Category: Essays

Showing 2545 – 2556 of 2,790 results

Michael Bierut|Essays

My Favorite Book is Not About Design (or Is It?)

Act One, the autobiography of playwright and director Moss Hart, is the best, funniest, and most inspiring description of the creative process ever put down on paper.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

New Models for Design Efficiency: Introducing Otto

Lorraine Wild|Essays

Exhibitions by Renzo Piano and 2x4

Vitra Showroom by 2x4, New York 2003. Photo: Courtesy of Vitra.Designers invited to display their work in the space of a museum face quandaries. Certainly the largest of these is that almost nothing about the processes of design — …

Rick Poynor|Essays

We Are All Editors Now. Or Are We?

Many designers aspire to be editors. But being an editor is not simply about choosing some things you like and throwing them together. Editing is about deep engagement with content and the construction of meaning.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Obvious, Shunned by So Many, Is Successfully Avoided Once Again

Does anyone devote as much energy to avoiding simple, sensible solutions as the modern graphic designer? Publications of designers' own work demonstrate what effort they go through to needlessly complicate what might be simple solutions.

William Drenttel|Essays

Catastrophic Imaginings: The Design of Disaster

A still from Refraction, a video by Aernout Mik.A decade ago, we were living in a loft on a quiet park in the shadows of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. One spring evening, I took our dog for her late night walk — it was …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Adventures of Cynic Boy and Design Mom in 3D

Left: Miramax Film Corp, ©2005. Right: Reddy Kilowatt Ashton B. Collins Sr. ©1926.Now that summer is here and my children are out of school, I have embarked upon a series of seasonal activities familiar to working mothers …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Call Me Shithead, or, What's in a Name?

Everyone has experience with naming, whether a baby or even a goldfish. The fact that it's so easy is what makes it so hard. The biggest problem, of course, is that new names seldom sound good at first.

Rick Poynor|Essays

In Memoriam: My Manual Typewriter

The fully evolved typewriter is a 20th-century industrial archetype. It feels inevitable, almost elemental, like one of those object types, such as a chair or a fork, that simply had to exist in this universe of forms.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Cut: When Life Imitates Art (I Mean Design)

I dreamt a few nights ago that I was watching a television game show called Photoshop! in which designers, as contestants, were asked to capture images from the web in front of a live studio audience. Suddenly a photo of a horse merged …

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Decoding Coldplay's X&Y

At a time when invisible data streams of binary information fed straight to our desktops are doing away with the need for album covers, it's odd to find a record sleeve as the subject of media comment and speculation. Odder still that the …

Michael Bierut|Essays