Arts + Culture

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Ad Reinhardt, Graphic Designer

Ad Reinhardt, detail of scrapbook page, ca. 1934. Courtesy of Smithsonian Archives of American Art.The American abstract expressionist painter Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt, who died in 1967 at the age of 54, is remembered as a …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The New Manifest Destiny

In the series Modern History (1978), the artist Sarah Charlesworth photocopied the front pages of newspapers and reframed the news by blocking out all the text, leaving only the masthead and photographs in their relative positions. The …

Jesse Nivens|Essays

In Search of Stock(y) Photography

Odalisca, Fernando Botero, 1998I work for a company that manufactures fitness equipment. While working on a new marketing piece, I found myself in the seemingly normal situation of needing a general stock photograph of an overweight …

Debbie Millman|Audio

Barbara Kruger

An interview with American artist Barbara Kruger.

Debbie Millman|Audio

Jeffrey Keyton

An interview with Jeffrey Keyton, Senior Vice Ppresident, On-Air Design and Off-Air Creative, MTV.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Dancing to the Sound in Your Head

We might not appreciate advertising conducted like a saturation bombing campaign in public spaces. Yet now, to complicate things, the personal stereo is being used as a way of reasserting spontaneity, exuberance and passion in …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Ephemera: Town & Country Cookbook

Cover, Town and Country Cookbook, 1953Books are, by their very nature, often judged by their covers. Like miniature posters or single-frame film trailers, the book cover is the visual prologue to what lies beneath. Book cover designers are …

Debbie Millman|Audio

Maira Kalman

An interview with the remarkable Maira Kalman — the closest thing we in the United States have to a National Treasure.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Good at Art

Growing up in the sixties, I couldn’t throw or catch a baseball with authority, punch someone in the face, or shoplift. But I had something I could call my very own. I was good at art.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Art Director Ken

Art Director Ken © Mattel, 2003.Ken, who turned 46 yesterday, shares a birthday with eighteenth-century chemist Joseph Priestly, nineteenth-century astronomer Percival Lowell, and twentieth-century singer songwriter, Neil Sedaka. (And …

Dan Nadel|Essays

This is Not My Design Life Now

Mat Brinkman, Melt Banana and Lightning Bolt at Ft. Thunder, 1998In another life, I was a regular contributor to design magazines. But I grew less interested in that and more in simply writing and making books. So, interested in getting …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Lost, O Lost

Photograph of Evelyn Waugh by Douglass Glass."Literature is either the essential or nothing." — Georges BatailleThe English writer Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) is perhaps best known for his satirical portraits of the British upper …