Category: Essays

John Thackara|Essays

Lessons of Infra [April 2005]

Report on India's 'jugaads,' Ezio Manzini's "small is not small," the Doors of Perception conference in New Delhi, applications from China for the London school of Economics, the ExArchs and more.

Momus|Essays

Paper Spends More Time With Its Family

I remember Wired publisher Louis Rosetto, back in the heady days of "the multimedia computer" and "the dot com boom", using a phrase borrowed from biology to describe the way the web was aping previous media forms one by one. "Ontogeny …

Michael Bierut|Essays

No Headline Necessary

A wordless billboard depicting the purple-stained fingers of Iraqi voters makes a potent advertisement for that country's newborn democracy.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Design Police

Now that cell phone cameras are a ubiquitous part of everyday life, it may come as no surprise that not everyone need be a professional photographer to publish their work. There's an engaging pull to the kinds of photographs that emerge …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot

Dot Dot Dot is the most stimulating and original visual culture magazine produced by designers since Emigre's heyday in the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.

Tom Vanderbilt|Essays

A Pictograph Is Worth a Thousand Words?

I braved the midway point of one of Seoul's ever-snarled streets yesterday to take this photo, whose scene I found compelling for the strange concentration of varying visual information. Seoul is in intensely graphic city, its commercial …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Scrapbooking: The New Paste-Up

"Craft-born embellishments," note one supplier of scrapbooking products, "are penetrating an unexpected market: graphic design."

Rick Poynor|Essays

Why Architects Give Me the Willies

No matter how central graphic communication might be to our lives, architecture always dominates press coverage because it is very expensive, expresses the conditions of power, and is just plain big.

William Drenttel|Essays

Moving the Axum Obelisk

In the mid-1990s, I saw an exhibition at the New York Public Library of the greatest illustrated books of the 19th century. One book stood out for me: a massive tome by Henry H. Gorringe, titled Egyptian Obelisks and dated 1882. It’s …

Momus|Essays

Mediation for the Masses

If Thomas de Zengotita didn't exist, we'd probably have to invent him. Luckily he's real; he teaches philosophy and anthropology at New York University and he's just published a book called Mediated: The Hidden Effects of Media on People, …

Lawrence Weschler|Essays

The Aural As An Architectonic Challenge

I think of design in wider than simple visual, or visual-textual, or visual-spatial terms. Rarely, it seems, is the aural considered as an ongoing architectonic challenge, which is what the people over at Transom.org are up to. As it …

Rob Walker|Essays

For Kicks

A look at one facet of the sneaker phenomenon — that is, the way that fashion and brand loyalty can come together in what might be considered the folk art of a consumer culture.