Arts + Culture

Julie Lasky|Essays

Christo's Agent Orange

Christo, The Gates, Central Park, New York 1979-2005, Drawing #047. Photo: Wolfgang Volz. ©2004 Christo.Swaying like 7,500 Hare Krishna in a can-can line, the saffron-colored fabric panels of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Central Park …

Rick Poynor|Essays

The Ikea Riot: Unsatisfied Excess?

When Ikea threw open the doors of a new store in London, the result was mayhem as customers stampeded. Evidence of social breakdown, or a sign that the utopian argument for low-cost modernist design has been won?

Rob Walker|Essays

Hyperreality Hobbying

“Reborning'” is the name that has emerged for a curious process of altering and enhancing a baby doll to look and even to feel as much like a human baby as possible.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Best Artist in the World

Alton Tobey, a little-known commercial illustrator, created a body of work in the early sixties that continues to inspire.

William Drenttel|Essays

Bird in Hand: When Does A Copy Become Plagiarism?

Left: STEP Inside Design, Cover, Jan.-Feb. 2005. Right: Photograph by Victor Schrager.Every once and a while, the plagiarism of one artist's work by another crosses the line, or so I thought. I wrote a different piece for Design Observer a …

William Drenttel|Essays

In Remembrance of Susan Sontag

In Remembrance of Susan Sontag: a designer's twenty-five years of interaction with the legandary writer.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Other Rand

The Fountainhead, a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand, continues to exert its influence over generations of architects and designers.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Fear and Loathing at the Design Museum

James Dyson has accused the Design Museum in London of ruining its reputation with frivolous exhibitions. For many bemused onlookers, his complaints were out of touch with evolving public perceptions of design.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Graphic Design Olympics

The event graphics and pictograms created for the Olympics by designers such as Otl Aicher, Lance Wyman and Deborah Sussman are part of a historic tradition that continues to this day.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Ladislav Sutnar: Mechanical Beauty

Dummy of dust jacket for Arnold Zweig's The Crowning of the King, 1938. Drawing, pencil and tempera paste-up. Last spring, we spent several days in Switzerland en route to Italy — a detour which was largely unremarkable except that …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

An Instrument of Sufficiently Lucid Cogitation

The legendary French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died on Tuesday at his home in the South of France, always carried a sketchbook with him. Today's obituary in The New York Times alleges that he described drawing as …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Britain and America: United in Idiocy

What do Brits and Americans think of each other? In Us & Them, a book by the satirical British illustrator Paul Davis, the two countries have one thing in common: they are both equally stupid. That’s not saying much.