Category: Essays

Jessica Helfand|Essays

One Person, One Vote, One MRI?

In our little New England village, voting takes place at the local Town Hall, a small building on Main Street with two entrances that lead to one large room containing a single voting booth. In the last primary, local officials placed …

Michael Bierut|Essays

I Hear You’ve Got Script Trouble: The Designer as Auteur

Screenwriter William Goldman has written about how difficult it is to ascribe authorship for a film. The same may be true for graphic design, which, like filmmaking, is essentially a collaborative activity.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Theory with a Small "t"

A critical writing determined by the need to shape practice will be limited in the cultural insights it can offer. This is the last thing that design writing needs when ways to engage a wider public could be opening up.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Graphic Flanerie

I have often wondered what a reality TV program about graphic design might be like. Would it feature, say, an imperious figurehead who could make or break the nascent career of a young designer? Would it be modeled on survivalism? On …

William Drenttel|Essays

El Lissitzky for Pesach

We all have images in our mind of the work of the Russian artist El Lissitzky: formal modernism, geometric constructions, typographic abstractions. This image was enlarged when I encountered the wonderful illustrations from an early book …

Rick Poynor|Essays

How to Say What You Mean

There is a crucial difference between subtle and complex ideas and needlessly convoluted forms of expression. The challenge now for design writing is to move outwards into a world in which design is everywhere.

William Drenttel|Essays

The Lying Game No. 2 (Or Vietnam Redux)

New York City - (AP Photo/Shawn Baldwin)In America, we are experiencing the most polarized populace since Vietnam. Millions of people may have disapproved of Bill Clinton's immoral behavior, but even at the height of his impeachment trial …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Stanley Kubrick and the Future of Graphic Design

Stanley Kubrick's attention to the nuances of graphic design, typography, and branding went far beyond his well-documented obsession with Futura Extra Bold. 2001: A Space Odyssey in particular projects a perfectly designed vision of the …

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Two Cultures of Design

In the past 25 years, graphic design has separated into two distinct strands. On one side there is professional practice in all its forms; on the other a self-directed design culture that is finding a wider audience.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Lying Game

Agence France-Presse—Getty ImagesEarlier this week, Nationalist Party protesters in Taiwan picketed their highly disputed political election with doctored images of President Chen Shui-bian: the idea was to depict his shame by …

John Thackara|Essays

Quality Time At High Speed [April 2004]

Report on high speed train travel (HST), the modernization of Britain's west coast railway, the final workshop of Spark!, Prada's $40 million Manhattan flagship, CHI 2004, and more.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Typographic Oddity No. 2: Spaceship Gothic

An upcoming auction of space memorabilia at Swann Galleries features a number of unusual specimens of paper ephemera which have miraculously survived the last half-century of American (and Soviet) space exploration. Who designed them? …