Rick Poynor

Rick Poynor|Essays

A Dream World Made by Machines

Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a complex, demanding, audacious piece of television.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Unearthly Powers: Surrealism and SF

Richard Powers, auteur of the paperback cover, was a key figure linking science fiction and Surrealism.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Books Every Graphic Designer Should Read

The Designers & Books website has published my list of 20 indispensable books about graphic design.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Paul Stiff, the Reader’s Champion

For the late Paul Stiff, design educator, writer, editor and skeptic, typography must never neglect to serve the reader.

Rick Poynor|Essays

On My Screen: The Back of Beyond

John Heyer’s The Back of Beyond, made for Shell Australia in 1954, is one of the country’s finest films.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Wim Wenders’ Strange and Quiet Places

The massive photographs in film director Wim Wenders’ new exhibition work best when they serve his painterly eye.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Stewart Mackinnon: Ruptured and Remade

Why, at the height of his early success, did a brilliant British illustrator decide to walk away and what happened next?

Rick Poynor|Essays

Starowieyski’s Graphic Universe of Excess

In Franciszek Starowieyski’s posters, desire, sexuality, monstrosity, madness and death conjoin in some of the most outrageous images found in graphic design.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Wim Crouwel: The Ghost in the Machine

Far from suppressing his own creative personality in the way he advised, Wim Crouwel was expressing it to the full.

Rick Poynor|Essays

An Unknown Master of Poster Design

Karel Teissig might just be the best poster designer you have never heard of.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Slicing Open the Surrealist Eyeball

Surrealism codified a poetic principle that has always existed as a possibility and still exists in life and art.

Rick Poynor|Essays

What Does J.G. Ballard Look Like? Part 2

There is increasing interest in the relationship between the writer J.G. Ballard and the visual arts. Have Ballard’s admirers and critics overlooked the most Ballardian artist of them all?