Category: Essays

Eric Nevin|Essays

Love Letters to Sub-Antarctic Islands

Assigned one portion of a world map, distributed in pieces by visiting critic Karel Martens to his graphic design students at the Yale School of Art, Eric Nevin created a booklet of love letters to the islands of the sub-Antarctic. The …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Ad Reinhardt, Graphic Designer

Ad Reinhardt, detail of scrapbook page, ca. 1934. Courtesy of Smithsonian Archives of American Art.The American abstract expressionist painter Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt, who died in 1967 at the age of 54, is remembered as a …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface

Why choose a particular typeface for a particular situation? Here are thirteen reasons.

Michael Erard|Essays

Languages as Design Objects

Linguists have, in general, done a poor job of articulating why people should care that half of the approximately 6,900 languages spoken on the planet will be extinct in a century. And despite heaping scoops of truism and sentimentality …

Alice Twemlow|Essays

The Bandwidth of Books

Kiosk: Modes of Multiplication exhibition. Photograph by Alice Twemlow.According to the Mexican critic Gabriel Zaid, writing in So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, the human race publishes a book every 30 seconds. …

Andrew Blauvelt|Essays

Design's Ethnographic Turn

The other day, evidently as a benefit of membership in AIGA, the largest professional organization for designers in the United States, I received a little booklet entitled An Ethnography Primer. I must admit some trepidation when I receive …

John Thackara|Essays

What Will Sustainable Tourism Be Like? [May 2007]

Report on Mapping the Necklace in Durham, the Dott Design Camp, the second meeting of Doors 9, the Picture House exhibition in England, Creative Communities, and more.

Teddy Blanks|Essays

Small Potatoes

Bag of Cape Cod Potato Chips and contents: whole potato & soggy, unsalted chips, purchased 4/11/07.

Thomas de Monchaux|Essays

What If Apple Is Bad for Design?

Original Apple iPod, photo courtesy bioneural.net.Odds are you're reading this on a screen with radially-rounded corners; odds are the frame has a centimeter or so of pearly titanium grey, or milky plasticky white, or calfskin-smooth …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The New Manifest Destiny

In the series Modern History (1978), the artist Sarah Charlesworth photocopied the front pages of newspapers and reframed the news by blocking out all the text, leaving only the masthead and photographs in their relative positions. The …

Jesse Nivens|Essays

In Search of Stock(y) Photography

Odalisca, Fernando Botero, 1998I work for a company that manufactures fitness equipment. While working on a new marketing piece, I found myself in the seemingly normal situation of needing a general stock photograph of an overweight …

Steven Heller|Essays

The Nazi Triangle

Chart of concentration camp badges worn in Dachau, c. 1936.If the canard that Adolf Hitler was a superb art director is meant to glorify the art directorial profession, think again. Although historians say he was the "art dictator" of …