Rick Poynor

Rick Poynor|Essays

Everything has Become Science Fiction

Is science fiction's most crucial task to envision the future or to understand the present?

Rick Poynor|Essays

Agency or Studio? The Dutch Design Dilemma

Dutch graphic design, once so original and innovative, now looks increasingly similar to everyone else's graphic design.

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Impossibility of an Island

Atlas of Remote Islands might look like a celebration of distant paradises. Its beauty masks a darker purpose.

Rick Poynor|Essays

On My Screen: Bill Morrison’s Decasia

The avant-garde classic Decasia, assembled from decaying film stock, is a sublime vision of another reality.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Where Is Art Now?

Leaving the art world to decide what art is doesn’t resolve the issue of quality.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Rethinking Conceptual Type Design

In Copenhagen last week, the organizers of “Conceptual Type — Type Led by Ideas” posed the question: “Where are the idealistic fonts, the fonts that are frontiers of new belief?”

Rick Poynor|Essays

What Does H. P. Lovecraft Look Like?

In a gilded age of adaptations: films, TV series, theatrical productions, H. P. Lovecraft’s short novel At the Mountains of Madness, is re-envisioned for a new generation.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Adventures in the Image World

This is a blog about visual culture. It reflects my interests, enthusiasms, concerns and bêtes noires across the spectrum of visual phenomena.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Danzig Baldaev’s Prison House of Flesh

Fuel’s Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, which appeared in 2004, was a shrewdly judged piece of publishing. The meticulous ink drawings of tattoos made by Danzig Baldaev, a prison guard from 1948 to 1986, had a horrible …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Design Writing from Down Under

A new issue of The National Grid arrives in the mail. You’ve never seen it? You are missing a treat.

Rick Poynor|Essays

On My Shelf: Surrealism Permanent Revelation

This post is the first in an occasional series. The idea is to revisit a book from my bookshelf.

Rick Poynor|Essays

An App for the Self-Replacing Book

British artist Tom Phillips’A Humument, must be one of the most successful artist’s books ever published. Now, in an entirely logical development, comes The Humument app for the iPad.