Category: Slideshows

The Editors|Slideshows

Winners of the Chicago Poster Biennial

Chicago International Poster Biennial, poster design by Yann Legendre, 2008In the face of relentless competition from the even more ephemeral world of new media, posters continue to obsess us. And that obsession has a new home in the …

Paola Antonelli|Slideshows

The Typographer’s Guide to the Galaxy

F Rat, 2007 from Oded Ezer: The Typographer's Guide to the Galaxy Have you ever looked at your handwriting from the other side of the sheet, holding the paper against the light? It is as displacing as watching your own photographic …

William Drenttel|Slideshows

Thoughts on Democracy, July 4 2008

During the summer of 1942, the American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell embarked on a series of paintings that would come to be known as "The Four Freedoms." Inspired by an impassioned speech President Roosevelt had made a year …

The Editors|Slideshows

The Next Page: Thirty Tables of Contents

Last year, on the occasion of "Next," the AIGA's Biennial National Design Conference in Denver, Design Observer published a little book, The Next Page: Thirty Tables of Contents. For our readers not in attendance, we are sharing it here as …

Tom Vanderbilt|Slideshows

Blast-Door Art: Cave Paintings of Nuclear Era

Photograph by Robert Lyon, courtesy of Daniel FrieseAt the back of what looks like an enclosed porch of an unpretentious ranch house near Wall, South Dakota, a steel-runged ladder leads down a 30-foot concrete access shaft. At the bottom, …

William Drenttel|Baseball

Any Baseball is Beautiful

Baseball spring training opens Tuesday. It is in this spirit that I stumbled upon the photographs of Don Hamerman. For the past few years, as he's walked his dog at a local park, he's picked up lost and forgotten baseballs. There are …

Tom Manning|Slideshows

Spam Cartoons

Like anyone else with an email account, every day I am greeted with a fresh dose of spam. Because spam filters are designed to scan emails for certain words and phrases, spammers have created programs that automatically generate a text …

William Drenttel|Slideshows

Stephen Doyle: A Few Words

Stephen Doyle, "WAS/SAW Poster," American Center for Design, 1994Between 1985 and 1997, I was partners with Stephen Doyle and Tom Kluepfel at Drenttel Doyle Partners in New York City. While Tom stayed home to mind the shop, Stephen and I …

William Drenttel|Slideshows

Burma (Myanmar), 1989

William Drenttel, passport, 1989According to Wikipedia: 8888 Uprising was a national peaceful revolution demanding democracy that started on August 8, 1988, in Burma (now Myanmar), when university students started the initial …

Lorraine Wild|Slideshows

Wallace Berman's Photographs

Photograph by Wallace Berman, "Shirley Berman," Larkspur 1960The mystery of Wallace Berman's photographs revolves around the degree to which they were — or were not — set up. Was Berman attempting to create a narrative, or was …

Michael Bierut|Slideshows

Flat, Simple and Funny: The World of Charley Harper

Charley Harper, "Mystery of the Missing Migrants," from Beguiled by the Wild: The Art of Charley Harper, Flower Valley Press, 1994A few years ago, we bought a little house at the southernmost tip of the Jersey Shore in a town called Cape …

William Drenttel|Slideshows

One Man's Literary Compass

When I look at my bookshelves, I see my life. Whole glimpses of previous interests are represented, from my collection of Latin American fiction to the many reminders of the years I spent living in Italy (the novels of Primo Levi and Italo …