Category: Essays

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.

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?

Michael Bierut|Essays

Errol Morris Blows Up Spreadsheet, Thousands Killed

Errol Morris’s documentary "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara" demonstrates his mastery of information design as a poetic narrative device.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

A Blog Poem, Part I

Designers DevelopDistinctive DementiaDenying Dear Debts Due Descendants now Dead;Doubt and Denial,(Dada? Or de Stijl?)Design Does DefileDamned Discourse, instead.

William Drenttel|Essays

Design URLs

Design Observer is not just a name we stumbled upon: we searched hi and low. Delineator was not available, nor was untitled. The Velocity of Modern Life sounded too, well, too obvious and far afield. As a service to our readers over the …

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.