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There it was: "THOUGHTS"! How could I not have seen it before? I was sitting at the dining room table in my aunt?s house in Massachusetts when I looked up and noticed this needlepoint sampler for the first time.... [...]
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Charles Brannock only invented one thing in his life: that metal thing in shoe stores that the salesman uses to measure your feet. Is it the most perfect invention of the 20th century? [...]
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An elegy to the makeready ? those sheets of paper, re-fed into a press to get the ink balances up to speed, leaving a series of often random, palimpsest-like, multiple impressions on a single surface ? in the digital age. [...]
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"I come to you, like all commencement speakers, as an emissary from the future." The commencement address delivered by Julie Lasky at the Cranbrook Academy of Art on May 9, 2008. [...]
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It turns out that the "recycling symbol" at the bottom of my yogurt container had nothing to do with its recyclability. So why was it there? My curiosity led to findings around which I built a design class. [...]
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Paul Rand held Hadank in the highest esteem because he practiced modernist formal principles even though he did not follow its dogma or style. And most important, as Rand said ?Hadank was then and always an original.? A profile of O.H.W. Hadank by Steven Heller... [...]
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Dmitri Siegel explores the various practices of design attribution. [...]
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Iron Man is the fulfillment of all the computer-integrated movies were ever meant to be, and by computer-integrated, I mean just that: beyond the technical wizardry of special effects, this is a film in which the computer is incorporated, like a cast member, into the development of the plot itself. [...]
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On a sunny morning in the early 1970s my neighbor, the small shrill widow of a minister and professor of theology at Harvard, dragged me into her house and opened the drawer of her late husband's desk. Choose, choose... [...]
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Charles Brannock only invented one thing in his life: that metal thing in shoe stores that the salesman uses to measure your feet. Is it the most perfect invention of the 20th century? [...]
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1967's "Toy of the Year" was the embodiment of controlled emotion in the face of that decade?s social unrest and conflict: John Bowers remembers The Spirograph. [...]
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The National Design Awards were announced today, and Michael Bierut is the recipient of the Design Mind award. We can think of no more suitable award for this writer, critic and working designer. [...]
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Contemporary posters published within the last two years are eligible for the Chicago International Poster Biennial and may be submitted by any poster designer in the world with no entry fee. Physical entries must be received in Chicago no later than May 27, 2008. [...]
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"Scrapbooks (like these) remind us that creating an album from saved matter does not necessarily provide an accurate self-portrait..." An essay by Jessica Helfand from her new book on the occasion of National Scrapbooking Day. [...]
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Where once the sky is falling scenarios would not, as Dr. Flicker said, ?happen for billions of years yet,? the doomsday clock is steadily ticking away. Wouldn?t it be nice if we could go back to the days when fiction was not fact. [...]
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A reminder to our many readers that Design Observer has a rich archive of slide shows for your enjoyment: Design Observer: Tables of Contents Tom Vanderbilt: Blast-Door Art Don Hamerman: Baseballs Tom Manning: Spam Cartoons Andrew Blauvelt: Peter Seitz Portfolio... [...]
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After seeing the Fella and McFetridge show, in its context ? in California, in LA, in the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall ? it occurs to me that this was also a show about the trajectories of modernism, specifically, the trajectories of American modernism... [...]
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Standard Operating Procedure is a gorgeous, pulsing stopwatch of a movie, and like all of Morris's best work, its structure is based on a rhythmic series of revelations. [...]
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How adman George Lois chronicled the sixties with his cover designs for Esquire magazine, with a peek behind the scenes at the legendary famous Muhammad-Ali-as-St. Sebastian photoshoot. [...]
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Ode To My Toaster, a poem by Allan Chochinov. [...]
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I?ve never worked in a design studio where music wasn?t played pretty much constantly. Nor can I recall visiting a studio where music wasn?t being played, or where designers weren?t wired up to headphones and bobbing rhythmically to unheard sounds. What is it with graphic designers and music? [...]
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Last year, on the occasion of "Next," the AIGA's Biennial National Design Conference in Denver, Design Observer published a little book, The Next Page: Thirty Tables of Contents. We are sharing it here as a slide show... [...]
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One night in 1991, just before Christmas, I was walking down St. Mark's Place in Manhattan, heading for my tiny but charming bed-sit on Sixth Street. I'd been around the neighborhood for more than twenty years by then. I... [...]
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Today, designers for mainstream advertising companies, weaned on alternative approaches, have folded the underground into the mainstream and called it cool. [...]
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So, it’s 1966 and two guys are hanging around their Los Angeles apartment, musing about the sort of things that people mused about in the Sixties. The aesthetic philosophers in question were the artist Ed Ruscha and the artist/comedy writer/composer/performer Mason Williams... [...]
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Welcome to the mordant, jingoistic and occasionally crude world — but rarely before seen world — of “blast-door art” — the cave paintings of the nuclear era. [...]
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Since 1992, every ballpark in America has been designed on the nostalgic model of Baltimore's Camden Yards, including the new parks for the Yankees and the Mets. Why is it impossible to build a baseball stadium that looks like it belongs in the 21st century? [...]
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Designers are famously nauseated by novices' use of neutral quotes — or dumb quoes — in place of true quotes. Why do we care so much? Should we? [...]
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Baudelaire's death mask gathered dust for years on top of a tall bookshelf in the front hall of my childhood home in Jamaica Plain. When I was a teenager I scaled the shelf one day after school looking for... [...]
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There was probably no more galvanizing nor polarizing emblem during the 1960s than the peace symbol. And perhaps few symbols have had origins surrounded in as much mystery and controversy [...]
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One of the great ironies of contemporary culture is the degree to which pro-forma warnings read as largely invisible. “Viewer Discretion Advised” tells us we’ve been warned... [...]
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So, what of productive failure with respect to graphic design and typography? The idea of failing again and again for a reason? Does it somehow help to define the limits of professional practice? [...]
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AIGA Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism seek to increase the understanding and appreciation of design, both within the profession and throughout American life. Submissions for the $10,000 Writing Award and the $1,000 Student Award are due before June 2, 2008. [...]
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In spite of the tawdry glamour of "high-priced call girls," let's remember that this supposedly victimless crime takes a vast human toll that goes far beyond the embarrassment of powerful men. Marc Rabinowitz’s project invites us to imagine prostitution’s stark statistics... [...]
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Thoughts on the enduring influence of bershon, "how you feel when you’re 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture." [...]
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Design Observer is pleased to announce that it has partnered with Coroflot to offer a Job Board on our site. (You will find access to the job board in our right-hand column.) Given the large and diverse audience here, we... [...]
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Chip Kidd's new novel, The Learners: A Novel. An excerpt courtesy of the author.... [...]
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Trivializing the swastika is not a crime, but it can be dangerous, particularly since it continues to be used as a weapon of hate. Perhaps this book would have best been titled, “We Have Ways of Making You Wince.” [...]
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Everyone who sees this computer cabinet has the same reaction: "What the hell is that thing?" "Oh, just my stereo," I reply. It's about five feet tall and three and a half feet wide with Star Trek-era modern brushed... [...]
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New books have been piling up here at Design Observer. We thought we'd share some of the many recently published titles we have received over the past couple of months — with a few older titles just stumbled upon.... [...]
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Baseball spring training opens Tuesday. It is in this spirit that I stumbled upon the photographs of Don Hamerman. For the past few years, as he's walked his dog at a local park, he's picked up lost and forgotten baseballs. There are dozens of them now, all lovingly photographed. [...]
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“Critical design” is design that, through its form, can question and challenge industrial agendas; embody alternative social, cultural, technical or economic values; and act as a prop to stimulate debate and discussion amongst the public, designers and industry. As critical design gathers momentum, where is graphic design? [...]
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I found this old photo in a box at the back of my attic. It shows a motel in Flagstaff, Arizona where I stayed for a couple of nights in May 1978. I was 20, it was my first visit to the US, and for three weeks I had been [...]
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Magazines are the sole industry in which you cannot help but judge a book by its cover. [...]
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The birth, death, and debate around one of Paul Rand's last logos: the "crooked E" he created for Enron. [...]
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I received a Grammy award, several years ago, for a CD package I had designed. Receiving a Grammy for a package design is like winning a Nobel Peace Prize for giving up a seat on the subway to an... [...]
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If clients are happy to refer to the output of graphic designers as look and feel, where?s the harm? [...]
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Voting on Tuesday, February 5, in the U.S. presidential primaries? We hope you will contribute a photograph to the Polling Place Photo Project. [...]
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If graphic design's become so edgy as a profession that we're getting name-dropped in hit movies, maybe it's time to get serious about how we're really being portrayed. [...]
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if graphic design's become so edgy as a profession that we're getting name-dropped in hit movies, maybe it's time to get serious about how we're really being portrayed. [...]
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From July 19, 1977 to February 28, 1981, the security staff at New York's Roosevelt Raceway kept a fastidious record of lost property. The result — 152 pages of wayward mittens, misplaced wallets and hundreds of personal items — is as much a record of the social history of a [...]
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Dmitri Siegel visits Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour's post-modern classic Guild House in Philadelphia and rereads Learning from Las Vegas. [...]
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The modern corporate logo was born in Germany shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, the direct descendent of burgher crests, coats of arms, trade and factory marks. One of the most prolific of these mark makers is barely recognized in design histories today, except for the occasional footnote. [...]
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James Traub on the Art Rogers vs. Jeff Koons legal case, perhaps relevant to recent discussions about Richard Prince's art. [...]
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A German-made plastic pencil sharpener shaped like a TV. Its 3-D screen shows a girl trapeze artist in black tights swinging over a circus crowd. I found it in 1992 in the top drawer of my assigned desk at... [...]
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The presence of Task asks, How do you make a magazine for the post-critical, post-movement moment of contemporary graphic design? [...]
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We are pleased to announce that the Polling Place Photo Project is continuing into the 2008 presidential primaries and election, supported by a new partnership of The New York Times, AIGA and Design Observer. [...]
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Here's the real question: could a climbing crime rate and the rise of the iPod be related? Has the iPod's design increased its likelihood of theft, and if so, what role could Apple's designers play in developing solutions? [...]
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In the late 50s, Swiss designer Ernst Bettler created a series of seemingly harmless posters that brought down a drug company with a Nazi past. It's a great story, but it never happened. Why do we need to believe in Ernst Bettler? [...]
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I collect First World War artifacts, but not because I am one of these guys who spends his weekends reenacting battles. I have trouble even understanding why someone would want to act out the trench warfare of 1917. This... [...]
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This essay, a rememberance of Paul Rand, is taken from Michael Kroeger's book, Paul Rand: Conversations with Students, which will be published on January 3 by Princeton Architectural Press. [...]
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There it was: "THOUGHTS"! How could I not have seen it before? I was sitting at the dining room table in my aunt's house in Massachusetts when I looked up and noticed this needlepoint sampler for the first time.... [...]
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In only a few short years, blogs have significantly evolved. And if blogs, and the people who engage with them, are to be respected, then we should all know who everyone is, and everyone ? whoever and whatever they have to say ? should not hide behind the digital veil. [...]
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In only a few short years, blogs have significantly evolved. And if blogs, and the people who engage with them, are to be respected, then we should all know who everyone is, and everyone — whoever and whatever they have to say — should not hide behind the digital veil. [...]
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When I was seven I lived next door to an exotic old woman and she gave me this Santa. In hindsight, the woman was old and probably a cardiologist — only exotic in the sense that she was very... [...]
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Ten years ago, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid attempted to create the most irritating song in the world. It's now available online, and it's perfect for the holidays! [...]
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Convention was disrupted last Thursday night in New York City at Designism 2:0 when the sometimes ?self-congratulatory? nature of the Art Director Club?s social conscience-raising event was upended by Vanity Fair media critic Michael Wolff?s unforgiving critique of design?s do-goodery. [...]
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Convention was disrupted last Thursday night in New York City at Designism 2:0 when the sometimes "self-congratulatory" nature of the Art Director Club's social conscience-raising event was upended by Vanity Fair media critic Michael Wolff's unforgiving critique of design's do-goodery. [...]
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Fuel's realization that they possessed the transferable skills and instincts to publish thought-provoking books with editorial depth, has allowed them to create a publishing venture that offers a fresh take on visual culture. [...]
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The Aphex Twin Big Bottom Exciter is one of several pieces of recording equipment that sit idly in the corner of my kitchen. As the name indicates, this twelve-by-two-by-two-inch box is designed to excite your bottom. During my DJ... [...]
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The Aphex Twin Big Bottom Exciter is one of several pieces of recording equipment that sit idly in the corner of my kitchen. As the name indicates, this twelve-by-two-by-two-inch box is designed to excite your bottom. During my DJ... [...]
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An artichoke sat on our kitchen windowsill for months, some years ago. At first, it was ugly and disgusting and kinda gooey ? and guests would say "ick." Then it slowly dried out, changed color, became something else altogether.... [...]
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An artichoke sat on our kitchen windowsill for months, some years ago. At first, it was ugly and disgusting and kinda gooey — and guests would say "ick." Then it slowly dried out, changed color, became something else altogether.... [...]
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We are delighted to introduce two new contributing writers to our line-up: Andrew Blauvelt and Rick Poynor will be posting regularly from now on. [...]
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Everyone we know reverentially displays in his home or workspace at least one oddball, funny-looking, apparently worthless item as though it were a precious, irreplaceable artifact. [...]
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The fog that Stephen Eskilson attributes to contemporary practice permeates this new history of graphic design published by Yale University Press. [...]
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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. [...]
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What does it mean when Harvard Business School makes a list of top design schools? Two words: muddled thinking. [...]
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On a sweeping and fully realized scale, Richard Ross's photographs probes the disciplinary dynamics in the cruel hidden places you would expect them, and in the banal everyday places you might not have even noticed them. [...]
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Do you make things look nice? Do you spend more time worrying about nuance and aesthetics than substance and meaning? Do you fiddle with style while ignoring the big picture? If your answers are yes, yes, or yes, then you are a decorator. [...]
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In a small church somewhere in the southern Pyrénées stands a wall covered in fragments of marble and ceramic tile. Declaring gratitude for any of a number of invisible reasons ? personal, spiritual ? the simple repetition of a... [...]
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Designer Tom Manning creates surreal comic strips using the nonsensical text of spam emails. [...]
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The story of Peter Seitz provides one example, and we can rest assured that there are many more stories just like his in cities across the country ? modernism in the fly-over zone, if you will ? which add a critical human dimension to design?s rich cultural heritage. [...]
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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 rather as evidence of one's attunement with the zeitgeist. [...]
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Designers make choices about the appropriateness of type based on any number of criteria, and ?liking it? is indeed one of them. But is that enough? [...]
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Nichelle Narcisi, winner of last month's Command X competition at the AIGA Next Conference in Denver, presents "Except You," her proposed campaign to raise the voter participation rate for 18 to 24 year olds. [...]
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What if I decided to apply design thinking to the U.S. military? What roles could design thinking play in war? A recent The New York Times article, "Army Enlists Anthropologists in War Zone," makes these questions especially relevant today. [...]
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Stephen Doyle is a graphic wordsmith. [...]
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Perhaps he was right and I was wrong? Perhaps it is dumb of me to believe that the only design worth bothering about is design born out of a mixture of personal enquiry and intelligent intuition? I realized I was suffering from the designer?s disease: empathy. [...]
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Observers seem to track the nations, not the languages, of the 104 Nobel-winning writers. Yet parsing the list of 25 languages that they wrote in turns up many interesting instances of disproportion. [...]
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From Fifty Years of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, published over 40 years ago in 1966. Eerie.... [...]
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Scientists probe and manipulate and channel and divide; they split and fuse and spike and engineer; but most of all, they look. As a designer, to spend any time with scientists is to become at once profoundly aware of our similarities and devastated by that which divides us. [...]
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I’ve always wondered why anyone with taste would pay thousands of dollars to publish one of those text-heavy, type-awful, full-page magazine advertisements void of any semblance of graphic design nuance or sophistication. [...]
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It is now a Design Observer tradition to host the best party at the AIGA Biennal Conference. This year's event is in Denver at The Milk Bar @ The Shelter. Friday, October 12 from 9:00pm to 2:00am. 1037 Broadway, "South of Colfax Nightlife District." [...]
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Officially published for the first time as a posthumous tribute: a loving parody of the writing of the late, great architectural critic Herbert Muschamp. [...]
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Why does the art that adds so much to the texts published in The New York Times disappear? Why cannot The New York Times simply index the art that it publishes, at least leaving the bibliographic tracings of the work in their newspaper? [...]
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Remember back in the late 1980s, when Minneapolis was a hotbed of creative energy? Back when brochures were tied together with braid and twigs? Minnesota was making a play for the next big thing: the North Woods look. Well, it's back... [...]
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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 — the magnificent illusion of mobility. For designers, faced by budgets and clients and [...]
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This slideshow of photographs from 1989 is offered in solidarity with the people of Burma — as they again confront one of the most brutal regimes in the world. [...]
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Back in 1956, The Times promotion department provided a viable answer in the form of its 65 Ways to Decorate with Books in Your Home, a book/zine with a reasonable $1 cover price. Steven Heller looks here for answers to repurpose of these venerable materials into useful life-enhancing goods. [...]
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