Category: Essays

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.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician I

I went to college with a very sharp guy who once claimed that the problem with sociology was sociologists, who were, as far as he was concerned, merely self-proclaimed experts on the obvious. "All sociologists really do," he once observed, …

William Drenttel|Essays

VAS: An Opera in Flatland

I first saw the work of Stephen Farrell while walking with Richard Meier through the opening of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial in 2000. Stephen made a 600+ page book about at typeface, Volgare, inspired by a Renaissance …

William Drenttel|Essays

Twin (Cities) Type in Flux

An article in late July in The New York Times discusses the new typeface commissioned for the City of Minneapolis by Jan Abrams, director of the University of Minnesota Design Institute, that moves when the wind blows.