Category: Essays

Laura Flusche|Essays

Can a Design Museum Change the World?

Luba Lukova: Designing Justice spotlights critical social justice issues that currently dominate our socially and politically polarized news cycle, including health care, women’s rights, LGBT rights, immigration, gentrification, …

Komal Sharma|Essays

What's Old is New Again

How computational design and long-standing traditions can work hand in hand.

Sean Adams|Essays

Margo Chase

The design profession and all of us lost a treasure last weekend when Margo Chase died.

Steven Heller|Essays

Finding Treasure

On the joy of collecting.

Steven Heller|Essays

Victims of the Image: Black Smears

The power of mainstream, routinely accepted, racial and ethnic stereotype images widely published in the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did more to foster the stigma of being different than even more …

Brian LaRossa|Essays

Design as a Third Area of General Education

Graphic designers are insecure. This is understandable; design lacks defensible boundaries.

Satoru Nihei|Essays

On Darkness, Doubt, and Design: Finding Light in the Act of Making

When Satoru Nihei couldn’t see a way forward, he made one—through a year of “bad” posters. What began as self-doubt became a practice in survival.

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Literary Alchemy and Graphic Design

Should graphic designers take a lead from Joycean lyricism?

Kenneth FitzGerald|Essays

Learn by Numbers: Eleven Lessons Taught Only in Design School

With two decades of design education experience behind me (and a reader of the popular design press for even longer), I’ve picked through the bulging bin of designers’ opinions about school to compile my own list of advice.

Steven Heller|Essays

Victims of the Image: Vintage Jewish Stereotypes

Racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes did not materialize from the miasma. They were, and continue to be, made by people, designers and illustrators for whom visual language is reduced to a tweet-like image short-hand.

Tiffany Peng|Essays

Sparing the Designer’s Ego

The suggestion that we designers should recognize our egos was one that should’ve been realized a lot sooner.

Steven Heller|Essays

Something to Read This Summer, Or Now!

If you are going to read one thing this summer (or now), I suggest an essay in Ben Shahn’s The Shape of Content titled “Biography of a Painting.”