Category: Essays

William Drenttel|Essays

Shallow Water Dictionary

A number of years ago, I stumbled across an out-of-print tract called the Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English by John R. Stilgoe, a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard. This almost-a-book, …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Sign Language: Endangered Species or Utopian Uprising?

Many of my students have, over the years, considered the street writ large as a kind of flexible, experimental canvas. Their sources — and here I would include everything from Aaron Siskind to Gabriel Orozco — inform work in …

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.

John Thackara|Essays

Presence and Embodiment [December 2003]

Report on late-confirming speakers for DoorsEast 2004, Sustainable Everyday: Scenarios for Urban Life, the Spark! 2004 conference, the Wearables for Health conference, Trandmediale in Berlin, and more.

John Thackara|Essays

Now We Are 10 [December 2003]

Report on the 10th anniversy of Doors of Perception, the Doors East conference, how to think and act rural, ITC, Wireless Local Loop (WLL), and more.

Rob Walker|Essays

The Guts of a New Machine

The iPod, a digital music player, it weighing just 6.5 ounces and holding about 1,000 songs.

Rob Walker|Essays

Digital Tools for Making Brilliant Mistakes

The many options for digitally antiquing your 21st-century self-expression.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Mark Lombardi and the Ecstasy of Conspiracy

Artist Mark Lombardi's intricate handdrawn diagrams describing the relationships behind contemporary political and financial scandals are both beautiful objects and extraordinary feats of information design.

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?

Jessica Helfand|Essays

On Visual Empathy

In a world besieged by unpredictable atrocities, don’t we all feel a little emotionally raw? Two recent articles in suggest that visual empathy may more critical to a productive imagination than we thought.

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.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Implausible Fictions

At a symposium several weeks ago at the Annenberg School for Public Policy in Philadelphia, we gave a presentation in which we discussed some of the more vexing consequences of graphic design and what we've come to call faux science: …