry, Vontz Center for Molecular Studies, Thom Mayne, Peter Eisenman, The Aronoff Center for Design and Art,School of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, Wexner Center, New York Times, Paul Goldberger, Monacelli Press, Esther Bridavsky, Asya Palatova, Sarah Whiting, Kurt Forster, Silvia Kolbowski, Jeffrey Kipnis, Frank Gehry
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10.09.06: Michael Bierut

Vinyl Fetish
This past weekend, I went down in the basement and brought up three heavy boxes of records that hadn't seen the light of day in more than 20 years. A meditation on the joys of vinyl.
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10.07.06: Sue Nguyen

What I Did Last Summer
My Summer Job at McSweeney's: in terms of what I made, I got to work on a Believer cover (the games issue), scan a million photos of a senior citizen working in a mental hospital, add drop shadows to fan letters to Ray Charles, and design workshop certificates for the kids. All in all I had a great summer.
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10.01.06: Dmitri Siegel

More Rules
The artwork for Beck's new album The Information immediately brings to mind the work of Sol LeWitt and the question of where the creative act is situated: in making the work or making the rules.
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09.29.06: William Drenttel

Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing
In partnership with AIGA, we launched the Winterhouse Writing Awards for Design and Criticism, an initiative to increase the appreciation of design — by recognizing new voices in design criticism and commentary. Here are the 2006 recipients.
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09.27.06: Michael Bierut

Alan Fletcher: Living by Design
Remembering the late British designer Alan Fletcher, who once said, "I treat clients as raw material to do what I want to do, though I would never tell them that." For him, design was not a profession or a craft, but a life.
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09.24.06: Michael Bierut

The Golden Age of American Commercialism
The encroachment of commercialism into everyday life seems like a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Yet around one hundred years ago, America began a romance with salesmanship that today seems almost delirious. A 1922 business directory shows how great crass commercialism used to look.
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09.21.06: Jessica Helfand

Death 'N' Stuff
Smoking Kills: The label days it all. Or does it? Once the allegedly chilling skull and crossbones is marketed as a decorative pattern on a silk bowtie, its credibility as an mark of peril seems, well, somewhat questionable, begging the question: have we become so bored by life that we've inadvertently become inured to death?
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09.19.06: DJ Stout

Remembering Ann Richards
To create the famous Texas Monthly cover of Governor Ann Richards astride a Harley, art director DJ Stout used a body double. "For many years, I would run into Ann Richards at my favorite Mexican food lunch spot in downtown Austin and she would always thank me for giving her such a 'sexy body.'"
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09.16.06: Kenneth Krushel

The Face Of Oblivion
Faces on supermarket packaging conform to a research-based "psychographic" that hasn't essentially changed in more than two decades. What is it about our self-image that identifies, at least on a consumer basis, with such fictional, even farcical lifestyles?
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09.13.06: Tom Vanderbilt

Small Worlds
One of the first things I like to do upon visiting a new city is to visit the scale-model version of itself. From Havana to Copenhagen, I've hunted down these miniature metropolises in dusty historical museums and under-visited exhibition halls. Surely one reason for their ineluctable allure is that simple Olympian sense of being able to consume as large as entity as Beijing or New York in a single eyeful.
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09.09.06: Michael Bierut

This is My Process
Designers often describe our work processes in terms that are dated and ill-suited for the activities that we actually undertake. Is there a model for the way that artists work that would be intelligible in a business context?
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09.04.06: Jessica Helfand

Annals of Small Town Life: The Logo Stops Here
Working with Florence Knol, Lucille McGinnis convinced her husband, Patrick B. McGinnis, that the New Haven Railroad needed a new logo. Enter Herbert Matter, Swiss-born designer, photographer and Yale professor whose own education was framed by apprenticeships with Cassandre, Leger and Le Corbusier.
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08.29.06: William Drenttel

What Ever Happened to Half.com, Oregon?
But back in 1999, in its Netflix-like heyday, Half.com was hot. And it did something quite remarkable. As a publicity stunt, it bought a town and renamed it. Someplace in Oregon. I wondered what ever happened to Half.com, Oregon — the first dot com city in the world?
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08.27.06: Rob Giampietro

On Arranging Books by Color
The central issue in arranging books, as Georges Perec warms us, is that "None of these classifications systems is satisfactory by itself," and he is right. But one idea from his list, "ordering by color," seems to be gathering a small following of late, particularly among the visually-inclined.
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08.23.06: Michael Bierut

Helmut Krone, Period.
One of the greatest designers that ever lived was an advertising art director: Doyle Dane Bernbach's Helmut Krone. A new book celebrates his life and work.
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08.20.06: Jessica Helfand

The Ovalization of The American Mind
Ovals — emancipated from circular restriction, freed of rectangular rigidity — are a perfect metaphor for the way we live now. They're out of shape and flabby, non-committal and generic — like sensible shoes, practical and monotonous and dull.
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08.17.06: Dmitri Siegel

World 6.0: Same as the Old World?
Edward Castronova's recent book Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games sheds some light on the increasingly tangled relationship between MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games) and the game of life.
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08.14.06: William Drenttel

Threat Advisory Pandemic Alert System (TAPAS)
How do we measure the danger level from the Avian Influenza A (H5N1) virus? What we lack is that one Tom Ridge-like bit of inspiration that would lend clarity to these confusing times. We took our cue from a certain John James Audubon. Herewith, one option for Homeland Security. Yes, we know: it's for the birds.
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08.11.06: Jessica Gladstone

WHTARQT!* (Vanity, Thy Name Is Virginia)
The State of Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles boasts more than 180 customized license plate designs, more than any other state in the nation.
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08.08.06: Michael Bierut

The Road to Hell, Part Two: That Elusive Silver Bullet
An online offer to teach anyone to do graphic designer raises the ultimate question: can we conclusively prove the value of design to the general public? We can't? Now what?
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08.03.06: Adrian Shaughnessy

Living Without The Internet
The "community" that I find on the internet is the communality of shared enthusiasms for marginalised subjects.
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07.28.06: Jessica Helfand

A Good Pan Is Hard To Find
On baking a cheesecake and becoming a better designer: it's one big balancing act of artistry and skill.
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07.25.06: Rick Perlstein

What is Conservative Culture?
Ask a conservative activist to explain what anchors and unites their fractious movement, and he will point to ideas. They will not mention the extraordinary role the development of a self-contained and self-conscious conservative culture played in transforming the politics of the United States.
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07.23.06: Dmitri Siegel

Please CARE
CARE is a four-step process for learning design. Building a strong process is the best way to prepare students for the complex, collaborative work of the designer.
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07.20.06: Jessica Helfand

The Global Curse of Comic Sans
In this coastal region slung just below the Pyrenees, one might expect to see evidence of the enduring cultural tensions between Spain and Catalonia — different kinds of signs or symbols, for instance â€" but on the surface at least, no such rift is exposed. Instead, Catalonia clings to a visual language that celebrates the goofy: this is a country awash in Comic Sans.
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07.17.06: Michael Bierut

Where the Happy People Go
The ferociously positive letters column in Architectural Digest magazine demonstrates that design can make people almost unnervingly happy.
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07.14.06: William Drenttel

Move It Down . . . A Little to the Right
That some years ago, some poor sign installer went to put the first letter of the name of the museum up on the wall, and someone screamed, "No, you idiot! Lower! Much Lower! Get it down close to the edge. And a quarter-inch to the right." That the building is the Guggenheim Museum, and that the architect was Frank Lloyd Wright, makes this photographic detail especially interesting.
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07.10.06: Michael Bierut

Regrets Only
Five graphic designers have chosen to boycott a breakfast at the White House for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. A principled stand or an empty gesture?
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07.07.06: Jessica Helfand

The Right Stuff
Prada is yet another in a long line of stories in which posessions loom large, at once shining beacons of material success and wagging fingers of moral turpitude. When will we have enough stuff?
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07.05.06: Lorraine Wild

Wassup, Beatrice
I've heard endless definitions and descriptions of graphic design: I can recite them all, and on any given day I can identify with one essentialism over another: e.g., "Today, I'm a conceptualizer." I can even be swayed by the argument that, in fact, we work in a moment when graphic design is devolving as a practice identifiable by any common standards. It makes me think of a woman who I have always found completely annoying in her assuredness — Beatrice Warde.
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07.03.06: Jessica Helfand

Absolut Signage
I'm deeply in touch with my inner schoolmarm, particularly when it involves typos set in stone — or in this case, emblazoned in metal. I call it: Absolut Boo-Boo.
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06.29.06: Jessica Helfand

Crafting All The Way To The Bank
Craft is a tricky word. When we feel ourselves pulled in by the unforgiving vortex of digitized everything, we plead for craft, throwing it out like a life preserver — a desperate appeal to the forgotten soul. In those moments, it becomes a metaphor for a kind of imperiled humanity. But what about craft, we ask?
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06.27.06: Dmitri Siegel

Designing Our Own Graves
What will be the role of the designer in a truly do-it-yourself economy? The more that our economy runs on people doing-it-themselves, the more people will demand opportunities to do so, and the more graphic designers will have to adapt their methods.
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06.25.06: Kenneth Krushel

A Talisman of Prosperity
The Edelweiss, and its architectural brethren down the road, might be found anywhere: from a Philadelphia suburb to the outskirts of Frankfurt. Eclectic and dense — and prone to decorative excess — this new international style is everywhere. Even, it seems, in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
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06.22.06: Michael Bierut

The Mysterious Power of Context
Some of the most effective graphic design is neutral and open ended, and acquires its effectiveness only through use and association. Is it possible to anticipate the power of context in design?
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06.20.06: Rob Giampietro

Kafka & Typography
For many, including myself, "The Trees" is about typography, and, in its first sentence, Kafka lets letters speak directly to the reader themselves: "we are like tree trunks in the snow." Picture a field after a recent snowfall. Think of the straight, almost runic lines of the fallen boughs. Approaching them, they seem like characters from an unused alphabet.
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06.16.06: Adrian Shaughnessy

Werner Herzog and the Deeper Truth
For hardcore cineastes — and bug-eyed amateur movie buffs like me — DVD audio tracks are an invention of Guttenburgian proportions. Few technological advances in the realm of art and culture can equal the joy afforded by an articulate and perceptive commentary specially prepared to accompanying a movie.
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06.14.06: Michael Bierut

My Phone Call to Arnold Newman
Michael Bierut remembers a 25-year-old phone conversation with the late photographer Arnold Newman.
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06.12.06: William Drenttel

The Red Hand : A Graphic History
I keep thinking about the red hand. Where did this graphic metaphor come from? The many uses of the red-hand — it's metaphorically rich and graphic history — remind me that symbols do have meaning. Whatever I think of Congresswoman Nancy Johnson here in northwestern Connecticut, I don't think she got caught red-handed, whether in a cookie jar or pie or pool of blood. This is a bad use of an historical symbol, and trashy politics as well.
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06.10.06: The Editors

Redesign of Design Observer
We are pleased to present a new design for Design Observer.
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06.08.06: Lawrence Weschler

Koppel to Cooper: Cool, Cooler, Cold
Hey, maybe that's the ticket for McSweeney's: Put some bigtime sexy celebrity on the cover, somebody huge and charismatic and irresistible, somebody like, you know...Ted Koppel! What then to make of this month's cover of Vanity Fair? The fact that the editors there, in offering Anderson Cooper up as the studmuffin du mois, may be an occasion for some serious concern.
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06.04.06: Michael Bierut

The Road to Hell: Now Paved with Innovation?
A new magazine from Business Week on design and innovation was created through an unpaid competition. If this is innovation, to hell with it.
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06.01.06: Jessica Helfand

"Oui, Oui, Oui" All The Way Home
On a sweltering day last August, my daughter and I embarked with a friend on a 6-day tour of Paris: Kid Paris, the Paris of candy stores and carousels and more than a few weird new ice cream flavors.
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05.31.06: The Editors

Design Observer @ 10,000,000 Party
Design Observer began in October 2003, and thirty-two months and over four hundred posts later, we are fortunate to have an ever-growing audience of readers and participants. This week we have reached a new traffic plateau — 10,000,000 cumulative site visits. Come celebrate Design Observer @ 10,000,000 on Tuesday, June 13. Party from 7:00pm - 10:00pm at The Delancey Bar & Nightclub: 168 Delancey (between Clinton and Attorney streets), Lower East Side, New York City. Rooftop open-air views. Cash bar and $5.00 BBQ.
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05.25.06: Justin Good

What is Beauty? Or, On the Aesthetics of Wind Farms
What is beauty and how does it relate to ecology? A look at contrasting aesthetic intuitions about wind farms reveals a paradigm shift in how we understand beauty.
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05.22.06: Jessica Helfand

Annals of Academia: The New Exoticism

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05.19.06: Michael Bierut

Eight-and-a-Half by Eleven
An installation of over 10,000 tiled pieces 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper redeems what has often been dismissed as a banal graphic format.
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05.18.06: Julie Lasky

The Photography of Mark Robbins
Mark Robbins' Households is a collection of portraits in which the sitters are sometimes sitting rooms (or kitchens or bedrooms), and the people are polished, draped, and arrayed like furniture. Composed to resemble architectural plans or elevations — or in some cases the triptychs of medieval altarpieces — the images represent home dwellers and their environments. Flesh, bone, brick, stone, contoured torsos, and varnished chairs assume equal status. The message is simple: You may not be what you eat, but you most certainly are where you live.
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05.14.06: Alissa Walker

Why Scientology is Good for Hollywood
If you live where I do, in the actual city of Hollywood, just a few blocks away from where the Oscars are held, you see the Church of Scientology as somewhat of a savior. Within a two-mile corridor along Hollywood Boulevard, the Church owns eight historic buildings, four of which are on the National Register of Historic Places. In a neighborhood where architectural triumphs evaporate with little remorse, Scientology is the most ardent preservationist force in town.
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05.11.06: Michael Bierut

I Am a Plagiarist
Plagiarism is a hot topic in the world of publishing, What does it mean in the world of design? Michael Bierut pleads guilty.
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05.09.06: Adrian Shaughnessy

We're All Stellar Designers, Now
When it comes to ads aimed at designers, advertisers are targeting an audience that will look at their ads with hypercritical and informed eyes. They'll sniff out the half-baked, the clichéd, and the patronising. Or will they?
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05.04.06: Dmitri Siegel

It Takes a Nation of Lawyers to Hold Us Back
When the Smithsonian Institution recently announced a deal with Showtime to create a joint venture called Smithsonian Networks, documentary filmmakers and free-speech advocates were outraged by the prospect of a single corporation having exclusive rights to a public trust. This Smithsonian/Showtime arrangement demonstrates how thorny intellectual property and copyright law has become.
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04.30.06: Jessica Helfand

Disaster Relief 101: No Door Hanger Left Behind
Door hangers seem the perfect metaphor for FEMA's failure: they're one-dimensional, unnecessarily complicated, and basically useless.
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04.26.06: Tom Vanderbilt

Wacky Packages of the Global Economy
Why had this one-time Wacky Package, decades after the fact, landed in North Africa (I would later learn you can buy Crust in Libya as well) as a knockoff? Who was behind this strange bit of design deception? Welcome to the funhouse-mirror-lined vortices of the global economy: The Knockoff Zone.
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04.24.06: Willis Regier

In Remembrance of Richard Eckersley
Richard Eckersley died on April 16, having given the best years of his life to establishing the importance of high-quality book design for university presses. Here, a remembrance by Willis Regier, director of the University of Illinois Press.
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04.21.06: Jessica Helfand

The Art of Thinking Through Making

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04.18.06: William Drenttel

Weather Report: 53 Degrees F. Heavy Snowfall Predicted
The weather is fucked up. "Science is a way of making sense of the world. Design is a way of making the world make sense."
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04.17.06: Mark Lamster

Return of the Prodigal Son
Can Alexander Brodsky reinvent Russian architecture?
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04.11.06: Jessica Helfand

The Propensity for Density
It's like design's been on a diet and finally gets to eat that giant cheesecake: shifting notches on the belt buckle, we're so happy for the sugar high that we don't realize we're slipping. And slipping we are.
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04.06.06: Michael Bierut

When Design is a Matter of Life or Death
When structural engineer William LeMessurier realized that his work on Manhattan's Citicorp Center was flawed, he was faced with a choice: he could keep quiet and gamble with thousands of lives, or he could speak up. What would you do?
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04.04.06: Jessica Helfand

A Sequence in Time
01:02:03 04/05/06 This number sequence in time will not occur again until 2106.
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04.03.06: William Drenttel

Meet Me in St. Louis: The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts makes the radical assumption that the experience of art is about contemplation. Take your time. You are alone here. The light will change if you stay long enough.
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03.28.06: Kenneth Krushel

Santa Fe Diarist
But there seem to be equally vigorous efforts to commercialize this distant past in Santa Fe, embracing a design esthetic that advertises itself as the "essence" of what had been thought to be lost. Then, in re-introducing this historical narrative, an efficient assembly line manufactures it into a commercially lucrative design creed.
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03.18.06: Michael Bierut

Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content
Design is that it is almost always about something else. The more things you're interested in, the better your work will be.
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03.16.06: Lawrence Weschler

Languorous Bodyscapes
"The long, languid spread of her body makes the first and most lasting impression." And more on these sorts of landscape-bodyscape slippages by this seasoned The New Yorker writer, and recent author of Everything That Rises : A Book of Convergences.
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03.12.06: Adrian Shaughnessy

Google and the Tyranny of Good Design
The Google logo — that scrap of oddball typography — is perhaps the most famous piece of graphic design in the world today. In its own small way, it's a little beacon of insurrection, in a world where graphic designers have become the agents of conformity.
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03.09.06: Dmitri Siegel

Broadcast vs. Broadband
Viral video is on the rise, spreading from broadband to broadcast and back again. What are the opportunities for designers in this new genre?
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03.02.06: Jessica Helfand

Give Me Privacy or Give Me an ID Card
The proposed National ID Card further blurs the line between the privacy and full disclosure of personal data in the public domain. It's the Card's design that appears the final string that may either secure our rights as individuals or rip them apart.
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02.26.06: Michael Bierut

The Persistence of the Exotic Menial
25 years ago, writer Ralph Caplan said that designers are exotic menials: exotic because of the presumed mystery inherent in what we do, and menial because whatever we do is required only for relatively low-level objectives. Has anything changed since then?
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02.23.06: Julie Iovine

Dwelling on Dwellings

Julie Iovine wonders why so much fuss is made about fancy condominium apartment buildings that will be occupied by so few people.

02.20.06: George W. Bush

I Don't Know Much About Designing Rugs
George W. Bush: I'll never forget the first decision I had to make as the president. I wasn't even sworn in yet and a fellow called me on the phone and he said: "What color of rug do you want to have in the Oval Office?"
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02.16.06: Jessica Helfand

What We Talk About When We Talk About Design History
At the end of the day, being a design historian means being observant and fearless, stubborn and driven, principled, passionate and anything but lazy. It means going where you have to go to get what you need.
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02.12.06: Michael Bierut

Design by Committee
"Design by committee" is usually thought to be a bad thing, but it has produced one great piece of architecture, the United Nations Headquarters Building.
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02.05.06: Jessica Helfand

Separated at Birth: Method? Or Madness?
Karim Rashid's method© cleaner is strikingly similar to that of a discount depot: coincidental congruousness?
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02.02.06: Jessica Helfand

Freedom of Speech or Filching of Style? The New Law of Eminent Lo-Mein
DIY design invading typography terrain: culture-jamming in the domains of freedom of speech, pharmaceutics, and pop-culture.
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01.29.06: Jessica Helfand

The D Word
HGTV's sunny splendor of twenty-seven minute remodels and inexhaustible inspiration: fodder for the DIY devotee.
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01.26.06: Rob Giampietro

What Design Really Needs is a Good Scandal
Looking at the new I.D. Forty design awards through the lens of scandal -- and James English's outstanding, The Economy of Prestige.
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01.22.06: Michael Bierut

Wilson Pickett, Design Theorist, 1942 - 2006
Wilson Pickett's advice on hitmaking, "Harmonize, then customize," would make good advice for any designer.
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01.19.06: Adrian Shaughnessy

Robert Brownjohn and The Big Idea

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01.15.06: Michael Bierut

In Praise of Slow Design
Is there a such a thing as slow graphic design? A look at 80 years of barely perceptible design changes at The New Yorker.
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01.08.06: Jessica Helfand

Civilian Typography: The Power and The Fury
Without a cell phone, or in a flood, or barred from public transportation, the thing that separates human beings from the animal kingdom is our ability to communicate verbally. If we can't do that, we do it graphically. When all else fails, the pen isn't just mightier than the sword: it is the sword.
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01.02.06: Lorraine Wild

Good Font, Shame About The Reporting

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01.01.06: Mark Lamster

Seeing Red
Red Bogart blamed technology and changing attitudes for the reason he sold Camp Tomahawk, but Mark Lamster knew there was something more to the story.
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12.29.05: Michael Bierut

The Unbearable Lightness of Fred Marcellino
Remembering Fred Marcellino, the designer and illustrator who dominated the look of quality fiction dustjackets in the 1980s.
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12.24.05: Jessica Helfand

Calling All Angels
In the spirit of angels: an exploration of their various iterations and their presence today
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12.19.05: Adrian Shaughnessy

Charles Dickens and The BBC
Who would have guessed that a BBC costume drama would provide us with Exhibit-A in the defense's case — that a mass audience can be engaged without pandering to base instincts?
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12.16.05: Jessica Helfand

Face Value
Facial transplants mapping our future: how much is the world of design responsible?
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12.11.05: Dmitri Siegel

Bartleby™
In his classic story of Wall Street, Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville recounts the tale of a humble copyist employed by the story's narrator. Could Bartleby's perfectly crafted refrain be the appropriate response to a world where every choice and configuration has been designed?
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12.03.05: The Editors

2005 Holiday Reading List
The Holidays are always a great time to catch up with reading, and to make gifts to friends and relatives. We've put together a list of some of our favorite books — recent and not so recent. We hope you enjoy them.
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12.01.05: Jessica Helfand

Cease and Design
Where graphic design education is concerned, more doing and less asking is necessary.
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11.27.05: Lorraine Wild

Think Regional, Act Annual
Flying from New York to Los Angeles last week, I spent the long hours at 35,000 feet doing something I had not done in years: I read the Print Magazine's "2005 Regional Design Annual" cover to cover. Here are some of the things I learned:
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11.20.05: Michael Bierut

Innovation is the New Black
Innovation is the latest buzzword to overtake the design profession. What does it mean?
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11.17.05: William Drenttel

David Hughes: Caricaturist of Our Time
But my favorite, in recent years, is the British illustrator David Hughes. I yearn for his drawings, look for them in my favorite publications, and save them whenever and wherever I find them.
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11.10.05: Rick Poynor

Emigre: An Ending
Issue 69 of Emigre will be the last. In its heyday, it was the most consistently interesting design publication produced by anyone, anywhere. By 1990, it was one of those magazines you simply had to get hold of and read straight away.
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11.06.05: Michael Bierut

Designing Twyla Tharp's Upper Room
Jennifer Tipton's lighting design for Twyla Tharp's dance piece, In the Upper Room, creates a magical experience for the audience and brings her often unseen art to the foreground.
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11.03.05: Jessica Helfand

On Considering the Source
As primary sources of inspiration in art become a rarified reality, one is forced to wonder where are the original, the unmediated and the pure, sans cliche?
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10.29.05: Michael Bierut

The Final Days of AT&T
The acquisition of AT&T by SBC will result in, among other things, the retirement of one of Saul Bass's most well-known logos. Does anyone care?
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10.27.05: Jessica Helfand

The Shock Of The Old: Rethinking Nostalgia
Placing Nostalgia: where in the design landscape does it fit? And should it be included in the first place?
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10.24.05: Michael Bierut

The Great Non-Amber-Colored Hope
A student design for a prescription pill bottle takes a metoric rise to mass production and becomes an instant icon in the world of graphic design.
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10.13.05: Michael Bierut

Looking for Celebration, Florida
An assessment of Celebration, Florida, a town built by the Walt Disney Company on "New Urbanist" planning principles in its tenth anniversary year.
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10.09.05: Alexandra Lange

Married with Tchotchkes
For many design-obsessed couples registering at Moss requires more strategy than playing the stock market.
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10.06.05: Jessica Helfand

On Citizenship and Humanity: An Appeal for Design Reform
Ruminations on the Citizen Designer: A human first, a designer second, but most importantly, one who responds to collective cultural needs.
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09.30.05: Adrian Shaughnessy

"Can you make the type bigger?"

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09.25.05: Rick Poynor

Where Are the Design Critics?
There is no reason why design criticism shouldn’t take an oppositional view of design's instrumental uses and its social role, but few design writers seem motivated to produce this kind of criticism.
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09.22.05: Lorraine Wild

Decorum, RIP
Mid-century modern is associated — especially in California — with an easier time, a more casual lifestyle: it's the spatial expression of a loosening of Depression-era habits. We associate restraint with the style of the mid-century, but the contemporary interpretation of that restraint is to connect it to a sort of visual minimalism.
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09.19.05: Rick Poynor

The Guardian's New European Look
The Guardian's choice of the "Berliner" format, half-way between broadsheet and tabloid, is an inspired alternative. The paper is the first British title to adopt this European page size. Elegant, well-proportioned pages make its tabloid rivals look like poor relations.
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09.15.05: Paula Scher

Remembering Henryk Tomaszewski

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09.11.05: Michael Bierut

Four Years After
After four years of ambiguity and contention and the World Trade Center site, Ellsworth Kelly's 2003 proposal seems wiser than ever.
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09.10.05: William Drenttel

Katrina: Designer News & Resources (09.10 Update)
This updates our efforts to support relief initiatives for those affected by Hurricane Katrina.
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09.08.05: William Drenttel

Katrina: Designer News & Resources (09.08 Update)
This post is an archive of news and resources to help designers devastated by Hurricane Katrina from the New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf States area.
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09.01.05: Jessica Helfand

Eye of the Storm
A re-entrance into the world: Following Hurricane Katrina, how should design continue?
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08.29.05: Michael Bierut

You May Already Be a Winner
Are graphic design competitions worthwhile?
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08.25.05: Kenneth Fitzgerald

Martin Venezky's Beautiful Melancholy
Kenneth FitzGerald assesses the work of Martin Venezky and his new monography, praising his ability to "summon a particular, subtle mood that is unique in design."
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08.23.05: William Drenttel

Reading the News & Charting Death
The potential for terrorism is not a chart I can make in my head. The numbers are there, but the design alludes me.
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08.20.05: Rick Poynor

Sublime Little Tubes of Destruction
In a culture otherwise swamped with unregulated branding, the graphic counter-attack on the cigarette packet, on its visual integrity as a design and its brand equity, normally regarded as commercially sacrosanct, is a remarkable sight to behold. In Europe, in the US and around the world, outsized health warnings in ugly typography now disfigure and subvert the best efforts of the brands' designers to embody the fast-fading allure of the cigarette.
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08.16.05: Michael Bierut

Every New Yorker is a Target
The latest New Yorker magazine has only one advertiser: Target. The effect is disorienting.
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08.12.05: Jessica Helfand

A Mosaic of Vision and Memory
Language, in the service of the visual, is a conceptual catalyst: and in Umberto Eco's latest book, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, words meet pictures in a captivating and indeed, an astonishing way.
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08.07.05: Tom Vanderbilt

The Darwinian iPod
But for the sake of a late summer day's argument, I wonder what the Intelligent Design "controversy" would look like in the world of design.
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08.05.05: William Drenttel

Small Town Meetings
Zoning regulations are how a town designs its future. They determine what kind of development is encouraged, and what kind is discouraged. In Meetings, Paul Shambroom visited 150 local government meetings in 32 states. The photographs are remarkable in presenting the physical details by which towns gather to determine how they live.
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08.05.05: The Editors

Notice To Our Readers

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08.04.05: Adrian Shaughnessy

Self-Initiated House Music
It is perhaps stretching definitions to say that Julian House has become a musician, but with the help of sampling technology and an array of digital audio tools, he makes striking and compelling audio assemblages, which have strong stylistic parallels with his collage-based graphic design.
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07.31.05: Jessica Helfand

Why Bugs Don't Belong on TV
On today's TV screens, the station-identification logo sits tethered to the surface, like an annoying rash that won't quite disappear. You think you've kicked it when — WHAMMMO — there it is again, blemishing the patina of an otherwise perfectly good viewing experience.
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07.27.05: Rick Poynor

Vladimir's House and Garden of Earthly Delights
Spending two weeks in Vladimir Beck's house on the island of Vrnik in Croatia made me question, yet again, rigid distinctions between artist and designer. Here, it's impossible to separate the two. Beck has designed every feature with a high degree of thought for what might make a domicile located in such a setting pleasurable and practical to live in.
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07.25.05: William Drenttel

Signs of Religion in the American South
I live in a country where religion has become not only a matter of faith, but increasingly the foundation for malevolent politics — ugly hostilities over abortion, what's on television, whether Darwin can be taught in schools, and who gets named to the Supreme Court. In the South, on every corner, is a sign, a plaque, a statue, a monument signifying faith. Jesus's name is invoked in the landscape to name beauty salons, to say this homeowner is a believer, and to give direction to non-believers.
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07.22.05: Michael Bierut

Credit Line Goes Here
Design is essentially a collaborative enterprise. That makes assigning credit for the products of our work a complicated issue.
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07.14.05: Michael Bierut

Rick Valicenti: This Time It's Personal
In his newly-published monograph Emotion as Promotion: A Book of Thirst, Rick Valicenti provides a glimpse into a designer's life that is at once accessibly seductive and brazenly idiosyncratic.
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07.12.05: Michael Bierut

My Favorite Book is Not About Design (or Is It?)
Act One, the autobiography of playwright and director Moss Hart, is the best, funniest, and most inspiring description of the creative process ever put down on paper.
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07.08.05: Jessica Helfand

New Models for Design Efficiency: Introducing Otto
eniac Link http://www.newyorker.com/ http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/mauchly/jwm8.html http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0001NBMAS/ref=pd_sxp_f/002-9888674-0621611?v=glance&s=dvd
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07.04.05: Lorraine Wild

Exhibitions by Renzo Piano and 2x4
Both architect Renzo Piano and graphic designers 2x4 are at the top of their respective games as designers, but the way they approach their own exhibitions (at LACMA and SFMOMA, respectively) places them at opposite poles of a style of communication, and maybe even belief.
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07.01.05: Rick Poynor

We Are All Editors Now. Or Are We?
Many designers aspire to be editors. But being an editor is not simply about choosing some things you like and throwing them together. Editing is about deep engagement with content and the construction of meaning.
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06.28.05: Michael Bierut

The Obvious, Shunned by So Many, Is Successfully Avoided Once Again
Does anyone devote as much energy to avoiding simple, sensible solutions as the modern graphic designer? Publications of designers' own work demonstrate what effort they go through to needlessly complicate what might be simple solutions.
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06.24.05: William Drenttel

Catastrophic Imaginings: The Design of Disaster
In the end, artificial disasters are designed to elicit and test the responses of participants. In their recording, both allow for a post-mortem evaluation. How did I do? How would I respond? Would I sit patiently in my car a mile up the road? Would I watch from my window, safe in my home?
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06.22.05: Jessica Helfand

The Adventures of Cynic Boy and Design Mom in 3D
Brainwashed I may be, but I distinctly noted an homage to Salvador Dalí — with perhaps a gentle nod to René Magritte — last night while sitting through Robert Rodriguez's ludicrous, yet oddly luscious new movie, The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3D.
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06.19.05: Michael Bierut

Call Me Shithead, or, What's in a Name?
Everyone has experience with naming, whether a baby or even a goldfish. The fact that it's so easy is what makes it so hard. The biggest problem, of course, is that new names seldom sound good at first.
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06.16.05: Rick Poynor

In Memoriam: My Manual Typewriter
The fully evolved typewriter is a 20th-century industrial archetype. It feels inevitable, almost elemental, like one of those object types, such as a chair or a fork, that simply had to exist in this universe of forms.
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06.10.05: Jessica Helfand

The Cut: When Life Imitates Art (I Mean Design)
CBS Television debuted its new series, The Cut, (modeled after other reality shows such as NBC's The Apprentice)about "16 aspiring designers."
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06.08.05: Adrian Shaughnessy

Decoding Coldplay's X&Y
At a time when invisible data streams of binary information fed straight to our desktops are doing away with the need for album covers, it's odd to find a record sleeve as the subject of media comment and speculation. Odder still that the album cover in question — Coldplay's X&Y — should contain binary data as its central motif. Prophetic or what? The X&Y cover is agreeably eye-catching. You wouldn't call it a classic, but it has an unexpected severity that lifts it above the anodyne and cosmeticised design currently favoured by multi-platinum selling artists. It has dark echoes of Peter Saville's ephocal Factory covers.
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06.06.05: Michael Bierut

The Man Who Saved Jackson Pollock
Herbert Matter, the designer who stored away a cache of recently-discovered Jackson Pollock paintings, deserves a similar rediscovery.
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06.03.05: Rick Poynor

Mevis and Van Deursen: Rueful Recollections, Recycled Design
In their self-edited monograph, Dutch graphic designers Mevis and Van Deursen turn their backs on their professed commitment to ideas and treat the book mainly as an opportunity for undemanding aesthetic play.
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05.30.05: William Drenttel

Maps of Cyberspace
It is the internet that has changed our perception of space, precisely because the sheer volume of interconnectivity is beyond our imagination, whether it be language-based, data-based, or community-based. Add black holes and photographs of asteroidal moons around Jupiter, and our world seems increasingly expansive. Yet, if we cannot map it, how can we understand it?
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05.26.05: Roy Behrens

A Designer Remembers the Writer Guy Davenport
Roy R. Behrens: A designer remembers the writer Guy Davenport.
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05.23.05: Jessica Helfand

Method Designing: The Paradox of Modern Design Education
When did we begin to allow, let alone forgive, let alone encourage work that is so rhetorical, so impervious to public engagement? The persistent evidence of impenetrable personal work in design schools across America is a serious epidemic, resulting in a kind of method designing that erroneously treats sentiment as substance.
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05.20.05: Rick Poynor

But Darling of Course it's Normal: The Post-Punk Record Sleeve
There have been collections of post-punk music and now, finally, there is British music critic Simon Reynolds' 500-page history of the genre from 1978 to 1984. It's a brilliant book. He argues that post-punk music's explosion of creativity equals the golden age of popular music in the mid-1960s, but that it has never received its full due. I think he's right.
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05.15.05: Momus

REDESIGNDESIGN
REDESIGNDEUTSCHLAND formed in 2001 and have an office on the Torstrasse in central Berlin. Their work is perhaps best seen as a Swiftian satire on design itself, a playful Postmodern prod in the direction of Modernism's tendency (especially in German-speaking countries) to reduce everything to a kind of Year Zero of irrational rationality.
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05.13.05: Tom Vanderbilt

Material Issue

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05.09.05: Michael Bierut

On (Design) Bullshit
Harry Frankfurt's book On Bullshit provokes the question: what is the relationship of bullshit and design?
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05.07.05: Lorraine Wild

A Design Annual Captures 1968
The title on the cover of the booklet is "Business as Usual" subtitled "Fourteenth Annual Type Directors Show—Typography Wherever It Exists"... On every spread of the book there are lovely pieces of typography, things most any of us would have been proud to have created, and then an image as brutal as a slap on the face. It was 1968.
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05.05.05: Rick Poynor

Getting Louder: Chinese Design on the March
The “Get it Lounder” design exhibition in Shenzhen, billed as the first of its kind in China, reflected the lifestyle aspirations of its participants. Will Chinese design be able to confront social reality in more overtly critical ways?
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04.28.05: Jessica Helfand

Greer Allen: In Memoriam
Designer, critic, pundit and historian, Greer Allen was Senior Critic in Graphic Design at Yale School of Art. He designed publications for The Houghton Library at Harvard, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and a number of other distinguished cultural institutions around the country. Greer Allen died last week after a short illness. He was 83.
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04.28.05: Momus

Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places
A little survey of the visuals being produced for some of Europe's independent labels just now.
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04.26.05: Adrian Shaughnessy

The Designer as Buffoon
The "Designer as Buffoon" phenomenon can be seen in two big-budget, prime-time advertising campaigns currently showing on British television. Both Ford and Ikea are promoting their respective products by offering us pumped-up caricatures of designers and inviting us to guffaw at them.
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04.24.05: Rick Poynor

Eduardo Paolozzi, 20th Century Image-Maker
If a visual artist created more concentrated, exhilarating images of science, technology and the media realm during the mid-20th century than British artist Eduardo Paolozzi, then I would like to see them. Paolozzi, who died on 22 April aged 81, was first of all a sculptor, but the screenprints he produced in the 1960s rank as masterpieces of the medium.
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04.22.05: Michael Bierut

Me and My Pyramid
The redesign of the United States Department of Agriculture's Food Pyramid is neither satisfying nor nourishing from an information design point of view.
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04.21.05: Jessica Helfand

Extremely Young and Incredibly Everywhere: The Public Art of Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer's emergent body of work includes film and video, public art installations, theatrical collaboration, expressive typography, and a fairly prolific jumpstart as a writer. Cumulatively, all of his projects — which range from collecting empty pages of famous writers, to constructing parabolas in a public park, to collecting anonymous self-portraits — seem to look for ways to formally address time and space and the human condition.
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04.18.05: Michael Bierut

The Supersized, Temporarily Impossible World of Bruce McCall
Illustrator Bruce McCall's vision of an exhuberant, overscale America is evoked by the opening of a new McDonald's in Chicago.
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04.16.05: William Drenttel

Ten Years of Design Leadership: Richard Grefé

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04.13.05: Tom Vanderbilt

Leisurama: Design Within Reach
"Leisurama" was the name of a model second-home community, in Long Island's Montauk region, designed by members of the Raymond Loewy Corporation. The model house was sold by Macy's, which exhibited it in the basement of its flagship New York City store. Buyers of the house, which ran around $12,000, got not only a house, but all the trappings — right down to the toothbrushes.
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04.08.05: Lorraine Wild

The Scourge of "Tuscan"
Where whole new neighborhoods are still being constructed (i.e., Orange or Riverside counties in California) "Tuscan" is the style du jour. And now the mighty "Tuscan" encroaches at the global scale: new housing in places like Orange County, China, a recently constructed suburb near Beijing, and similar suburban developments adjacent to Bangalore echo the southern Californian template of total bogusness.
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04.05.05: Rick Poynor

Wisconsin Death Trip
Michael Lesy’s book Wisconsin Death Trip documented awful events in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, using a town photographer’s pictures. Years later, it remains a spellbinding piece of literary and photographic alchemy.
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04.03.05: Michael Bierut

Homage to the Squares
The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's exhibition Design is not Art provides a useful contrast to an simultaneous exhibition of the work of Josef and Anni Albers, and demonstrates differences between art and design.
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03.31.05: Momus

Paper Spends More Time With Its Family
I remember the first time I noticed paper coming back as a sort of small, particularised, opaque digital ghost of itself. It was in 1996. There was much talk, at the time, of "the paperless office". People were beginning to refer to paper mail derisively as "snail mail". But computers, as if they felt sorry for the displaced and humiliated paper, began to find other roles for the stuff. More ornamental, decorative, playful roles...
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03.28.05: Michael Bierut

No Headline Necessary
A wordless billboard depicting the purple-stained fingers of Iraqi voters makes a potent advertisement for that country's newborn democracy.
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03.24.05: Jessica Helfand

The Design Police
As unlikely as it sounds: Graphic Junkies is a photo blog by "an active law enforcement officer in the state of Georgia." The photographs are remarkable; the context compelling.
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03.21.05: Rick Poynor

Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot
Dot Dot Dot is the most stimulating and original visual culture magazine produced by designers since Emigre's heyday in the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.
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03.18.05: Tom Vanderbilt

A Pictograph Is Worth a Thousand Words?
As I wandered the streets of Seoul, noting any number of (male) symbols, it got me to thinking about the staggering ubiquity of — and inevitable limits of — pictographic communication, and what it suggests about globalization (and its discontents).
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03.17.05: Jessica Helfand

Scrapbooking: The New Paste-Up
"Craft-born embellishments," note one supplier of scrapbooking products, "are penetrating an unexpected market: graphic design."
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03.13.05: Rick Poynor

Why Architects Give Me the Willies
No matter how central graphic communication might be to our lives, architecture always dominates press coverage because it is very expensive, expresses the conditions of power, and is just plain big.
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03.10.05: William Drenttel

Moving the Axum Obelisk
In the mid-1990s, I saw an exhibition at the New York Public Library of the greatest illustrated books of the 19th century. One book stood out for me: a massive tome by Henry H. Gorringe, titled Egyptian Obelisks and dated 1882. It's in my design collection because of a dubious memory that it's the first book to document a from-start-to-finish design process. Of course, the process it documents is how one moves an obelisk.
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03.08.05: Momus

Mediation for the Masses
Rather than coming at the expense of the poor, mediation might be the next step for them too. If all goes well, we might be looking at a world in which everyone is a foolish tourist, a happy shopper, a postmodern self-mediator.
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03.03.05: Lawrence Weschler

The Aural As An Architectonic Challenge
What are the people over at Transom.org up to? As it happens, this month is a very good time to pay them a visit: for the next several weeks, Walter Murch — the phenomenally smart and inspired film and sound editor — will be continuing to hold court there.
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02.28.05: Michael Bierut

Fear and Loathing in Pen and Ink

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02.26.05: Michael Bierut

Designing Under the Influence
The similarity of a young designer's work to that of the artist Barbara Kruger provides the starting point for a discussion of the role of influence in design, and whether it is possible for someone to "own" a specific style.
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02.23.05: William Drenttel

Stop The Plant: The Failure of Rendering
There is no single rendering ominous enough to create public fear; no image so compelling as to create political momentum; and no symbol so memorable as to unite the opposition. Whether through artistic renderings or compelling information design, no one has made a visual case against these plants that is wholly effective. This is, I believe, a fundamental failure of design.
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02.21.05: Jessica Helfand

Our Bodies, Our Fonts
Body markings — piercings, tattoos and so forth — have recently evolved into a kind of marginalized form of graphic expression, yet one that sheds an unusual light on some of the more mainstream ways in which design often reveals itself.
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02.19.05: Kenneth Krushel

The Gates
Much has been written about Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Gates" project in Central Park in New York City. In the past few days, though, we have received two further reports on this project which we want to share with our readers: an essay by Ken Krushel and a photographic portfolio by Adam Bartos.
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02.18.05: Jessica Helfand

My Friend Flickr
Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite that was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, Canada company founded in 2002. It's a utopian oddity — a culture enabled by a technology that in turn enables a culture — and it's a brilliant example of socially networked software because it's free, its easy, and it makes sense.
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02.16.05: Jessica Helfand

The New Paper Chase: Cyberspace on The Auction Block
On February 23, Christies in New York will auction more than 1,000 items dating as far back as the early 17th century, all of it tracing the history of cyberspace.
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02.14.05: Tom Vanderbilt

Rise and Fall of Rock and Roll Graphic Design
Has heavy metal graphic design run its course? Is the band logo as a species dead? And is there much of a future for the graphic representation of popular music itself?
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02.13.05: Julie Lasky

Christo's Agent Orange
Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Central Park gates lack that magnetic, landscape-transforming power. Could this be owing not just to the way the gates drive viewers to seek greater heights of sensation, but also to the off-putting emergency color, the subtle grid of the rip-stop nylon reminiscent of quick escapes from troubled aircraft?
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02.12.05: Rick Poynor

The Ikea Riot: Unsatisfied Excess?
When Ikea threw open the doors of a new store in London, the result was mayhem as customers stampeded. Evidence of social breakdown, or a sign that the utopian argument for low-cost modernist design has been won?
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02.10.05: Momus

The Strange Commercial
Some commercials rot slowly into strangeness, others seem born with their strangeness fully-grown. I've recently been intrigued by two sets of TV commercials archived on the web, one from late 1960s Germany, the other from early 1980s Japan.
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02.08.05: Michael Bierut

Authenticity: A User's Guide
Graphic designers take pleasure in simulation. This makes defining authenticity a tricky thing.
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02.04.05: William Drenttel

Chris Marker: La Jetée
For years, I've owned a copy of La Jetée, a book about the film by Chris Marker, the experimental filmmaker. Designed by Bruce Mau and published by MIT Press/Zone Books in 1993, this is one of those design books that has ascended into the realm of rare bookdom...
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02.03.05: Michael Bierut

The Comfort of Style
The design process at the World Trade Center site has attracted enormous interest on one hand, and marginalized the role of designers on the other, as described in Philip Nobel's book Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero.
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01.31.05: Jessica Helfand

All Rise!
On the scale of true confessions, this one lies somewhere between admitting I once wrote for a soap opera and divulging my complete incapacity to recall keyboard commands in Adobe Illustrator. But there it is: when I'm hopelessly stuck, a quick round of Destructomatch is just the ticket.
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01.23.05: Momus

The Vice Design Issue
The Vice Design Issue is not an anti-design tract, but the championing of an aesthetic that's already quite well-established, already wowing museum curators - a casual, trashy, porno-party style that celebrates tack, lo-tech and the good old bohemian values of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
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01.23.05: Jessica Helfand

Paris Dispatch: A Long Way Down
It is difficult, perhaps impossible not to contemplate death on the occasion of a funeral, but to do so in an environment of such remarkable beauty — and such ineffable sadness — amplifies our sense of here and now, of where and why and, of course, of what.
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01.19.05: Michael Bierut

The Best Artist in the World
Alton Tobey, a little-known commercial illustrator, created a body of work in the early sixties that continues to inspire.
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01.17.05: Lorraine Wild

New Year's Housecleaning

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01.14.05: Tom Vanderbilt

A Review of a Show You Cannot See
A review of the planned, but closed, "Terminal Five" art show at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, featuring art installations houses in the former iconic terminal designed by Eero Saarinen.
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01.09.05: Rick Poynor

The I.D. Forty: What Are Lists For?
How do we measure one kind of achievement in design against another to arrive at a ranking? The truth is we can’t. The real purpose of I.D.’s list was to underscore the magazine’s position as selector and taste-maker.
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01.08.05: Michael Bierut

Robert Polidori's Peripheral Vision
Robert Polidori's photographs depict contemporary architecture in the context of a decidedly imperfect world.
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01.06.05: William Drenttel

Bird in Hand: When Does A Copy Become Plagiarism?

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01.03.05: Dmitri Siegel

Mysterious Disappearance of Carol Hersee
The story of Carol Hersee's portrait as Test Card F: since it first appeared in 1967 on BBC2, Carol's face has been on-air for over 70,000 hours.
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01.02.05: The Editors

Understanding and Action

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01.01.05: Mark Lamster

The Collector
Jefferson R. Burdick transformed the act of baseball card collecting into a culture of commercialism, an achievement that haunted him throughout his career.
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12.31.04: Jessica Helfand

A Blog Poem, Part II
Some call it "Graphics"; Others: "Art." (Occasionally, "Schlock.") Still we persist and we impart Good taste — on coated stock. ("How boring."— Clement Mok.)
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12.31.04: The Editors

2004 Book Recommendations

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12.29.04: William Drenttel

In Remembrance of Susan Sontag
In Remembrance of Susan Sontag: a designer's twenty-five years of interaction with the legandary writer.
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12.26.04: Momus

Berlin Wheatpasting
"What is desirable in our field," said Milton Glaser in 2002, "is continuous transgression." Berlin wheatpasters know that. They're out there at night, come snow, come rain, risking fines or imprisonment to publicize semi-legal parties with amateur, exciting, semi-legal graphics.
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12.24.04: Michael Bierut

And May All Your Christmases Be Carefully Staged So As To Appear White
A backstage story from George Balanchine's production of The Nutcracker dramatizes how difficult it is to create magical effects.
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12.23.04: Jessica Helfand

Code (PMS) Blue
Hospital rooms are architectural oddities: they're all function with no form. To the extent that, in matters of critical care, timing is everything, why should it matter? Then again, why shouldn't it?
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12.16.04: Michael Bierut

The Other Rand
The Fountainhead, a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand, continues to exert its influence over generations of architects and designers.
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12.09.04: Tom Vanderbilt

Pleasures and Pathos of Industrial Ruins
An account of a visit to the abandoned site of Bethlehem Steel, Pennsylvania.
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12.08.04: Michael Bierut

Just Say Yes
A seemingly legitimate news release from Dow Chemical on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster was actually a hoax perpetrated by The Yes Men, who have created a new kind of civil disobedience uniquely suited to the media age.
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12.04.04: The Editors

Introducing Three New Writers

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12.03.04: Jessica Helfand

Time, Space and The Microsoft Colonialists
If Microsoft displayed its marketing genius by introducing "Spaces" three weeks before Christmas, its failure as a compelling editorial product — as evidenced by its restrictive format, its templated narrowcasting, its uninspired design parameters — illuminates its ultimate weakness: these spaces have nothing to do with space, in all its rich, fascinating and deeply human complexity.
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12.01.04: Michael Bierut

The Whole Damn Bus is Cheering
The familiar yellow ribbons stuck to cars urging us to "support our troops" have lots of competition and are horribly designed.
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11.29.04: Jessica Helfand

Donald Trump, Art Director: Not The Real Thing
Not until now has Pepsi opened itself up to a public makeover on national television, a redesign in the hands of a smattering of aspiring capitalists, a group whose combined knowledge of design principles might be characterized as, dare I say it — negligible.
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11.25.04: William Drenttel

My Country Is Not A Brand
Branding was originally an approach for creating reputations for commercial products.
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11.21.04: Michael Bierut

Logogate in Connecticut, or, The Rodneydangerfieldization of Graphic Design: Part II
A new logo for the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism by Cummings & Good provokes a public controversy on the value of design.
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11.18.04: Michael Bierut

The World in Two Footnotes
Writing in Eye Magazine, Nick Bell observes that designers too often act as "agents of neutrality" or "aesthetes of style" and suggests that they focus more on their work's content.
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11.15.04: Jessica Helfand

The Designibles
What's incredible about The Incredibles is the art of design capture. Because when it comes to nailing design, the "Is" have it.
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11.13.04: Michael Bierut

First Person Shooter
News photographs from Iraq are eerily reminiscent of video game images.
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11.11.04: Rick Poynor

Who's In and Who's Out of the Dictionary
A Dictionary of Modern Design gives exemplary treatment to industrial designers, furniture designers, and the organisations that served them. Once again, though, graphic design emerges as the also-ran of design.
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11.03.04: Jessica Helfand

Am I Blue
Bumper stickers and lawn posters aside, Americans showed their concern on election day 2004 by standing in epic lines at polling centers around the nation, but also in certain subtle, discreetly visual ways. From dressing in all blue (or red) to wearing "I voted today" buttons, there has been a kind of silent visual communication effort steadily in play for the last 36 hours.
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11.01.04: Michael Bierut

Colorama
Grand Central Terminal's enormous Colorama displays by Kodak documented a suburban fantasy world for millions of commuters.
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10.29.04: Rick Poynor

Fear and Loathing at the Design Museum
James Dyson has accused the Design Museum in London of ruining its reputation with frivolous exhibitions. For many bemused onlookers, his complaints were out of touch with evolving public perceptions of design.

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10.25.04: William Drenttel

On Making Things

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10.21.04: Michael Bierut

What We Talk About When We Talk About Architecture
Architectural critiques, such as those conducted at Yale University and documented in its student publication Retrospecta, can have the same drama as good theatre; like the public radio show "Car Talk" the subject at hand is merely a springboard for diverting digression.
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10.09.04: William Drenttel

Does Aspen Have A Future?

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10.08.04: Jessica Helfand

The Rodneydangerfieldization of Graphic Design: Part I
We need to listen to people besides designers. We need to get in those boardrooms, those war rooms, those bastions of decision-making where no designer has ever been before. We need new legacies, better policies, richer histories for the next generation of graphic designers.
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10.01.04: Michael Bierut

I Hate ITC Garamond
ITC Garamond, a popular typeface designed in 1975, is quite simply ugly, and I hate it.
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09.24.04: Jessica Helfand

Gentlemen Prefer Blogs
Watching Annie Duke beat out a half-dozen male competitors in the World Poker Tournament this week, I experienced an odd case of déjà vu. It wasn't because of some Proustian memory of my own poker prowess — far from it, infact. Rather, what I felt was an odd sort of parallel universe with something I've been ruminating about for some time: namely, my presence here on Design Observer as the sole female contributor, and the scarcity of women who regularly participate in discussions here on this site.
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09.20.04: Michael Bierut

Graphic Designers, Flush Left?
Are graphic designers as a class predisposed to favor left-wing politics?
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08.25.04: The Editors

Late Summer Reading: August 2004
Summer vacations are always a great time to catch up with reading, so we've put together a list of some of our favourite books — recent and not so recent — by Asimov, Auster, Ballard, Berliner, Brooks, Caine, Coetzee, Colwin, Coupland, Diamond, Dreyfuss, Dyer, Frank, Galison, Gibson, Hochuli, Hopkins, Houellebecq, Johns, Jullien, Krichevski, Norman, Oates, Orwell, Pessoa, Peyré, Pollan, Powers, Schwartz, Sebald, Sedaris, Slater, Sterling, Stilgoe, Truitt, Vonnegut, Warshow, and Weschler. We hope you enjoy them.
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08.23.04: Michael Bierut

The Graphic Design Olympics
The event graphics and pictograms created for the Olympics by designers such as Otl Aicher, Lance Wyman and Deborah Sussman are part of a historic tradition that continues to this day.
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08.17.04: Michael Bierut

What is Design For? A Discussion
Rick Poynor and Michael Bierut discuss the purpose and promise of graphic design, in a conversation moderated by Creative Review editor Patrick Burgoyne.
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08.14.04: Michael Bierut

The Rendering and the Reality
The winners of a competition to redesign New York City's High Line, Field Operations and Diller, Scofidio & Renfro, created architectural renderings that demonstrate both the discipline's power and shortcomings.
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08.10.04: Jessica Helfand

Ladislav Sutnar: Mechanical Beauty

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08.05.04: Jessica Helfand

An Instrument of Sufficiently Lucid Cogitation
The legendary French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died on Tuesday at his home in the South of France, always carried a sketchbook with him. Today's obituary in The New York Times alleges that he described drawing as meditative, while photography was intuitive: though certainly both activities might have been informed by a relentless need to observe and in a sense, preserve the world around him.
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08.04.04: Michael Bierut

Eero Saarinen's Forty Year Layover

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07.31.04: Rick Poynor

Britain and America: United in Idiocy
What do Brits and Americans think of each other? In Us & Them, a book by the satirical British illustrator Paul Davis, the two countries have one thing in common: they are both equally stupid. That’s not saying much.
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07.27.04: William Drenttel

Penmanship: The Voice of A Future Designer

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07.25.04: Michael Bierut

The Bodoni Conspiracy
Eerie parallels between the cover designs of the reports of the 9/11 Commission and the Monicagate investigator Kenneth Starr suggest a conspiracy that can be traced back to sixteenth-century type designer Giambattista Bodoni.
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07.21.04: Jessica Helfand

Graphic Design: The Movie
Some time ago, I pondered about the future of graphic design as a reality show, but recently I've become convinced that its real future lies in its actual integrated presence onscreen: design as part prop, part protagonist.
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07.20.04: Michael Bierut

Pablo Ferro Offers You His Protection
The title design for the film Napoleon Dynamite, credited to Pablo Ferro [although designed in fact by actor Aaron Ruell], provoke an assessment of Ferro's influence in the world of motion graphics.
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07.16.04: Jessica Helfand

Design Gone Mad

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07.14.04: Michael Bierut

To Hell with the Simple Paper Clip
Answering the question "What's your favorite designed object?" with something humble and anonymous may be a tiresome cliche, but it's one that resonates with editors of the New York Times Magazine and curators at the Museum of Modern Art.
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07.12.04: Michael Bierut

Ed Ruscha: When Art Rises to the Level of Graphic Design
A retrospective of the drawings of Ed Ruscha raises the question: is he an artist or a graphic designer?
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07.08.04: Jessica Helfand

Ask Not What Your Typeface Can Do For You: Ask What You Can Do For Your Typeface
"Manhattan-based architect Frederic Schwarz's memorial 'Empty Sky' WILL USE Times New Roman..."
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07.07.04: William Drenttel

Posted Without Comment

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07.06.04: William Drenttel

Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician III

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07.05.04: Michael Bierut

And the Gold Award for Design Goes to God
New NASA images of the planet Saturn reveal it to be a beautifully designed object.
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07.03.04: Rick Poynor

Where are the Design Intellectuals?
Prospect magazine has published a list of the 100 top British public intellectuals. A handful of visual art and architecture people make the cut, but no from design is included, reflecting its absence from public debate.
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07.01.04: Jessica Helfand

Take Two Logos and Call Me in the Morning

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06.29.04: Michael Bierut

The Tyranny of the Tagline
Advertising agencies put great stock in taglines, those simple phrases intended as the core of an evergreen ad campaigns. Now taglines are invading the world of branding, as a new corporate identity for the YWCA reveals.
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06.19.04: Michael Bierut

Barthes on the Ballpoint
Roland Barthes disliked ballpoint pens, suggesting that there is a "Bic style" suited for "writing that merely transcribes thought."
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06.16.04: Michael Bierut

The Idealistic Corporation
American corporations in the mid-twentieth century, such as IBM, Container Corporation, and General Dynamics, worked with designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Herbert Bayer and Erik Nitsche in the conviction that design was not only a tool for business, but an potent instrument for making the world a better place.
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06.11.04: Jessica Helfand

Designer by Day, Catwoman by Night

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06.06.04: Rick Poynor

Modernising MoMA: Design on Display
MoMA is broadening its approach to graphic design. Recovering this material history will assist us in understanding our broader cultural history and help to educate a more aware generation of visual communicators.
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05.29.04: Michael Bierut

McSweeney's No. 13 and the Revenge of the Nerds
McSweeney's No. 13, published by Dave Eggers and guest edited by Chris Ware, is a masterwork of publication design and an invaluable survey of today's best comic artists and graphic novelists.
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05.20.04: Jessica Helfand

Annals of Academia, Part II: Graphic Design and The New Optimism
Debord
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05.17.04: Michael Bierut

India Switches Brands
The 2004 elections in India were an exercise in branding as well as politics, as a well-funded "India Shining" campaign failed to convince the electorate to retain the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP).
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05.12.04: Jessica Helfand

Annals of Academia, Part I: What I Didn't Learn In Graduate School

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05.09.04: Michael Bierut

My Democracy Was Irretrievably Undermined by Reactionary Idiots and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
Will a designer t-shirt contest have any effect on the US presidential elections?
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05.05.04: William Drenttel

Learning from Las Vegas: The Book That (Still) Takes My Breath Away

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05.01.04: Jessica Helfand

Time Waits for No Fan

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04.28.04: Michael Bierut

Better Nation Building Through Design
A new flag design for Iraq may inadvertantly symbolize much of what is misguided in the US's occupation of that country.
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04.23.04: Rick Poynor

Critics and Their Purpose
Pulling a 1960s art magazine from the shelf, I opened it at random to find a long list of thoughts about art criticism assembled in 1966 by students at the Royal College of Art in London. Many of these ideas apply to design.
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04.22.04: Michael Bierut

Catharsis, Salesmanship, and the Limits of Empire
Nozone #9: Empire and a new promotional campaign for the radio station Air America demonstrate alternate ways that graphic design can engage political issues and their audiences.
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04.20.04: Jessica Helfand

One Person, One Vote, One MRI?

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04.17.04: Michael Bierut

I Hear You've Got Script Trouble: The Designer as Auteur
Screenwriter William Goldman has written about how difficult it is to ascribe authorship for a film. The same may be true for graphic design, which, like filmmaking, is essentially a collaborative activity.
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04.17.04: Rick Poynor

Theory with a Small "t"
A critical writing determined by the need to shape practice will be limited in the cultural insights it can offer. This is the last thing that design writing needs when ways to engage a wider public could be opening up.
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04.15.04: Jessica Helfand

Graphic Flanerie
Graphic Design's real power comes from its ability to reach us through any of a number of means, both real and virtual, now and later. This ability to transcend the everyday and resonate in the heart, the soul, the mind and the memory—this is graphic design's reality, its legacy, and it is, decidedly, a reality that is more than a sum of its parts.
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04.10.04: William Drenttel

El Lissitzky for Pesach

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04.09.04: Rick Poynor

How to Say What You Mean
There is a crucial difference between subtle and complex ideas and needlessly convoluted forms of expression. The challenge now for design writing is to move outwards into a world in which design is everywhere.
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04.06.04: William Drenttel

The Lying Game No. 2 (Or Vietnam Redux)

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04.03.04: Rick Poynor

The Two Cultures of Design
In the past 25 years, graphic design has separated into two distinct strands. On one side there is professional practice in all its forms; on the other a self-directed design culture that is finding a wider audience.
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04.02.04: Michael Bierut

Stanley Kubrick and the Future of Graphic Design
Stanley Kubrick's attention to the nuances of graphic design, typography, and branding went far beyond his well-documented obsession with Futura Extra Bold. 2001: A Space Odyssey in particular projects a perfectly designed vision of the future that has never been topped.
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04.01.04: Jessica Helfand

The Lying Game

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03.26.04: Jessica Helfand

Annals of Typographic Oddity No. 2: Spaceship Gothic

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03.24.04: Michael Bierut

Michael McDonough's Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School
Architect Michael McDonough delineates the difference between educational theory and professional practice with "The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School."
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03.21.04: Rick Poynor

Jan van Toorn: Arguing with Visual Means
Jan van Toorn’s designs embody an idea about citizenship. They address viewers as critical, thinking individuals who can be expected to take an informed and skeptical interest in the circumstances of their world.
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03.19.04: Michael Bierut

The Book (Cover) That Changed My Life
The deceptively simple 1960s paperback cover of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" is redolent of a very specific time and place to readers who discovered the book then.
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03.16.04: Jessica Helfand

Blanket Statements

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03.13.04: Michael Bierut

George Kennan and the Cold War Between Form and Content
Diplomat George Kennan's "Long Telegram" of 1946 is a memorable synthesis of form and content, and a demonstration of how powerful form can be.
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03.12.04: Jessica Helfand

The DNA of AND: Ampersand as Myth and Metaphor

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03.09.04: Jessica Helfand

Annals of Typographic Oddity: Mourning Becomes Helvetica

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03.06.04: Michael Bierut

1989: Roots of Revolution
"Dangerous Ideas," the 1989 conference of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) chaired by Tibor Kalman and Milton Glaser, introduced many themes -- social responsibility, political engagement, professional ethics -- that still resonate today.
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03.05.04: Jessica Helfand

Regarding the Photography of Others

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03.03.04: William Drenttel

Defamiliarization: A Personal History

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02.28.04: Michael Bierut

Information Design and the Placebo Effect
It turns out that New York City is filled with buttons for pedestrians to activitate "Walk" signals at busy intersections that have never worked. Does pressing these useless buttons provide us with a sense that at least we're doing something?
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02.28.04: Rick Poynor

Bruce Mau: The Aura of Power
Bruce Mau has constructed a formidable mystique around himself as a designer whose concerns and apparent brainpower put him in a different league from most other visual communicators. How did he do it?
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02.26.04: William Drenttel

Typography and Diplomacy

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02.24.04: Jessica Helfand

The Crisis of Intent

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02.18.04: Michael Bierut

The Final Decline and Total Collapse of the American Magazine Cover
Comparing the magazine covers of today to those created for Esquire magazine in the 1960s by George Lois leads to only one conclusion: today's magazine ideal magazine cover is enticing, not arresting, aiming not for shock, but for seduction. And it stinks.
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02.11.04: Rick Poynor

Neville Brody Revisited
Forget passing questions of fashion. When future assessments of graphic design in the 1980s are made, Neville Brody will emerge as one of the most considerable designers of the period, working anywhere.
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02.05.04: William Drenttel

Call for Entries: Periodic Table of the Elements
Jessica Helfand and I are building a collection of Periodic Tables and hope to publish a book on their scientific, visual and cultural history.
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02.04.04: William Drenttel

Uut, Uup and Away
What happens when we discover new elements, especially ones on the outer fringes of the periodic table? Where did Uut and Uup come from?
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02.03.04: Jessica Helfand

You're Going to Hollywood, Baby

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02.02.04: Michael Bierut

Rob Roy Kelly's Old, Weird America
The late educator and designer Rob Roy Kelly has had a lasting influence on the profession of graphic design, particularly through his landmark book "American Wood Type."
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01.31.04: Michael Bierut

The Sins of St. Paul
Paul Rand is almost universally revered as the infallible father of American graphic design, which may have blinded his legions of admirers to his flaws: an overemphasis on logos as a communications tool, a lack of engagement in content, a detachment from history, and humorlessness.
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01.18.04: Michael Bierut

(Over)explaining Design
From the murals at Rockefeller Center to the proposals for the World Trade Center site, designers demonstrate an eagerness to explain, and perhaps overexplain, their ideas. Can the explanations get in the way of the work? Should the work speak for itself?
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01.15.04: William Drenttel

Rationalizing Absence
James Turrell's influence on World Trade Tower memorial design.
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01.13.04: Jessica Helfand

The Span of Casual Vision

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01.11.04: Rick Poynor

Behind the Billboard
Designers are battlers against entropy: a vital task, but taking the long view, often a doomed, quixotic mission. Stephen Gill’s photographs, showing the disorderly zones behind billboards, offer a reality check.
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01.11.04: Michael Bierut

Vladimir Nabokov: Father of Hypertext?
The innovative narrative technique developed by Vladimir Nabokov for his 1962 novel "Pale Fire" -- essentially a single epic poem with footnotes and commentary -- anticipated hypertext, the internet, and the interconnected world of blogs.
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01.05.04: William Drenttel

Adolf Wölfli Invents Design Brut?
Mr. Gomez has taken your basic 19th-century-madman-artist and turned him into a model 20th century graphic designer.
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01.05.04: Michael Bierut

The Forgotten Design Legacy of the National Lampoon
The rerelease of the National Lampoon's ersatz and hilarious "1964 C. Estes Kefauver Memorial High School Yearbook" is a reminder that the magazine's art directors, Michael Gross and David Kaestle, anticipated our profession's obsession with vernacular graphic languages by almost fifteen years.
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01.02.04: Jessica Helfand

Mind the Light, Light the Mind
As I began to describe Quaker Meeting for Worship — where one sits in silence for some period of time, in a large room with any number of other congregants, and where one stands to speak, on virtually any topic, when moved to do so — I realized that this presented a compelling metaphor for blogging.
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01.01.04: Mark Lamster

Notes From the Other Georgia
With a past of urban decay and trauma, the city of Tbilisi faces a precarious future.
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12.21.03: Rick Poynor

Notes on Experimental Jetset
Experimental Jetset’s argument that design should have a certain autonomy and an inner logic separate from tastes and trends makes sense, but as a rationale for defaulting to Helvetica, is it convincing?
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12.17.03: Michael Bierut

Errol Morris Blows Up Spreadsheet, Thousands Killed
Errol Morris's documentary "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara" demonstrates his mastery of information design as a poetic narrative device.
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12.16.03: Jessica Helfand

A Blog Poem, Part I

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12.16.03: William Drenttel

Design URLs
As a service to our readers over the holidays, here is a list of the twenty URLs we found to be available, and more interestingly, the close to one hundred URLs we found to be taken.
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12.11.03: Rick Poynor

Adbusters in Anarchy
Adbusters’ once orderly pages are in a state of heaving agitation. The magazine seems to be seduced by the coolness of design as a gesture, even though this is part of the surface-fixated postmodernism it deplores.
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12.07.03: William Drenttel

Shallow Water Dictionary
A couple of years ago I stumbled across a little out-of-print tract called the Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English by John R. Stilgoe, a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard.
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12.05.03: Jessica Helfand

Sign Language: Endangered Species or Utopian Uprising?
At turns provocative and peculiar, photographs of a new building in Birmingham, England, hint at a utopian uprising: No angles. No signs. In other words: no branding?
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12.02.03: Rick Poynor

Remember Picelj
The English-speaking world knows little about the design history of Communist Europe. Few will have heard of the distinguished Slovenian Ivan Picelj. His prints ask us to remember; they are full of yearning.
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11.24.03: Michael Bierut

Mark Lombardi and the Ecstasy of Conspiracy
Artist Mark Lombardi's intricate handdrawn diagrams describing the relationships behind contemporary political and financial scandals are both beautiful objects and extraordinary feats of information design.
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11.24.03: Rick Poynor

Missing Sleeve Notes
Nick de Ville’s Album: Style and Image in Sleeve Design is the best collection of album cover designs published to date. But where did all of this information come from, and why does he provide no references?
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11.22.03: Jessica Helfand

On Visual Empathy
In a world besieged by unpredictable atrocities, don't we all feel a little emotionally raw? Two recent articles in suggest that visual empathy may more critical to a productive imagination than we thought.
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11.16.03: Rick Poynor

Unnecessary Revival
As a first-time enthusiast for American Typewriter, I was happy to see it pass into history. Resurrecting the typeface now that the typewriter has given way to digital technology is just nostalgia ― soft at the core.
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11.12.03: Jessica Helfand

Implausible Fictions
At what point does the designer's interpretation threaten to skew, or misrepresent or somehow implausibly amplify information in a manner that might be considered irresponsible?
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11.10.03: Michael Bierut

Graphic Design and the New Certainties
Graphic designers claim to want total freedom, but even in this intuitive, arbitrary, "creative" profession, many of us secretly crave limitations, standards, certainties. And certainties are a hard thing to come by these days.
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11.09.03: Rick Poynor

Those Inward-looking Europeans
Three American design teachers visit London and the Netherlands. European designers, they say, are not paying attention to design history. Maybe the visitors are missing local factors and broader global issues.
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11.06.03: William Drenttel

Information Archaeology
Russ Kick is "a self-described 'information archaeologist...'" The revealing of state secrets through deconstructing a PDF.
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11.06.03: William Drenttel

Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician II
More on Edward Tufte and his critique of PowerPoint.
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11.03.03: Jessica Helfand

Color Me Kurt
Having seen Schwarzenegger as a black man before he was elected Governor, one can only imagine what's next for Colors under Kurt Andersen.
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11.02.03: Rick Poynor

It's a Man's World
Adam Parfrey’s book shows hundreds of men’s magazine covers from the 1950s painted by artists who specialized in depictions of tough guys abusing terrified women. Have we outgrown this kind of thing? Heck no.
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10.30.03: Jessica Helfand

Fatal Grandeur
Maybe design isn't going to kill you if it falls on your head. But if YOU fall, design is not exactly going to save you, either.
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10.28.03: William Drenttel

Culture Is Not Always Popular

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10.28.03: Michael Bierut

The New York Times: Apocalypse Now, Page A1
Michael Bierut on the typographic redesign of the New York Times, October 2003.
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09.26.03: Jessica Helfand

Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician I

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09.22.03: William Drenttel

VAS: An Opera in Flatland
VAS: An Opera in Flatland is the first full-length novel by Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell.
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09.14.03: William Drenttel

Twin (Cities) Type in Flux
A new typeface commissioned for the City of Minneapolis moves when the wind blows. Is this what Gutenberg imagined when he invented movable type?
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09.10.03: Jessica Helfand

The Art of Elegant Abstraction
Bill Morrison's surprising 66-minute film is now playing on the Sundance Channel. For listings, see: http://www.sundancechannel.com/film_finder/index.php?startingLetter=d
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09.06.03: Jessica Helfand

The Real Declaration

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09.02.03: William Drenttel

Paul Rand: Bibliography as Biography
This is bibliography as biography, and a posthumous testament to the considerable scope — and ongoing life — of one designer's mind. A Selected Bibliography of Books from the Collection of Paul Rand
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Design Observer

Observatory

Departments

Topics

Essays

01.30.12: Owen Edwards

01.27.12: The Editors

01.11.12: Pat Kirkham

01.05.12: James Biber

12.12.11: Eugenia Bell

11.28.11: Owen Edwards

11.23.11: Michael Erard

11.17.11: Patrick Cramsie

11.10.11: Adam Harrison Levy

10.27.11: Owen Edwards

10.06.11: Cheryl Yau

10.03.11: Kevin Walker

09.19.11: Alice Twemlow

09.14.11: Josh Berta

08.30.11: Fred A. Bernstein

08.22.11: Adam Harrison Levy

08.15.11: Adrian Shaughnessy

08.01.11: Jiwon Lee

07.25.11: Jessica Helfand

07.21.11: Michael Erard

07.14.11: Owen Edwards

07.07.11: Adam Harrison Levy

07.04.11: Jessica Helfand

06.18.11: Adam Harrison Levy

06.16.11: Elliott Earls

06.13.11: Louise Fili and Steven Heller

06.07.11: Matthew Stadler

05.31.11: Helen Walters

05.19.11: Susan Roy

05.10.11: Adrian Shaughnessy

04.28.11: Cathy Huang

04.11.11: Alexandra Lange

04.04.11: Constantin Boym

03.21.11: Fred A. Bernstein

03.14.11: Phil Patton

03.10.11: Andy Chen

03.07.11: David Antin

03.03.11: Steven Heller

02.17.11: Steven Heller

02.07.11: Steven Heller

01.31.11: Michael Bierut

01.12.11: Steven Heller

01.10.11: Rick Poynor

12.22.10: Marian Bantjes

12.20.10: Jessica Helfand

12.16.10: Rick Poynor

12.07.10: Steven Heller and Elaine Lustig Cohen

12.01.10: Rick Poynor

11.15.10: Steven Heller

11.09.10: Adrian Shaughnessy

11.01.10: KT Meaney

10.28.10: Andy Chen

10.25.10: Marian Bantjes & Jessica Helfand

10.19.10: Alexandra Lange

10.11.10: William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand

10.07.10: Leonard Koren

09.29.10: Adam Harrison Levy

09.18.10: Jan Conradi

09.17.10: Steven Heller

09.16.10: Jessica Helfand

09.15.10: Alice Twemlow

09.15.10: Steven Heller

09.14.10: Michael Bierut

09.14.10: Lorraine Wild

09.13.10: Michael Bierut

09.12.10: AIGA

09.12.10: The Editors

09.09.10: Jessica Helfand

09.07.10: Jessica Helfand

08.15.10: Alexandra Lange

08.08.10: Robert Grudin

07.25.10: Michael Bierut

07.23.10: Alexandra Lange

07.21.10: Christopher Mount

07.13.10: Gerry Shamray