Category: Essays

Michael Bierut|Essays

Rob Roy Kelly’s Old, Weird America

The late educator and designer Rob Roy Kelly has had a lasting influence on the profession of graphic design, particularly through his landmark book "American Wood Type."

John Thackara|Essays

Landscape to Mediascape [February 2004]

When traditional forms of work and daily life disappear from a locality, what is to take their place? What are the success factors for design projects in real-world situations? How should we deploy, and exploit, "mediascapes"? A talk by …

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Sins of St. Paul

Paul Rand is almost universally revered as the infallible father of American graphic design, which may have blinded his legions of admirers to his flaws: an overemphasis on logos as a communications tool, a lack of engagement in content, a …

Michael Bierut|Essays

(Over)explaining Design

The premature release (noted by Bill Drenttel below) of Michael Arad and Peter Walker's World Trade Center memorial design sans explanation, for one day at least, was refreshing. It's worthy to make design more understandable -- this site …

William Drenttel|Essays

Rationalizing Absence

[Left: Michael Arad + Peter Walker, Reflecting Absence, 2004. Right: James Turrell, Hover, 1983.]I believe these images speak for themselves. When a German photo agency mistakenly released new renderings of the World Trade Center memorial …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Span of Casual Vision

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.

William Drenttel|Essays

Adolf Wölfli Invents Design Brut?

[Adolf Wolfli, The Cevelar Mary (Funeral March, p.4038), (detail), 1929]Adolf Wölfli was a mad artist, a schizophrenic who molested three-year-old girls. Born in Bern, Switzerland in 1864, Wölfli died in 1930 at the age of 66. …

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Forgotten Design Legacy of the National Lampoon

In a bookstore over the holidays I happened to come across a new edition of something had thought I would never see again: the legendary National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook. Originally published in 1971, the publication has at its …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Mind the Light, Light the Mind

I was driving in the car recently when one of my children asked me to explain Quakerism. (A propos of what, now, I can't recall, though a similarly unprovoked opening conversational gambit came several days earlier, when the same child …

Mark Lamster|Essays

Notes From the Other Georgia

With a past of urban decay and trauma, the city of Tbilisi faces a precarious future.

Rob Walker|Essays

The Lives They Lived: Making Us Laugh

Consider the machine that a television engineer named Charles Douglass, invented in the 1950's. It was called the Laff Box.