Category: Essays

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: …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Graphic Design and the New Certainties

Graphic designers claim to want total freedom, but even in this intuitive, arbitrary, "creative" profession, many of us secretly crave limitations, standards, certainties. And certainties are a hard thing to come by these days. I was …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Those Inward-looking Europeans

Three American design teachers visit London and the Netherlands. European designers, they say, are not paying attention to design history. Maybe the visitors are missing local factors and broader global issues.

William Drenttel|Essays

Information Archaeology

The New York Times recently ran a front page story about a U.S. Justice Department report on the agency's diversity efforts. The final assessment was posted on the web last month, but over half of the report was "blacked out." Obviously, a …

William Drenttel|Essays

Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician II

In a recent interview (here and here) with Edward Tufte by Dan Nadel (I.D. Magazine, November 2003), I was surprised to read Tufte saying that he discovered how "horrifying" PowerPoint was while doing a Google search for people who were …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Color Me Kurt

An article in today's New York Times discusses the new direction for Colors under the editorial leadership of critic, author, editor and part-time radio host Kurt Andersen.

Rick Poynor|Essays

It's a Man's World

Adam Parfrey’s book shows hundreds of men’s magazine covers from the 1950s painted by artists who specialized in depictions of tough guys abusing terrified women. Have we outgrown this kind of thing? Heck no.

John Thackara|Essays

Creativity and the City [November 2003]

Report on the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneve, Doors East, planning for the 2004 Spark! conference, psychogeography, Sublin Ad-hoc Wireless Network (DAWN), and more.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Fatal Grandeur

In one of the annotations to my design manifesto, "Me, The Undersigned," I wrote somewhat sarcastically of the seriousness with which some of us view our profession by noting, "Design is probably not going to kill you if it falls on your …

Michael Bierut|Essays

The New York Times: Apocalypse Now, Page A1

Michael Bierut on the typographic redesign of the New York Times, October 2003.