Technology

Debbie Millman|Audio

Marian Bantjes, Alexander Gelman + Michael Surtees

An interview with Marian Bantjes, Alexander Gelman and Michael Surtees of DesignNotes.

Momus|Essays

Paper Spends More Time With Its Family

I remember Wired publisher Louis Rosetto, back in the heady days of "the multimedia computer" and "the dot com boom", using a phrase borrowed from biology to describe the way the web was aping previous media forms one by one. "Ontogeny …

Debbie Millman|Audio

Bad Boys of Design

Designers Michael Ian Kaye, Mark Kingsley, Petter Ringbom, James Victore and Armin Vit.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

My Friend Flickr

Flickr is a digital photo sharing website and web services suite that was developed by Ludicorp, a Vancouver, Canada company founded in 2002. It’s a utopian oddity — a culture enabled by a technology that in turn enables a …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The New Paper Chase: Cyberspace on The Auction Block

People who collect things are typically drawn to social history — the idea, for example, that an entire era can somehow be encapsulated in a single artifact. Collections of artifacts testify therefore to the notion that history …

The Editors|Essays

Understanding and Action

The news from Southeast Asia seems to get worse with each passing day. It is a small consolation, but it seems that disasters, whether man-made or natural, bring out the best in our information designers. Perhaps in the face of …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Time, Space and The Microsoft Colonialists

If Microsoft displayed its marketing genius by introducing "Spaces" three weeks before Christmas, its failure as a compelling editorial product — as evidenced by its restrictive format, its templated narrowcasting, its uninspired …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Am I Blue

Despite a moment last week when things were looking up for both graphic designers and democrats, things aren't looking too good for the Kerry campaign this morning. And while I've been quite vocal in my dismissiveness about graphic …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Gentlemen Prefer Blogs

Watching Annie Duke beat out a half-dozen male competitors in the World Poker Tournament this week, I experienced an odd case of déjà vu.

William Drenttel|Essays

Font Forensics, Or Whether George W. Bush Is Hiding Something

Imagine a leading newspaper summarizing its main story in these terms: "It was the typefaces that consumed much of the news media." Meanwhile, Dan Rather, the anchor of CBS News, had to mount an aggressive defense "to protect the …

William Drenttel|Essays

Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician III

A year in advance of its publication, a chapter from Edward Tufte's next book, Beautiful Evidence, has been posted on his website under Ask E.T. "Sparklines: Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics," makes a case for the "wonderful …

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Idealistic Corporation

American corporations in the mid-twentieth century, such as IBM, Container Corporation, and General Dynamics, worked with designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Herbert Bayer and Erik Nitsche in the conviction that design was not only a …