History

Michael Bierut|Essays

Design by Committee

"Design by committee" is usually thought to be a bad thing, but it has produced one great piece of architecture, the United Nations Headquarters Building.

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Robert Brownjohn and The Big Idea

Left: Robert Brownjohn. Right: Liberace. There's an essay on Liberace by art critic Dave Hickey that's so full of vivid insight that it persuaded me, on a recent trip to the US, to visit the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas. Amongst other …

Lorraine Wild|Essays

Good Font, Shame About The Reporting

A critical look at how mainstream media misreports typography and film design, ignoring historical accuracy and the designers behind the visuals that shape culture.

Lorraine Wild|Essays

Think Regional, Act Annual

Print Regional Design Annual, cover by Abbott Miller, 2005Flying from New York to Los Angeles last week, I spent the long hours at 35,000 feet doing something I had not done in years: I read Print Magazine's "2005 Regional Design Annual" …

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Final Days of AT&T

The acquisition of AT&T by SBC will result in, among other things, the retirement of one of Saul Bass's most well-known logos. Does anyone care?

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Shock Of The Old: Rethinking Nostalgia

Nostalgia has always been a bad word for designers. Like "retro" and "vintage" it smacks of a sort of been-there-done-that ennui — looking backward instead of forward, nostalgia presents as the very antithesis of the new. Even …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Where Are the Design Critics?

There is no reason why design criticism shouldn’t take an oppositional view of design's instrumental uses and its social role, but few design writers seem motivated to produce this kind of criticism.

William Drenttel|Essays

Catastrophic Imaginings: The Design of Disaster

A still from Refraction, a video by Aernout Mik.A decade ago, we were living in a loft on a quiet park in the shadows of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. One spring evening, I took our dog for her late night walk — it was …

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Decoding Coldplay's X&Y

At a time when invisible data streams of binary information fed straight to our desktops are doing away with the need for album covers, it's odd to find a record sleeve as the subject of media comment and speculation. Odder still that the …

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Man Who Saved Jackson Pollock

Herbert Matter, the designer who stored away a cache of recently-discovered Jackson Pollock paintings, deserves a similar rediscovery.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Mevis and Van Deursen: Rueful Recollections, Recycled Design

In their self-edited monograph, Dutch graphic designers Mevis and Van Deursen turn their backs on their professed commitment to ideas and treat the book mainly as an opportunity for undemanding aesthetic play.

Lorraine Wild|Essays

A Design Annual Captures 1968

The images above are taken from one of the oddest artifacts of the design profession created during the sixties: a booklet documenting the work chosen for the 14th Annual Type Director's Club Show of 1968 (not to be confused with …