Rick Poynor

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Secret History of the Edgelands

These transitional zones, places of “possibility, mystery and beauty,” can be found anywhere that urban development meets open land.

Rick Poynor|Essays

On My Shelf: Richard Neville’s Playpower

Martin Sharp’s cover design is a garden of queasily decadent delights where the joke is probably on the reader.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Solitude in Dark Trees

Was this structure the idle amusement of some loggers, or an art piece by someone at the academy nearby? Gingerly testing each rung, I climbed up into it.

Rick Poynor|Essays

A Journal with No Fear of Flying

The Drawbridge’s change of visual direction is one of the most dramatic ever ventured by a literary magazine.

Rick Poynor|Essays

What Does J.G. Ballard Look Like?

J.G. Ballard was one of those rare writers whose vision inspired a new adjective. What is a “Ballardian” image and how have designers and image-makers interpreted it?

Rick Poynor|Essays

On My Shelf: Nairn’s London

Inside the architecture critic Ian Nairn’s classic, idiosyncratic guide to London’s buildings and spaces.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Discovered by Chance in a Paris Arcade

What better way to pass a couple of spare hours in Paris than to visit the covered arcades that were, for the Surrealists, some of the best places to encounter the marvellous?

Rick Poynor|Essays

In Praise of the East European Film Poster

Czech film posters of the 1960s are some of the most extraordinary graphic creations ever put on paper.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Out of the Studio: Graphic Design History and Visual Studies

Graphic design history’s best chance of development now lies in an expanded conception of the rapidly emerging discipline of visual studies.

Rick Poynor|Essays

How to Chew Gum while Walking

We go round in circles but the central issue doesn’t change: what can a designer add to a project beyond fulfilling the client’s brief?

Rick Poynor|Essays

Surrealism in the Pre-School Years

A poet described postcards as a “Lilliputian hallucination of the world”: he must have seen the surreal babies.

Rick Poynor|Essays

W.G. Sebald: Writing with Pictures

How do the great German writer's notoriously tricky visual fictions compare with reality?