Category: Essays

Steven Heller|Essays

Tolerance: Spreading the Word

THE TOLERANCE PROJECT is a traveling poster collection that celebrates and honors the starting point of all meaningful discourse: tolerance.

Lucy Hitchcock|Essays

DesignInquiry: Futurespective

What is DesignInquiry?

Steven Heller|Essays

Wearable Architecture That Won’t Fall Down

Whem architecture and fashion collide.

Steven Heller|Essays

Depero’s English Pictionary

Fortunato Depero was not fluent in English, so he created a personal Pictionary-esque learning aid. The hand scrawled script and simple line drawings explores a range of linguistic necessities like human anatomy (describing a …

Steven Heller|Essays

Rockwell’s Most Radical Painting

Rockwell could be considered the most effective propagandist for the American way, perhaps ever. But there was controversy in some paintings, if not on the surface, then below the glaze.

Jarrett Fuller|Essays

Against Design?

We must move away from the designer-savior industrial complex that tells us the designer can parachute into any problem and, with some design thinking, fix it, indicating change from the top-down.

Justin Ross Muchnick|Essays

Between Space and Place: The Entrance to the Churchill War Rooms Museum

If “place is security" and "space is freedom” how does an entrance to a museum celebrating an underground bunker define that boundary?

Steven Heller|Essays

Ferro’s Letters

An unpublished book of lettering from the great Pablo Ferro.

Alan Rapp|Essays

Personal Space

Robert Sommer’s Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design was published in fifty years ago, and its compact title concept — an invisible but perceptible security zone surrounding an individual — caught on.

Ken Gordon|Essays

Designers Like You Should Read Machines Like Me

People, you might have noticed, are wracking their brains to understand artificial intelligence.

Anna Talley|Essays

La Lutte Continue

The posters created by the Atelier Populaire during the May 1968 riots in Paris may be one of the best examples of how the medium of graphic design has the capacity to help bring an entire country to its knees.

Brian LaRossa|Essays

The Tension Between Graphic and Type Design

Ask someone on the street if they’ve heard of Helvetica and they’ll likely say yes. Ask them who designed Helvetica and I guarantee they’ll have no idea.