History

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Remembering Paul Rand

My graduate thesis at Yale was a long, dissertation-style treatise on the history of the square. Only one member of the graduate faculty actually took the time to read it — and that was Paul Rand. "With what little time I've had to …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Things, Part I

In an age characterized by elevated environmental awareness — reducing our carbon footprint, enhancing our sustainable output — we remain obsessed with our attachment to the material world.

Michael Bierut|Essays

How To Be Ugly

Whether reactionary spasm or irrevocable paradigm shift, the new trend is making design that looks ugly. The trick is to surround it with enough attitude so it will be properly perceived not as the product of everyday incompetence, but …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Type Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

About a year ago, I participated in a student portfolio review involving nearly a dozen American schools, many (most?) exhibiting the classic projects that characterize all undergraduate design programs — the color studies, the …

Michael Bierut|Essays

DéjÁ Vu All Over Again

From Fifty Years of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, published over 40 years ago in 1966. Eerie.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Science and Design: The Next Wave

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Stan Brakhage: Caught on Tape

For Stan Brakhage, that concentration resulted in extraordinary explorations of many things, including the life cycle of a moth, caught on adhesive strips of tape, and subsequently captured on film where it regained — however briefly …

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, …

Alice Twemlow|Essays

Design Criticism's Winding Road

Cover of 1955 Buick catalog.On the whole, Deborah Allen had little patience for the "expensive toys" she reviewed as car critic for Industrial Design magazine in the 1950's. She lived in New York, used public transport, and didn't even …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Another Myth Brilliantly Debunked

Popular Science, June, 1956.In 1933, just three months after the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 13 folding-carton manufacturers met in Washington DC to organize objectives and clarify for their constituents a proposed Code of Fair …

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 …

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Tony Wilson: The Postmodern Mythmaker

A Factory Sample Too, 7-inch EP. Design by Mat Cook, Intro. 1995.Tony Wilson, founder of Factory records, died on last Friday, August 10. He'd been fighting cancer for some time. Wilson had many claims to fame: he was a successful …