Graphic Design

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Designers and Dilettantes

Still from The Sarany Motel, a film by Elliott Earls, 2007This fall, Elliott Earls, head of the 2-D Design Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, will release his second feature-length film The Sarany Motel, which he produced, directed, …

Michael Bierut|Essays

You're So Intelligent

Wanting to be taken seriously, designers yearn to be respected for their minds. Yet they take their real gifts — a miraculous fluency with beauty, an ability to manipulate form in a way that can touch people's hearts — for …

Michael Bierut|Slideshows

Flat, Simple and Funny: The World of Charley Harper

Charley Harper, "Mystery of the Missing Migrants," from Beguiled by the Wild: The Art of Charley Harper, Flower Valley Press, 1994A few years ago, we bought a little house at the southernmost tip of the Jersey Shore in a town called Cape …

Alice Twemlow|Essays

When Did Posters Become Such Wallflowers?

What was odd about many of the posters Alice Twemlow judged in a recent competition was that they didn’t promote an idea, event or product; their only purpose seemed to be entering numerous annual poster competitions.

John Corbett|Slideshows

Sun Ra, Street Priest and Father of D.I.Y. Jazz

Sun Ra, photographer unknown, circa 1950, Chicago.The space-voices got me on a space wisdom beam, and the beam led me to Chicago.— Sun Ra, 1962April 13, 1956, Chicago. Sun Ra and his friend and manager Alton Abraham arrive at Balkan …

Steven Heller|Essays

Martin Weber in the Third Dimension

Pages from "The Weber Process," promotional brochure for the Martin J. Weber Studio, c. 1952When he died on June 9, Martin J. Weber was 102. You may not know his name. I didn't. Like other toilers in the art service bullpens of New York …

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.

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 …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface

Why choose a particular typeface for a particular situation? Here are thirteen reasons.

Debbie Millman|Audio

Jeffrey Keyton

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

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

The New New Typography

Vier5, Poster for Exhibition Phalanstère with Prinz Gholam, Hans Walter Müller and Matthieu LehanneurI first saw the work of French design team Vier5 (Marco Fiedler and Achim Reichert) in Tokion magazine a couple of years ago, …