Arts + Culture

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Art Director Ken

Art Director Ken © Mattel, 2003.Ken, who turned 46 yesterday, shares a birthday with eighteenth-century chemist Joseph Priestly, nineteenth-century astronomer Percival Lowell, and twentieth-century singer songwriter, Neil Sedaka. (And …

Dan Nadel|Essays

This is Not My Design Life Now

Mat Brinkman, Melt Banana and Lightning Bolt at Ft. Thunder, 1998In another life, I was a regular contributor to design magazines. But I grew less interested in that and more in simply writing and making books. So, interested in getting …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Lost, O Lost

Photograph of Evelyn Waugh by Douglass Glass."Literature is either the essential or nothing." — Georges BatailleThe English writer Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) is perhaps best known for his satirical portraits of the British upper …

Debbie Millman|Audio

Andrea Deszo

An interview with designer, artist and educator Andrea Deszo.

David Stairs|Essays

That (Other) 1970's: The Last King of Scotland

Faber & Faber book cover, The Last King of Scotland, detail of illustraton by Steve Caplin, 1998.The Last King of Scotland, director Kevin McDonald's film about Idi Amin's notorious presidency (1971-79), recently opened in Uganda to great …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Illusion of Certainty

Allan McCollum, Each and Every One of You, 2004. 1200 digital inkjet prints. Photograph courtesy Barbara Krakow Gallery.Last fall, at a small gallery on West 22nd Street in New York, the artist Allan McCollum exhibited his new system for …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

I'm Not Ready to Make Nice

It's a tough time to be a critic. Everyone's got an opinion they're all-too-eager to deliver, and in today's wiki-esque maelstrom of information sharing, we're all supposed to be equal. In the best case scenario, knowledge aggregation is …

William Drenttel|Slideshows

The Good Citizen's Alphabet

Cover design, Gaberbocchus Press, illustration by Franciszka Themerson, 1953.In these political times, so polarized with heated rhetoric, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a copy of Bertrand Russell's The Good Citizen's …

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

"I Sold My Soul And I Love It"

Creative Review cover, February 2007.The current issue of Creative Review is "guest edited" by hip British advertising agency Mother. As is the way with "guest editors," Mother hasn't actually edited the magazine; instead, they've …

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Interface Space

"Hans Gremmen with Monique Gofers, Empty Trashcan, 2004You probably spend hours a day staring at this screen — working, playing, talking to friends, shopping. With so many creative people spending so much time on their computers it …

Michael Bierut|Essays

The It Factor

In their 1983 book Quintessence: The Quality of Having It, Owen Edwards and Betty Cornfeld created an elegant and influential treatise in what makes something the real thing, a lesson that Steve Jobs has obviously absorbed.

Lorraine Wild|Slideshows

Sister Corita: The Juiciest Tomato

In Daniel Berrigan’s words, Sister Corita is a "witch of invention." And there is no doubt that at least in those tumultuous years of the 1960s, her powers of invention seemed supernatural, if not divine... Corita’s work stands …