Arts + Culture

Jessica Helfand|Essays

My Friend Flickr

Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite that was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, Canada company founded in 2002. It’s a utopian oddity — a culture enabled by a technology that in turn enables a …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The New Paper Chase: Cyberspace on The Auction Block

People who collect things are typically drawn to social history — the idea, for example, that an entire era can somehow be encapsulated in a single artifact. Collections of artifacts testify therefore to the notion that history …

Tom Vanderbilt|Essays

Rise and Fall of Rock and Roll Graphic Design

Browsing recently through a collection of "band fonts," my memory drifted back to Middle School where I, plastic Bic in hand, would spend countless hours carefully inscribing the covers of my Mead notebooks with the logos and signature …

Julie Lasky|Essays

Christo's Agent Orange

Christo, The Gates, Central Park, New York 1979-2005, Drawing #047. Photo: Wolfgang Volz. ©2004 Christo.Swaying like 7,500 Hare Krishna in a can-can line, the saffron-colored fabric panels of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Central Park …

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Ikea Riot: Unsatisfied Excess?

When Ikea threw open the doors of a new store in London, the result was mayhem as customers stampeded. Evidence of social breakdown, or a sign that the utopian argument for low-cost modernist design has been won?

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.

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.

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 …

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.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Other Rand

The Fountainhead, a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand, continues to exert its influence over generations of architects and designers.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Fear and Loathing at the Design Museum

James Dyson has accused the Design Museum in London of ruining its reputation with frivolous exhibitions. For many bemused onlookers, his complaints were out of touch with evolving public perceptions of design.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Graphic Design Olympics

The event graphics and pictograms created for the Olympics by designers such as Otl Aicher, Lance Wyman and Deborah Sussman are part of a historic tradition that continues to this day.