Category: Essays

Michael Bierut|Essays

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.

Lawrence Weschler|Essays

Languorous Bodyscapes

Mysterious Cloud Over Los Angeles, Photographer Unknown, November 1976.So I was visiting my friends Pepe and Dionora in Santiago, Chile, a while back — they're great art lovers and their apartment nests a collection of marvelous …

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

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. Milton Glaser's "I 'Heart' New York" may have a prior claim, and the Coca-Cola script, the Nike tick …

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Broadcast vs. Broadband

Remember the early 1990s, when techno-evangelists promised that television as we know it would soon be replaced by a searchable database of streaming video available at any time on your computer? Today, with the near-ubiquity of …

Rob Walker|Essays

Original Tastemaker

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia announced a 650-home community near Raleigh, N.C., designed and built in a collaboration between Stewart and KB Home, a builder of residential houses.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Give Me Privacy or Give Me an ID Card

Illustration by Paula Scher for Subjective Reasoning, issue entitled "Useless Information," published by Champion Paper, 1992.When I was 11 years old, I saw my mother's passport for the first time. This seemingly inconsequential event was, …

John Thackara|Essays

Utopias by Design? [March 2006]

Report on In the Bubble: Designing in A Complex World, a CustomerMade conference, car sharing, P.M.'s Bolo Bolo, Wayne A. Lemmon's defense of sprawl, and more.

Michael Bierut|Essays

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 …

Julie Iovine|Essays

Dwelling on Dwellings

Why should so many care so much about someplace intended for the use of so few? Apparently, it's inevitable. The compulsion to dwell on dwellings you'll never inhabit could be the inverse of the Marxist axiom regarding club membership.Two …

George W. Bush|Essays

I Don't Know Much About Designing Rugs

President George W. Bush hosts a meeting in the Oval Office decorated with the new presidential rug on December 20, 2001. White House and Homeland Security staff attended the meeting: (clockwise from the bottom), President George Bush, …

Rob Walker|Essays

The Story of O's

More than 60 years ago, CheeriOats were introduced to a cereal aisle far less abundant with choices than the one we know today. Cheerios — the shortened name, as of 1945 — remains a powerhouse.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

What We Talk About When We Talk About Design History

From the packaging of our belongings to the presentation of our surroundings, most of us recognize that design has, over the course of the past century, become a ubiquitous component in everyday life. Design is signage and graffiti and …