Observed | April 29
Creatives for Ukraine, an open platform with over one thousand digital artworks submitted showing solidarity with Ukraine. [BV]
Trained as an Industrial designer at Notre Dame, Michigan state senator
Mallory McMorrow takes on the GOP. [JH]
Yup. [JH]
Designers! They’re just like us! “Grey’s friend Jamie Lee Curtis helped design the cover of
Out of the Corner, using what she described in a phone interview as
“D.I.Y. photoshop phone app skills.” [JH]
[]
Observed | April 26
Award-winning American artist and illustrator, Marshall Arisman, has died at 83.
Steve Heller’s tribute is here. [JH]
[]
Observed | April 08
Kevin Lippert, the founder of Princeton Architectural Press, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 63. [JH]
Forbes offers “
graphic design on a budget” advise—in the name of leadership. [JH]
The saga to
redesign Rhode Island’s license plate continues, with design educators weighing in. [JH]
An early Easter gift for a grateful librarian:
Charles Darwin’s notebooks, long missing, mysteriously returned! (Via Jen Renninger) [JH]
Educator, artist, activist and civil rights era photographer
Doris Derby has died. She was 82. [JH]
[]
Observed | March 18
MIT announces
The Morningside Academy for Design, a new hub for cross-disciplinary education, research, and innovation across the design professions, and which will be housed at the School of Architecture and Planning. [JH]
Karen Hoffman, a seasoned educator and industrial designer, is named the next President of ArtCenter, in California. She will be the first female president in the college’s ninety-year history. [JH]
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Observed | March 11
The 2020 National Security Law, slogans, and the art of the pictogram:
a thread on Twitter. (via Blake Eskin.) [JH]
Owning the apple—one logo at a time. [JH]
[]
Observed | March 04
Emeline King, Ford’s first black female transportation designer, has a few things to say about trailblazing. [JH]
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Observed | February 25
The value of
well-designed work. [JH]
In Berlin:
Konstantin Grcic on design, function, and the new normal. [JH]
How to
design a bike lane. [JH]
[]
Observed | February 11
A love letter to Garamond. [JH]
Maria Nicanor is appointed director of the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York.[JH]
[]
Observed | January 28
An extraordinary list of speakers just announced for the
State of Black Design conference, at Texas State University. (h/t Rebecca Breuer) [JH]
When design fails—according to Reddit users. [JH]
When Build Back Better becomes
Design Back Better: a speculative scenario for employee retention, one “innovation space” at a time. [JH]
[]
Observed | January 21
How a design museum unearthed a treasure trove of
classic Slovak games. [JH]
“Someone out there ... came up with the emoji grid as a spoiler-free way of sharing her results with other people.” Josh Wardle, creator of the internet word game Wordle, on
the game’s minimalist design. (via Blake Eskin) [JH]
In other design news,
the green M&M has been redesigned so that she will be “better represented to reflect confidence and empowerment, as a strong female, and known for much more than her boots.” (via Jeffrey Kittay.) [JH]
Colgate’s designers have spent more than five years
redesigning their toothpaste tubes so they can be recycled in curbside bins. [JH]
[]
Observed | January 14
Cooper Union is looking for a
new architecture dean. [JH]
In a year of cancelled film and theatrical productions all over the world,
production design gets a nice shout-out. [JH]
Meet the woman preserving 125 years of black history in Baltimore. [BV]
[]
Observed | January 07
“It seems to me that designers, bringing evermore astonishing prowess to bear, too often outshine the work they are meant to support.”
Another pitch-perfect review by Jesse Green. [JH]
Design and the Chinese bookstore:
a saga! (h/t to Jen Renninger) [JH]
From
Mad magazine to B-Movies:
An Oral History of Beastie Boys’ Artwork. [BV]
[]
Observed | December 30
Book jackets as optical echoes. [JH]
Design and Healing, a new exhibition at Cooper Hewitt in New York, “helps us appreciate optimism amid hopelessness, and celebrates extraordinary accomplishments under duress”. [JH]
The long read: Craig L. Wilkins on the questionable role of
the architectural biennial. [JH]
Why is a typeface named
Jim Crow? (via Mike Errico.) [JH]
[]
Observed | December 23
“It’s something that should have been caught
in the design phase.” [JH]
A beautiful roundup of forty years of MTV logos, from our friends at
It’s Nice That. [JH]
Broken covers: Steve Goldman puts the world’s worst album art on show.[BV]
[]
Observed | December 17
Redesigning the euro—by 2024! [JH]
Brad Pitt, design obsessive, takes on
his latest project, in France. [JH]
Design at Apple in the post-Jony Ive era. [JH]
We normally avoid any incoming news item labeled “trends to watch” but there are actually some lovely things in here. ’Tis the season to look at ...
beer labels! [JH]
La Patria is a robust online archive of Uruguayan design that includes posters, postage stamps. book and record covers, and more. [JH]
[]
Observed | December 10
Design and traffic. [JH]
In Ghana,
a model for design, education, community—and sustainability. [JH]
Insecure—the acclaimed HBO series—makes
costume design history. [JH]
Ritesh Gupta launches
Useful School, a pay-what-you-can online design curriculum for people of color. [BV]
Spotify Wrapped: a design-cautionary tale. [JH]
[]
Observed | November 26
Dave Hickey, the author of Air Guitar and The Invisible Dragon, has died. The influential art and cultural critic was 82. [JH]
Rethinking design—as a transformative catalyst for change—in the circular economy. [JH]
[]
Observed | November 15
Bob Gill, “bomb-throwing revolutionary”“, “polemicist”, and, yes, the important and influential graphic designer, dies at 90. [JH]
Who designs the city? A compelling, inclusive, and actionable inquiry. [JH]
All hail the mighty ...
typewriter! [JH]
[]
Observed | November 12
Periplus* Workshops, offers a new and unique opportunity for emerging designers to respond to nature in the rural and ancient Mani Region, near Kalamata, in Greece. [JH]
A new retrospective of
Barbara Kruger’s “endlessly hashtaggable” work opens at the Art Institute of Chicago. [JH]
[]
Observed | November 05
Inspired? Revolutionary? Or just batshit crazy? A consulting architect on
a proposed new dormitory at the University of California Santa Barbara claims its design premise is "unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent, and a human being". [JH]
If you think you’re not part of this well-oiled machine of excess—and its dark underbelly—
you’re wrong. (Don’t miss the Swedish teapot man.) [JH]
[]
Observed | October 29
Black students make up only 9% of enrollment at 96 schools teaching art and design in the United States. But thanks to D’Wayne Edwards, that is about to change. [JH]
At just 61 years old,
Nigeria is still an emerging nation—and it’s a hotbed of design. [JH]
Humor, art, activism:
discuss amongst yourselves. [JH]
What do the words “design” and “delicatessen” have in common?
You’re about to find out! [JH]
[]
Observed | October 26
Graphic designers will swoon to see
Ricky Jay’s collection, which will be auctioned this week at Sotheby’s in New York. [JH] []
Observed | October 22
Elizabeth Diller interprets Edmund de Waal’s book, “The Hare With Amber Eyes” as a
cabinet of curiosities. The exhibition opens at The Jewish Museum in New York on November 19. [JH]
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Observed | October 15
Karim Rashid opines on the harsher realities of a life in design. [JH]
Richard Schultz, American pioneer of modernist furniture, dies at 95. [JH]
Pixar movies, and
the subtleties of dystopian cities. [JH]
In celebration of their relaunch Print magazine comissioned
a wonderful video that you should watch. [BV]
[]
Observed | October 01
Adnan Lotia recreates iconic album covers with ...
Lego. [JH]
Designers Verònica Fuerte and Sebastián Londoño turn circles into an
international design language. [JH]
Jim Jarmusch,
collage artist. [JH]
Posted without comment. [JH]
[]
Observed | September 24
For the ABC Science series
Phenomena, the Australian artist and filmmaker Josef Gatti collaborated with the Australian composer Kim Moyes for an amalgamation of art and science exploring ‘naturally occurring patterns, and the fundamental forces of nature that create them’. [BV]
Jack Kerouac,
book designer. [JH]
An
exquisite memorial by the American artist Suzanne Firstenberg. [JH]
[]
Observed | September 17
From Aunt Jemima to AI, How Racism Creeps Into Design: an
insightful video from Bloomberg Equality. [JH]
The
40 winners of this year’s Posterheroes Becoming e-Quals competition have been announced. Congrats to all! [BV]
German artist Max Hattler finds inspiration in the immense size, muted colors, and relentless repetition of
the facades of Hong Kong’s apartment high-rises. [BV]
Swatch Bharat—online collections of Indian native aesthetics, created to preserve artifacts disappearing due to globalization—has completed their
eighth collection. Get inspired![BV]
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Observed | September 10
Rachel Berger’s
Shooter Box—an exhibition protesting the United States military’s use of Microsoft Xbox controllers as battle equipment—now on view at California College of the Arts. [JH]
Pantone No. 1837, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a
conspiracy theory about art and commerce. [JH]
Designing a better airport. [JH]
Revisiting a seminal
guerilla signage project, twenty years later. [JH]
[]
Observed | September 03
Everyone’s a (design) critic! The internet goes wild—not in a good way—for the
cover art “design” for Drake’s new album. [JH]
A new graphic novel on censorship—from MITPress—gathers insights and highlights from
a profession under attack. [JH]
Rebranding Chernobyl with a logo that decays over time. (Via Michael Bierut.) [JH]
Today we chase after information, without gaining knowledge. We take note of everything, without gaining insight. We communicate constantly, without participating in a community... This is
how information develops a lifeform: inexistent and impermanent. [JH]
[]
Observed | August 27
A spectacularly researched—and meticulously produced—
history of design and visual culture in Louisiana. (Via Nancy Sharon Collins.)
[JH]
Alan Heller, who collaborated with Mario Bellini, Massimo and Lella Vignelli, and others to produce memorable objects in plastic, dies at 81. [JH]
Originally located in Marshall Field’s unused 1905 South Prairie Avenue mansion, The New Bauhaus school opened its doors on October 18, 1937. Bauhäusler László Moholy-Nagy, director, began to shape the original Bauhaus curriculum to suit his purposes. Gone were the craft-based distinctions that helped enforce gendered segregation and discrimination in the German workshops.
An in-depth look at the founding of American Bauhaus. [BV]
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