Category: Essays

Momus|Essays

The Strange Commercial

Eventually all advertising will seem strange. Brad Stockshot and Cindy Clipart, modelling chunky knitwear on the beach, will look like absurd freaks. The 2005 Audi A6, as sleek as an arrowhead up on that billboard, will seem as archaic as …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Authenticity: A User's Guide

Graphic designers take pleasure in simulation. This makes defining authenticity a tricky thing.

William Drenttel|Essays

Chris Marker: La Jetée

For years, I've owned a copy of La Jetée, a book about the film by Chris Marker, the experimental filmmaker. Designed by Bruce Mau and published by MIT Press/Zone Books in 1993, this is one of those design books that has ascended …

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Comfort of Style

The design process at the World Trade Center site has attracted enormous interest on one hand, and marginalized the role of designers on the other, as described in Philip Nobel's book Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle …

Rob Walker|Essays

Hyperreality Hobbying

“Reborning'” is the name that has emerged for a curious process of altering and enhancing a baby doll to look and even to feel as much like a human baby as possible.

John Thackara|Essays

Street-level Innovation [February 2005]

Report on Solomon Kolkota's study of urban planning in China, Usman Haque's workshop on open source architecture, sustainable societies, the 'infra of sharing,' Project Clinics at Doors 8, and more.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

All Rise!

On the scale of true confessions, this one lies somewhere between admitting I once wrote for a soap opera and divulging my complete incapacity to recall keyboard commands in Adobe Illustrator. But there it is: when I'm hopelessly stuck, a …

Rob Walker|Essays

Surface Effects (re: Shepard Fairey)

When Shepard Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, a friend wanted to know how to make stencils. Fairey offered to show him, using picture of the wrestler Andre the Giant.

Momus|Essays

The Vice Design Issue

I happen to be reading through the Vice magazine Design Issue while sitting in a wooden house in Hokkaido, North Japan, watching an NHK TV special celebrating the design work of Charles and Ray Eames. It's the perfect counterpoint. I …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Paris Dispatch: A Long Way Down

It is difficult, perhaps impossible not to contemplate death on the occasion of a funeral, but to do so in an environment of such remarkable beauty — and such ineffable sadness — amplifies our sense of here and now, of where …

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Best Artist in the World

Alton Tobey, a little-known commercial illustrator, created a body of work in the early sixties that continues to inspire.

Lorraine Wild|Essays

New Year's Housecleaning

I am a member of a typical Los Angeles turn-of-the-century multi-cultural family, so the concept of the New Year as we practice it stretches from its mere Gregorian beginning on January 1st through the much grander lunar New Year of early …