Arts + Culture

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Ladislav Sutnar: Mechanical Beauty

Dummy of dust jacket for Arnold Zweig's The Crowning of the King, 1938. Drawing, pencil and tempera paste-up. Last spring, we spent several days in Switzerland en route to Italy — a detour which was largely unremarkable except that …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

An Instrument of Sufficiently Lucid Cogitation

The legendary French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died on Tuesday at his home in the South of France, always carried a sketchbook with him. Today's obituary in The New York Times alleges that he described drawing as …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Britain and America: United in Idiocy

What do Brits and Americans think of each other? In Us & Them, a book by the satirical British illustrator Paul Davis, the two countries have one thing in common: they are both equally stupid. That’s not saying much.

Michael Bierut|Essays

To Hell with the Simple Paper Clip

Answering the question "What's your favorite designed object?" with something humble and anonymous may be a tiresome cliche, but it's one that resonates with editors of the New York Times Magazine and curators at the Museum of Modern Art.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Ed Ruscha: When Art Rises to the Level of Graphic Design

A retrospective of the drawings of Ed Ruscha raises the question: is he an artist or a graphic designer?

Michael Bierut|Essays

Barthes on the Ballpoint

"Ballpoint" is an exhibition at London's Pentagram Gallery organized by my partner Angus Hyland and featuring the work of "artists, illustrators and designers invited to make an artwork using only ballpont pen." The participants include …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Modernising MoMA: Design on Display

MoMA is broadening its approach to graphic design. Recovering this material history will assist us in understanding our broader cultural history and help to educate a more aware generation of visual communicators.

Michael Bierut|Essays

McSweeney's No. 13 and the Revenge of the Nerds

McSweeney's No. 13, published by Dave Eggers and guest edited by Chris Ware, is a masterwork of publication design and an invaluable survey of today's best comic artists and graphic novelists.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Critics and Their Purpose

Pulling a 1960s art magazine from the shelf, I opened it at random to find a long list of thoughts about art criticism assembled in 1966 by students at the Royal College of Art in London. Many of these ideas apply to design.

William Drenttel|Essays

El Lissitzky for Pesach

We all have images in our mind of the work of the Russian artist El Lissitzky: formal modernism, geometric constructions, typographic abstractions. This image was enlarged when I encountered the wonderful illustrations from an early book …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Lying Game

Agence France-Presse—Getty ImagesEarlier this week, Nationalist Party protesters in Taiwan picketed their highly disputed political election with doctored images of President Chen Shui-bian: the idea was to depict his shame by …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Jan van Toorn: Arguing with Visual Means

Jan van Toorn’s designs embody an idea about citizenship. They address viewers as critical, thinking individuals who can be expected to take an informed and skeptical interest in the circumstances of their world.