Eight-and-a-Half by Eleven

Installation view, MFA Thesis Show, Yale School of Art Graphic Design Program, 2006. Photo: Dylan Fracareta

8 1/2 x 11 inches. I've been avoiding this format all my life. At my first job in New York, we used European-sized stationery...

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I Am a Plagiarist

Left: Page from 12 T y p o graphical Interpretations, Willi Kunz, 1975
Right: Poster for the Yale School of Architecture, Michael Bierut, 2005

The New York media world has been obsessed of late with the story of Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard undergraduate who landed a two-book deal for $500,000 from Little, Brown while still in high school. Within weeks of the publication of her first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, allegations arose that she had copied passages from books by another young-adult author. Soon schadenfreude-fueled investigators uncovered similaries to still other books. Confronted with the near-duplicate passages, Viswanathan first denied everything ("I have no idea what you are talking about."), then conceded inadvertent wrongdoing ("Any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious."), and finally admitted to The New York Times that the problem was her photographic memory ('''I remember by reading...

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