Rick Poynor

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Covers of J.G. Ballard’s Crash: An Update

Some recent covers of J.G. Ballard’s disturbing Crash, a notoriously hard novel for designers to interpret.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Typographic Stories of the City Streets

Characters, a new book by Stephen Banham, investigates the stories behind Melbourne’s street signs.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Motif Magazine: The World Made Visible

Motif magazine, founded in 1958, anticipated a new way of seeing, documenting and appreciating the “visible world.”

Rick Poynor|Essays

John McHale and the Expendable Ikon

Artist, graphic designer, information theorist, architectural critic, sociologist, futurist: it’s time to rediscover John McHale.

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Unspeakable Pleasure of Ruins

“Ruin porn,” a reductive tag that makes any photograph of ruins seem suspect, ignores the cultural history of the ruin.

Rick Poynor|Essays

On My Shelf: A Classic by Berger and Mohr

John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Fortunate Man brilliantly fuses words and photos to examine a doctor’s life.

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Evil Genius of David Shrigley

British artist David Shrigley, subject of a major exhibition in London, is forever tempting and testing the viewer.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Ernst Haas and the Color Underground

Has Ernst Haas, an early master of color photography, received the credit his ground-breaking pictures deserve?

Rick Poynor|Essays

Read All That? You Must be Kidding Me

Ellen Lupton’s essay about reading and writing for Graphic Design: Now in Production misses some key points.

Rick Poynor|Essays

On My Shelf: Jean-Luc Godard Anthologized

Lawrence Ratzkin’s cover design for an early anthology about Jean-Luc Godard is almost an anti-cover.

Rick Poynor|Essays

How We Learned to Live with Zombies

Zombie films, zombie walks, zombie shops, zombie TV series: our darkest fears are now mainstream.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Another Design Voice Falls Silent

As design criticism takes off as a branch of academic study, design publications such as Grafik keep closing.