Arts + Culture

Rick Poynor|Essays

Mevis and Van Deursen: Rueful Recollections, Recycled Design

In their self-edited monograph, Dutch graphic designers Mevis and Van Deursen turn their backs on their professed commitment to ideas and treat the book mainly as an opportunity for undemanding aesthetic play.

Rick Poynor|Essays

But Darling of Course it’s Normal: The Post-Punk Record Sleeve

There have been collections of post-punk music and now, finally, there is British music critic Simon Reynolds' 500-page history of the genre from 1978 to 1984. It's a brilliant book. He argues that post-punk music's explosion of creativity …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Eduardo Paolozzi, 20th Century Image-Maker

If a visual artist created more concentrated, exhilarating images of science, technology and the media realm during the mid-20th century than British artist Eduardo Paolozzi, then I would like to see them. Paolozzi, who died on 22 April …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Extremely Young and Incredibly Everywhere: The Public Art of Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer published his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, to critical acclaim only three years after graduating from Princeton University, where he won the Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior Creative Writing thesis …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Homage to the Squares

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's exhibition Design is not Art provides a useful contrast to an simultaneous exhibition of the work of Josef and Anni Albers, and demonstrates differences between art and design.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot

Dot Dot Dot is the most stimulating and original visual culture magazine produced by designers since Emigre's heyday in the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.

Debbie Millman|Audio

Grant McCracken, Part 2

Grant McCracken PhD, author and a research affiliate at MIT.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Scrapbooking: The New Paste-Up

"Craft-born embellishments," note one supplier of scrapbooking products, "are penetrating an unexpected market: graphic design."

Debbie Millman|Audio

Grant McCracken, Part 1

Grant McCracken PhD, is an author and a research affiliate at MIT.

Lawrence Weschler|Essays

The Aural As An Architectonic Challenge

I think of design in wider than simple visual, or visual-textual, or visual-spatial terms. Rarely, it seems, is the aural considered as an ongoing architectonic challenge, which is what the people over at Transom.org are up to. As it …

Rob Walker|Essays

For Kicks

A look at one facet of the sneaker phenomenon — that is, the way that fashion and brand loyalty can come together in what might be considered the folk art of a consumer culture.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Designing Under the Influence

The similarity of a young designer's work to that of the artist Barbara Kruger provides the starting point for a discussion of the role of influence in design, and whether it is possible for someone to "own" a specific style.