Arts + Culture

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

The 2012 Olympic Logo Ate My Hamster

Designers often bemoan the lack of coverage given to graphic design in mainstream media. Yet when design catches the attention of journalists and commentators it usually results in a vicious mugging rather than hearty praise.

William Drenttel|Essays

Al Gore for President

In Al Gore's just-released book, Assault on Reason, he argues that the Bush Administration has used "the language and politics of fear" to "drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts or the public interest." The key …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

My Dirty Little Secret

Photograph from "Beginner Gardening." Happy News Vol. 1 No. 1, 2007.I have become an obsessive gardener. Not that I am any good at it — in fact, quite the opposite. Yet I persist in what's become an endless struggle to tame our …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Ad Reinhardt, Graphic Designer

Ad Reinhardt, detail of scrapbook page, ca. 1934. Courtesy of Smithsonian Archives of American Art.The American abstract expressionist painter Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt, who died in 1967 at the age of 54, is remembered as a …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The New Manifest Destiny

In the series Modern History (1978), the artist Sarah Charlesworth photocopied the front pages of newspapers and reframed the news by blocking out all the text, leaving only the masthead and photographs in their relative positions. The …

Jesse Nivens|Essays

In Search of Stock(y) Photography

Odalisca, Fernando Botero, 1998I work for a company that manufactures fitness equipment. While working on a new marketing piece, I found myself in the seemingly normal situation of needing a general stock photograph of an overweight …

Debbie Millman|Audio

Barbara Kruger

An interview with American artist Barbara Kruger.

Debbie Millman|Audio

Jeffrey Keyton

An interview with Jeffrey Keyton, Senior Vice Ppresident, On-Air Design and Off-Air Creative, MTV.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Dancing to the Sound in Your Head

We might not appreciate advertising conducted like a saturation bombing campaign in public spaces. Yet now, to complicate things, the personal stereo is being used as a way of reasserting spontaneity, exuberance and passion in …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Ephemera: Town & Country Cookbook

Cover, Town and Country Cookbook, 1953Books are, by their very nature, often judged by their covers. Like miniature posters or single-frame film trailers, the book cover is the visual prologue to what lies beneath. Book cover designers are …

Debbie Millman|Audio

Maira Kalman

An interview with the remarkable Maira Kalman — the closest thing we in the United States have to a National Treasure.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Good at Art

Growing up in the sixties, I couldn’t throw or catch a baseball with authority, punch someone in the face, or shoplift. But I had something I could call my very own. I was good at art.