Education

Steven Heller|Essays

Silas H. Rhodes, Founder of SVA

Silas H. Rhodes, chairman of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, died last Thursday at 91. He was a progressive educator who established a uniquely collaborative learning environment that delicately balanced creative independence …

Debbie Millman|Audio

Alice Twemlow

British-born Alice Twemlow is a design critic and the author of What Is Graphic Design For? She also chairs the Design Criticism department at the School of Visual Arts in New York.     

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.

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 …

Debbie Millman|Audio

Elliott Earls

On this episode, Debbie interviews designer and performance artist Elliott Earls, designer-in residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Not-So-Golden Age of Zero Tolerance

When I was a student, the assignments and their expected outcomes were intentionally conceived as chore-like, specific and frankly, narrow. This was the age of zero tolerance: deviation from a designated format was neither an approved …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

What Makes A Good Poster?

"Designing Effective Posters," Design by Jeff Radel, PhD., Department of Occupational Therapy Education, University of Kansas Medical Center.At its core, the school science fair of my youth was an excuse to engage in two of my favorite …

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Please CARE

One of graphic design's strengths in its relatively short history has been its flexibility. The field has adapted to technological and economic changes over the last half century by absorbing elements of computer science, animation, …

Debbie Millman|Audio

John Maeda

A disussion with former MIT Media Lab Director John Maeda, who is currently the 16th President of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Academia: The New Exoticism

It's May — the month of hay fever, television sweeps and final reviews. Of the first two, I can say only this: as a veteran allergy sufferer, I watched the swan-song episode of The West Wing in an antihistamine-induced haze, and it …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Eight-and-a-Half by Eleven

An installation of over 10,000 tiled pieces 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper redeems what has often been dismissed as a banal graphic format.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Cease and Design

When my daughter, Fiona, was five years old and first learning to write, she came home from school one day and set to work. Pencil gripped firmly in her tiny hand, she wrote a word — then plunked her first and second fingers down …