A-Z
While human-centered design was once the pinnacle of progressive ambition, a tricky question now confronts us all: what about the rest of life? Working with John Thackara and Caterina Castiglioni, at the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano twenty international design students were asked to design an urban ecology tool, place, equipment, or experience, that would enhance the interdependence of all of life in practical ways. Their conclusions are diverse, inspiring, and powerful. (Read the full report here.)
Reports of discrimination (and a lawsuit) at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.
Native American graphic design: a primer.
Cheryl Holmes's next book documents the history of the question she has been asking for decades—where are the Black designers?— along with related questions that are urgent to the design profession: where did they originate, where have they been, and why haven't they been represented in design histories and canons? With a foreword by Crystal Williams, President of Rhode Island School of Design, HERE: Where the Black Designers Are will be published next fall by Princeton Architectural Press.
Can ballot design be deemed unconstitutional? More on the phenomenon known as "Ballot Siberia," where un-bracketed candidates often find themselves disadvantaged by being relegated to the end of the ballot.
Designing the Modern World—Lucy Johnston's new monograph celebrating the extraordinary range of British industrial designer (and Pentagram co-founder) Sir Kenneth Grange—is just out from our friends at Thames&Hudson. More here.
Good news to start your week: design jobs are in demand!
An interview with DB | BD Minisode cohost and The State of Black Design founder Omari Souza about his conference, and another about his new book. (And a delightful conversation between Souza and Revision Path host Maurice Cherry here.)
What happens when you let everyone have a hand in the way things should look and feel and perform—including the kids? An inspiring story about one school’s inclusive design efforts.
Graphic designer Fred Troller forged a Swiss modernist path through corporate America in a career that spanned five decades. The Dutch-born, Troller—whose clients included, among others, IBM, Faber Castell, Hoffmann LaRoche, Champion International, and the New York Zoological Society—was also an educator, artist, and sculptor. Want more? Help our friends at Volume raise the funds they both need and deserve by supporting the publication of a Troller monograph here.
The Independence Institute is less a think tank than an action tank—and part of that action means rethinking how the framing of the US Constitution might benefit from some closer observation. In order to ensure election integrity for the foreseeable future, they propose a constitutional amendment restoring and reinforcing the Constitution’s original protections.
Design! Fintech! Discuss amongst yourselves!
The art (and design) of “traffic calming” is like language: it’s best when it is extremely clear and concise, eliminating the need for extra thinking on the receiving end. How bollards, arrows, and other design interventions on the street promote public safety for everyone. (If you really want to go down the design-and-traffic rabbit hole with us here, read about how speculative scenario mapping benefits from something called “digital twins”.)
Opening this week and running through next fall at Poster House in New York, a career retrospective for Dawn Baillie, whose posters for Silence of the Lambs, Little Miss Sunshine, and Dirty Dancing, among countless others, have helped shape our experience of cinema. In a field long-dominated by men, Bailie's posters span some thirty-five years, an achievement in itself. (The New York Times reviews it here.)
Can't make it to Austin for SXSW this year? In one discussion, a selection of designers, policymakers, scientists, and engineers sought identify creative solutions to bigger challenges. (The “design track” ends today, but you can catch up with all the highlights here.)
Should there be an Oscar for main title design?
Design contributes hugely to how we spend (okay, waste) time online. But does that mean that screen addiction is a moral imperative for designers? Liz Gorny weighs in, and Brazillian designer Lara Mendonça (who, and we love this, also self-identifies as a philosopher) shares some of her own pithy observations.
Oscar nominees, one poster at a time.
Ellen Mirojnick—the costume designer behind Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, and Oppenheimer, for which she is 2024 Oscar nominee—shares some career highlights from forty years in film. (Bonus content: we kicked off Season Nine of The Design of Business | The Business of Design with this conversation.)
Erleen Hatfield, of The Hatfield Group, is the engineer behind many innovative buildings, including the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home to the Atlanta Falcons, whose roof opens like a camera aperture to reveal the sky. Now, she's also one of the newly-minted AIA fellows, an honor awarded to architects—only 3% of their 98,000+ AIA members—who have made significant contributions to the profession.
Anamorph, a new filmmaking and technology company co-founded by filmmaker Gary Hustwit (of Helvetica fame) and digital artist Brendan Dawes, wants to reshape the cinematic experience with a proprietary generative technology that can create films that are different every time they’re shown.
Viewers seem more concerned with Biden's rounded smartphone than with his policies. (We're not discussing the age of the man, here—just his phone!)
Claiming he is “not very good at design,” Riken Yamamoto, a 78-year old Japanese architect, wins the coveted Pritzger Prize. Notes the jury: "Yamamoto’s architecture serves both as background and foreground to everyday life, blurring boundaries between its public and private dimensions, and multiplying opportunities for people to meet spontaneously”.
Citizen outcry over Southwest's new cabin design—and in particular, it's new-and-improved-seats—may not be likely to result in changes any time soon, but the comments (Ozempic seats!) are highly entertaining. (“Is there an option to just stand?”)
More than 50 years ago, a small group of design educators tried to decolonize design in Africa, hoping to teach African designers how to use research and design for their people and their nations by leveraging their own indigenous knowledge and local customs. While their pioneering effort was suppressed after a few short years by the colonial authorities, their approach to teaching design still resonates today: consider the story of François-X. N.I. Nsenga, an indigenous African designer who grew up in Belgian Rwanda and studied in British Kenya at Africa's first university-based design program. For more on the cultural history, design philosphy, and the "Europeanisation" of colonial Africa, you'll find a conversation with Nsenga in Gjoko Muratovski's book, Research for Designers: A Guide to Methods and Practice.
At turns dystopian and delightful, the future of AI-based digital assistants seem poised to communicate through the “emotion and information display” of new constellations of hardware. (Including … orbs!) Like concept cars, they're not on the market just yet, but developmental efforts at more than a few telecoms suggest they're clearly on the horizon. More here.
Jha D Amazi, a principal and the director of the Public Memory and Memorials Lab for MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) Design Group, examines how spatializing memory can spark future collective action and provide a more accurate and diverse portrayal of our nation's complicated past. She gave this year’s annual Richard Saivetz ’69 Memorial Architectural Lecture at Brandeis last month, entitled, “Spatializing Memory”.
Self-proclaimed “geriatric starlet” and style icon Iris Apfel has died. She was 102.
“You know, you’ve got to try to sneak in a little bit of humanity,” observes Steve Matteson, the designer behind Aptos—Microsoft's new “default” font. “I did that by adding a little swing to the R and the double stacked g." Adds Jon Friedman, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for design: “It’s both quirky and creates a more natural feel that brings in some of the serif font ‘je ne sais quoi’ to it”. Resistant to change (or simply longing for Calibri), font geeks are not having it. Fun fact? Aptos was originally called Bierstadt. You may well imagine, as we did, that this was a nod to the 19th century German-American landscape painter, Albert Bierstadt—but the actual translation is “Beer City”.
In Dallas, the Better Block Foundation is sponsoring a design contest called Creating Connections, aimed at addressing the growing epidemic of loneliness by exploring the impact of design on how people connect with others.
AIGA
Carrie Olivia Adams
Fernando Aguiar
Manuela Aguirre
Renna Al-Yassini
Marc Alt
Mariana Amatullo
Kurt Andersen
Gail Anderson
Kate Andrews
David Antin
Paola Antonelli
Alec Appelbaum
Allison Arieff
Zara Arshad
Mary Badon
Eric Baker
Marian Bantjes
Jonathan Barnbrook
John Barr
Lawrence Barth
Ernest Beck
Rachel Berger
Andrew Bernheimer
Fred A. Bernstein
Josh Berta
James Biber
Lisa Bielawa
Magda Biernat
Michael Bierut
Pedro Levi Bismarck
Eva D. Blake
Johanna Blakley
Teddy Blanks
Andrew Blauvelt
Ken Botnick
Constantin Boym
Alan G. Brake
Brooke Brewer
Gaby Brink
Liz Brown
Azby Brown
Gavin Browning
Dominique Browning
David Cabianca
Michael Cannell
John Cantwell
Alexandra Cardia
Jade-Snow Carroll
John Cary
Valerie Casey
Robin Cembalest
Deirdre Cerminaro
Helen Chang
Patrick Chappatte
Andy Chen
Joanne Chew
Allan Chochinov
Andrea Codrington
Billy Collins
Jan Conradi
Julia Cooke
John Corbett
Patrick Cramsie
Denise Gonzales Crisp
Glen Cummings
Meredith Davis
Thomas de Monchaux
Mark Dery
Prajna Desai
Nathalie Destanda
Carolyn Deuschle
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
Krista Donaldson
Stephen Doyle
Courtney Drake
William Drenttel
Jade Dressler
Lena Dunham
Charles & Ray Eames
Elliott Earls
Owen Edwards
Adam Eeuwens
Jennifer Ehrenberg
John Emerson
Mitch Epstein
Michael Erard
Gabrielle Esperdy
Robert Fabricant
Louise Fili
Thomas Fisher
Kenneth FitzGerald
Barbara Flanagan
Ramsey Ford
John Foster
Thomas Frank
Felice C. Frankel
David Freund
Robert Frost
Julia Galef
John Gall
Óscar Fernando Gómez
Rob Giampietro
Jessica Gladstone
Joshua Glenn
Kaomi Goetz
Vicki Goldberg
Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Justin Good
Peter Good
Jason Grant
Robert Grudin
Rachel Hadas
Donald Hall
Phil Hamlett
Robert Hammond
Michelle Hauser
Jessica Helfand
William H. Helfand
Steven Heller
Scott Henderson
Eric J. Herboth
Tarpley Hitt
Kirsten Hively
John Hockenberry
Andrew Howard
Kate Howe
John Howell
Cathy Huang
Amanda Hurley
William Henry Jackson
Karrie Jacobs
Ricky Jay
Meena Kadri
John Kaliski
Jac sm Kee
Justin Kemerling
Chip Kidd
William Davies King
Liza Kirwin
Alex Knowlton
Leonard Koren
Steven Kroeter
Amelia Lacy
Juliette LaMontagne
Mark Lamster
Rick Landesberg
Alexandra Lange
Francisco Laranjo
Julie Lasky
Jiwon Lee
Warren Lehrer
Nancy Levinson
Adam Harrison Levy
Zeuler R. M. de A. Lima
Randy Ludacer
Claire Lui
Paul Lukas
Elle Luna
Ellen Lupton
Elaine Lustig Cohen
John Madere
Roger Martin
Chaz Maviyane-Davies
J.D. McClatchy
Bradford McKee
Kathleen Meaney
James Merrill
Debbie Millman
Elizabeth Helman Minchilli
Momus
Bill Moran
Edward Morris
Murray Moss
Michael Mossoba
Christopher Mount
Paul Muldoon
Michael Murphy
Dan Nadel
Ashish Nangia
Nichelle Narcisi
Bruce Nussbaum
Diana O’Hehir
Meghan O’Rourke
Sharon Olds
Wanda Orlikowski
Jason Orton
Jez Owen
Lyle Owerko
Jay Parkinson
Martin Parr
Phil Patton
Rick Perlstein
Robert Petrick
Robert Pinsky
Kolean Pitner
Adam Plunkett
Maria Popova
Doug Powell
Rick Poynor
Chris Pullman
Kerry William Purcell
Avinash Rajagopal
Wendy Rawlings
Willis Regier
Jen Renninger
Angela Riechers
Fred Ritchin
Jen Roos
Susan Roy
Michael Russem
Vera Sacchetti
Louise Sandhaus
Luc Sante
Kerry Saretsky
Steven Boyd Saum
Paula Scher
Carl Schoonover
Jonathan Schultz
Martha Scotford
Gerry Shamray
Adrian Shaughnessy
Paul Shaw
Dick Sheaff
Dmitri Siegel
Rachel Signer
Mike Sinclair
Andrew Sloat
Andrea Nagy Smith
Bryn Smith
Matt Soar
Victoria Solan
Michael Sorkin
Ettore Sottsass
Jeff Speck
Erik Spiekermann
David Stairs
Karen Stein
Daniel Stephens
Jude Stewart
DJ Stout
Gong Szeto
Laura Tarrish
John Thackara
The Editors
Alan Thomas
Dana Thomas
James Traub
Elizabeth Tunstall
Alice Twemlow
William Underhill
Tom Vanderbilt
Betsy Vardell
Dirk Wachowiak
Alissa Walker
Rob Walker
Josh Wallaert
Helen Walters
Timothy Jack Ward
John Waters
Jeshurun Webb
James Wegener
Laura Weiss
Margaret Wertheim
Lawrence Weschler
Kit White
George M. Whitesides
Tony Whitfield
Lorraine Wild
Deborah Willis
Christian Wiman
Jane Withers
Peter Wolf
Ken Worpole
Franz Wright
An Xiao Mina
Cheryl Yau
William Butler Yeats
Edvin Yegir
Mimi Zeiger
Michael Zinman
Observed
While human-centered design was once the pinnacle of progressive ambition, a tricky question now confronts us all: what about the rest of life? Working with John Thackara and Caterina Castiglioni, at the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano twenty international design students were asked to design an urban ecology tool, place, equipment, or experience, that would enhance the interdependence of all of life in practical ways. Their conclusions are diverse, inspiring, and powerful. (Read the full report here.)
Reports of discrimination (and a lawsuit) at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.
Native American graphic design: a primer.
Cheryl Holmes's next book documents the history of the question she has been asking for decades—where are the Black designers?— along with related questions that are urgent to the design profession: where did they originate, where have they been, and why haven't they been represented in design histories and canons? With a foreword by Crystal Williams, President of Rhode Island School of Design, HERE: Where the Black Designers Are will be published next fall by Princeton Architectural Press.
Can ballot design be deemed unconstitutional? More on the phenomenon known as "Ballot Siberia," where un-bracketed candidates often find themselves disadvantaged by being relegated to the end of the ballot.
Designing the Modern World—Lucy Johnston's new monograph celebrating the extraordinary range of British industrial designer (and Pentagram co-founder) Sir Kenneth Grange—is just out from our friends at Thames&Hudson. More here.
Good news to start your week: design jobs are in demand!
An interview with DB | BD Minisode cohost and The State of Black Design founder Omari Souza about his conference, and another about his new book. (And a delightful conversation between Souza and Revision Path host Maurice Cherry here.)
What happens when you let everyone have a hand in the way things should look and feel and perform—including the kids? An inspiring story about one school’s inclusive design efforts.
Graphic designer Fred Troller forged a Swiss modernist path through corporate America in a career that spanned five decades. The Dutch-born, Troller—whose clients included, among others, IBM, Faber Castell, Hoffmann LaRoche, Champion International, and the New York Zoological Society—was also an educator, artist, and sculptor. Want more? Help our friends at Volume raise the funds they both need and deserve by supporting the publication of a Troller monograph here.
The Independence Institute is less a think tank than an action tank—and part of that action means rethinking how the framing of the US Constitution might benefit from some closer observation. In order to ensure election integrity for the foreseeable future, they propose a constitutional amendment restoring and reinforcing the Constitution’s original protections.
Design! Fintech! Discuss amongst yourselves!
The art (and design) of “traffic calming” is like language: it’s best when it is extremely clear and concise, eliminating the need for extra thinking on the receiving end. How bollards, arrows, and other design interventions on the street promote public safety for everyone. (If you really want to go down the design-and-traffic rabbit hole with us here, read about how speculative scenario mapping benefits from something called “digital twins”.)
Opening this week and running through next fall at Poster House in New York, a career retrospective for Dawn Baillie, whose posters for Silence of the Lambs, Little Miss Sunshine, and Dirty Dancing, among countless others, have helped shape our experience of cinema. In a field long-dominated by men, Bailie's posters span some thirty-five years, an achievement in itself. (The New York Times reviews it here.)
Can't make it to Austin for SXSW this year? In one discussion, a selection of designers, policymakers, scientists, and engineers sought identify creative solutions to bigger challenges. (The “design track” ends today, but you can catch up with all the highlights here.)
Should there be an Oscar for main title design?
Design contributes hugely to how we spend (okay, waste) time online. But does that mean that screen addiction is a moral imperative for designers? Liz Gorny weighs in, and Brazillian designer Lara Mendonça (who, and we love this, also self-identifies as a philosopher) shares some of her own pithy observations.
Oscar nominees, one poster at a time.
Ellen Mirojnick—the costume designer behind Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, and Oppenheimer, for which she is 2024 Oscar nominee—shares some career highlights from forty years in film. (Bonus content: we kicked off Season Nine of The Design of Business | The Business of Design with this conversation.)
Erleen Hatfield, of The Hatfield Group, is the engineer behind many innovative buildings, including the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home to the Atlanta Falcons, whose roof opens like a camera aperture to reveal the sky. Now, she's also one of the newly-minted AIA fellows, an honor awarded to architects—only 3% of their 98,000+ AIA members—who have made significant contributions to the profession.
Anamorph, a new filmmaking and technology company co-founded by filmmaker Gary Hustwit (of Helvetica fame) and digital artist Brendan Dawes, wants to reshape the cinematic experience with a proprietary generative technology that can create films that are different every time they’re shown.
Viewers seem more concerned with Biden's rounded smartphone than with his policies. (We're not discussing the age of the man, here—just his phone!)
Claiming he is “not very good at design,” Riken Yamamoto, a 78-year old Japanese architect, wins the coveted Pritzger Prize. Notes the jury: "Yamamoto’s architecture serves both as background and foreground to everyday life, blurring boundaries between its public and private dimensions, and multiplying opportunities for people to meet spontaneously”.
Citizen outcry over Southwest's new cabin design—and in particular, it's new-and-improved-seats—may not be likely to result in changes any time soon, but the comments (Ozempic seats!) are highly entertaining. (“Is there an option to just stand?”)
More than 50 years ago, a small group of design educators tried to decolonize design in Africa, hoping to teach African designers how to use research and design for their people and their nations by leveraging their own indigenous knowledge and local customs. While their pioneering effort was suppressed after a few short years by the colonial authorities, their approach to teaching design still resonates today: consider the story of François-X. N.I. Nsenga, an indigenous African designer who grew up in Belgian Rwanda and studied in British Kenya at Africa's first university-based design program. For more on the cultural history, design philosphy, and the "Europeanisation" of colonial Africa, you'll find a conversation with Nsenga in Gjoko Muratovski's book, Research for Designers: A Guide to Methods and Practice.
At turns dystopian and delightful, the future of AI-based digital assistants seem poised to communicate through the “emotion and information display” of new constellations of hardware. (Including … orbs!) Like concept cars, they're not on the market just yet, but developmental efforts at more than a few telecoms suggest they're clearly on the horizon. More here.
Jha D Amazi, a principal and the director of the Public Memory and Memorials Lab for MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) Design Group, examines how spatializing memory can spark future collective action and provide a more accurate and diverse portrayal of our nation's complicated past. She gave this year’s annual Richard Saivetz ’69 Memorial Architectural Lecture at Brandeis last month, entitled, “Spatializing Memory”.
Self-proclaimed “geriatric starlet” and style icon Iris Apfel has died. She was 102.
“You know, you’ve got to try to sneak in a little bit of humanity,” observes Steve Matteson, the designer behind Aptos—Microsoft's new “default” font. “I did that by adding a little swing to the R and the double stacked g." Adds Jon Friedman, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for design: “It’s both quirky and creates a more natural feel that brings in some of the serif font ‘je ne sais quoi’ to it”. Resistant to change (or simply longing for Calibri), font geeks are not having it. Fun fact? Aptos was originally called Bierstadt. You may well imagine, as we did, that this was a nod to the 19th century German-American landscape painter, Albert Bierstadt—but the actual translation is “Beer City”.
In Dallas, the Better Block Foundation is sponsoring a design contest called Creating Connections, aimed at addressing the growing epidemic of loneliness by exploring the impact of design on how people connect with others.
Jobs | March 19
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