Category: Essays

Tom Vanderbilt|Essays

A Review of a Show You Cannot See

Stuck the other day at John F. Kennedy airport in New York, with inescapable CNN thoughtscreens blaring, cell-phone dialogues traversing my own personal airspace, and every decent magazine already read, I longed for a moment of quiet …

Rick Poynor|Essays

The I.D. Forty: What Are Lists For?

How do we measure one kind of achievement in design against another to arrive at a ranking? The truth is we can’t. The real purpose of I.D.’s list was to underscore the magazine’s position as selector and taste-maker.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Robert Polidori's Peripheral Vision

Robert Polidori's photographs depict contemporary architecture in the context of a decidedly imperfect world.

William Drenttel|Essays

Bird in Hand: When Does A Copy Become Plagiarism?

Left: STEP Inside Design, Cover, Jan.-Feb. 2005. Right: Photograph by Victor Schrager.Every once and a while, the plagiarism of one artist's work by another crosses the line, or so I thought. I wrote a different piece for Design Observer a …

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Mysterious Disappearance of Carol Hersee

The story of Carol Hersee’s portrait as Test Card F: since it first appeared in 1967 on BBC2, Carol’s face has been on-air for over 70,000 hours.

The Editors|Essays

Understanding and Action

The news from Southeast Asia seems to get worse with each passing day. It is a small consolation, but it seems that disasters, whether man-made or natural, bring out the best in our information designers. Perhaps in the face of …

Rob Walker|Essays

The Good, the Plaid and the Ugly

Reborn dolls, 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

Tools for Citizen Services [January 2005]

Report on designing knowledge, Doors of Perception 8 in New Dheli, the street as innovation, ethnography in innovation, enabling services and more.

Mark Lamster|Baseball

The Collector

Jefferson R. Burdick transformed the act of baseball card collecting into a culture of commercialism, an achievement that haunted him throughout his career.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

A Blog Poem, Part II

Designers come, designers goInventing things to crit.But New Year's Eve's our chance to sharePure silliness — and wit.("Speak Up!"—Armin Vit.)

The Editors|Essays

2004 Book Recommendations

The Editors of Design Observer present their book recommendations for the 2004 calendar year.

William Drenttel|Essays

In Remembrance of Susan Sontag

In Remembrance of Susan Sontag: a designer's twenty-five years of interaction with the legandary writer.