Media

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.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Unbearable Lightness of Fred Marcellino

Remembering Fred Marcellino, the designer and illustrator who dominated the look of quality fiction dustjackets in the 1980s.

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Charles Dickens and The BBC

Who would have guessed that a BBC costume drama would provide us with Exhibit-A in the defense’s case — that a mass audience can be engaged without pandering to base instincts?

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Bartleby™

In his classic story of Wall Street, Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville recounts the tale of a humble copyist employed by the story's narrator. Could Bartleby's perfectly crafted refrain be the appropriate response to a world where …

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

Innovation is the New Black

Innovation is the latest buzzword to overtake the design profession. What does it mean?

William Drenttel|Essays

David Hughes: Caricaturist of Our Time

"Gulf War," illustration by David Hughes, Observer Magazine, 1991.In the 1970s, I worked at the Forum Gallery in New York City. My job was to sort through hundreds of unattributed portraits by David Levine — the caricaturist for the …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Emigre: An Ending

Issue 69 of Emigre will be the last. In its heyday, it was the most consistently interesting design publication produced by anyone, anywhere. By 1990, it was one of those magazines you simply had to get hold of and read straight away.

Jessica Helfand|Video

John Stossel on Graphic Design

This film was made in 2005 for 20/20, a beloved AIGA National Conference segment in which twenty designers are asked to talk about something for one minute each. This particular year, the conference itself had no theme, leaving Jessica …

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.

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Guardian’s New European Look

The Guardian's choice of the "Berliner" format, half-way between broadsheet and tabloid, is an inspired alternative. The paper is the first British title to adopt this European page size. Elegant, well-proportioned pages make its tabloid …

William Drenttel|Essays

Reading the News & Charting Death

A few weeks ago, Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of U.S. Homeland Security, made the mistake of suggesting that security in the subways (after bombings in London's "Tube") was less of a priority than security in the air. "The truth of the …