Graphic Design

Olivia Coetzee|Essays

Use Only as Directed: Safety is not Always Safe

The safety pin, the safety match, the safety razor: are these objects as safe as their names suggest?

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Small Town Life: The Logo Stops Here

Working with Florence Knoll, Lucille McGinnis convinced her husband, Patrick B. McGinnis, that the New Haven Railroad needed a new logo. Enter Herbert Matter, Swiss-born designer, photographer and Yale professor whose own education was …

Maya P. Lim|Books

The Signs of Barcelona

A glimpse inside Louise Fili’s newest book.

Steven Heller|Essays

Earnest Elmo Calkins: Founder of Modern Advertising and a Designer You Probably Don’t Know

“It is arguable that without the puritanically raised Calkins, Modern art would never have washed up on American advertising’s shores, creative advertising teams might not have existed, and graphic design would be a different …

John Foster|Accidental Mysteries

An Archive of Czech Film Posters

Real life #TBT: a publicly accessible database with over 6,000 original, vintage posters from all periods of cinema.

Susan Yelavich|Interviews

A Sign of Resistance; A Symbol of Hope

In Poland, viral posters make “Konstytucja” a universal sign of protest.

Irene Malatesta|Essays

How Designers Can Fight Unconscious Bias: Powerful Lessons From Vectors SF

Exploring the problem and prevalence of unconscious racial and gender bias in the workplace and beyond.

Laura Flusche|Essays

Can a Design Museum Change the World?

Luba Lukova: Designing Justice spotlights critical social justice issues that currently dominate our socially and politically polarized news cycle, including health care, women’s rights, LGBT rights, immigration, gentrification, …

Steven Heller|Essays

Victims of the Image: Black Smears

The power of mainstream, routinely accepted, racial and ethnic stereotype images widely published in the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did more to foster the stigma of being different than even more …

Satoru Nihei|Essays

On Darkness, Doubt, and Design: Finding Light in the Act of Making

When Satoru Nihei couldn’t see a way forward, he made one—through a year of “bad” posters. What began as self-doubt became a practice in survival.

Sean Adams|Evidence

Joe Orton: Dangerous Collage

Is it graphic design?

Sean Adams|Evidence

Manifesto of Surrealism: 3 Tragedies

We pass through our days creating fictions to make sense of the world.