Rick Poynor

Rick Poynor|Essays

Jan van Toorn: Arguing with Visual Means

Jan van Toorn’s designs embody an idea about citizenship. They address viewers as critical, thinking individuals who can be expected to take an informed and skeptical interest in the circumstances of their world.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Bruce Mau: The Aura of Power

Bruce Mau has constructed a formidable mystique around himself as a designer whose concerns and apparent brainpower put him in a different league from most other visual communicators. How did he do it?

Rick Poynor|Essays

Neville Brody Revisited

Forget passing questions of fashion. When future assessments of graphic design in the 1980s are made, Neville Brody will emerge as one of the most considerable designers of the period, working anywhere.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Stephen Gill: Behind the Billboard

Designers are battlers against entropy: a vital task, but taking the long view, often a doomed, quixotic mission. Stephen Gill’s photographs, showing the disorderly zones behind billboards, offer a reality check.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Notes on Experimental Jetset

Experimental Jetset’s argument that design should have a certain autonomy and an inner logic separate from tastes and trends makes sense, but as a rationale for defaulting to Helvetica, is it convincing?

Rick Poynor|Essays

Adbusters in Anarchy

Adbusters’ once orderly pages are in a state of heaving agitation. The magazine seems to be seduced by the coolness of design as a gesture, even though this is part of the surface-fixated postmodernism it deplores.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Remember Picelj

The English-speaking world knows little about the design history of Communist Europe. Few will have heard of the distinguished Slovenian Ivan Picelj. His prints ask us to remember; they are full of yearning.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Missing Sleeve Notes

Nick de Ville’s Album: Style and Image in Sleeve Design is the best collection of album cover designs published to date. But where did all of this information come from, and why does he provide no references?

Rick Poynor|Essays

Unnecessary Revival

As a first-time enthusiast for American Typewriter, I was happy to see it pass into history. Resurrecting the typeface now that the typewriter has given way to digital technology is just nostalgia ― soft at the core.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Those Inward-looking Europeans

Three American design teachers visit London and the Netherlands. European designers, they say, are not paying attention to design history. Maybe the visitors are missing local factors and broader global issues.

Rick Poynor|Essays

It's a Man's World

Adam Parfrey’s book shows hundreds of men’s magazine covers from the 1950s painted by artists who specialized in depictions of tough guys abusing terrified women. Have we outgrown this kind of thing? Heck no.