Category: Essays

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Are JPEGs the New Album Covers?

Black to Comm "Levitation/Astoria." 7" Lathe-Cut Picture Disc, design by Marc Richter and Renate Nikolaus. Dekorder Records.Over the past few months I've been researching a book about current record cover art. Besides hunting down examples …

William Drenttel|Essays

Julie Iovine

Julie Iovine has joined The Architect's Newspaper as executive editor. (Via Unbeige.) [WD]

William Drenttel|Essays

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 …

Rob Walker|Essays

Back to Basics Egg & Muffin Toaster

In a recent issue of The M.I.T. Sloan Management Review, Michael Schrage, a business writer and an M.I.T. researcher, challenged what Bruce Greenwald, has said about the fate of all innovative technologies: “In the long …

Michael Bierut|Essays

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.

Rick Poynor|Essays

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 …

John Thackara|Essays

Food Systems: The Design Agenda [April 2007]

Report on Doors of Perception "Juice," David Kester's parliamentarian brief, Torin Geodesign, Dwell on Design: The Intelligent House, Dott's Explorer's Club, and more.

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

The New New Typography

Vier5, Poster for Exhibition Phalanstère with Prinz Gholam, Hans Walter Müller and Matthieu LehanneurI first saw the work of French design team Vier5 (Marco Fiedler and Achim Reichert) in Tokion magazine a couple of years ago, …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Ephemera: Town & Country Cookbook

Cover, Town and Country Cookbook, 1953Books are, by their very nature, often judged by their covers. Like miniature posters or single-frame film trailers, the book cover is the visual prologue to what lies beneath. Book cover designers are …

William Drenttel|Essays

International Polar Year

International Polar Year 2007-2008, logo, designed by Ralph Percival, Mouse in the House Graphic Design, 2006.In what may turn out to be the biggest international scientific project to date, an army of thousands of scientists will spend …

Michael Bierut|Essays

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.

Rob Walker|Essays

TV Land

Buying, selling, updating, restoring and “flipping” for quick profits — it all ran together, but I watched even when I couldn’t remember if the title of a certain show was “Flip This House” or …