Business

Debbie Millman|Audio

Chip Kidd

Book designer extraordinaire Chip Kidd is also the author of several books including The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners: A Novel. 

Debbie Millman|Audio

Chip Kidd

Book designer extraordinaire Chip Kidd is also the author of several books including The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners: A Novel. 

Cheryl Towler Weese|Essays

Is Apple Soft on Crime?

In its now-ubiquitous campaign, the iPod holds the promise of cool: silhouetted figures dance on a colored field, brandishing their sleek white iPods, serving alternatively as dance partners, status symbols and fashion accessories. It's a …

Steven Kroeter|Essays

Design Thinking, Muddled Thinking

One of the most agonizing experiences of my professional career was the annual marketing plans process at the large consumer package goods company where I started in brand management. Each year the brand managers wrote (exhaustingly, …

Rob Walker|Essays

False Endorsement

There is no shortage of logos in the world, no dearth of brands striving for consumer allegiance and no chance that the creation of new brands and logos will cease.

Andrew Blauvelt|Unusual Suspects

Modernism in the Fly-Over Zone

The story of Peter Seitz provides one example, and we can rest assured that there are many more stories just like his in cities across the country — modernism in the fly-over zone, if you will — which add a critical human …

Michael Bierut|Essays

How To Be Ugly

Whether reactionary spasm or irrevocable paradigm shift, the new trend is making design that looks ugly. The trick is to surround it with enough attitude so it will be properly perceived not as the product of everyday incompetence, but …

Elizabeth Tunstall|Essays

What If Uncle Sam Wanted You?

James Montgomery Flagg, lithograph, 1917. (Prints & Photographs Division, U.S. National Archives)What if Uncle Sam wanted you to design not posters, but services in the war zones of Afghanistan or Iraq? As a design anthropologist, I am …

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

The Designer's Virus

"Bubonic Plague," in Albert Fournier, Atlas de Bactériologie, ca. 1910. (Collection: Winterhouse)I took part in the recent Eye magazine debate in London on the relationship between design and marketing. Also on the panel was a …

Steven Heller|Essays

Topanga, I Hardly Knew Ye

NutriSystem Advertisement, The New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2007Being a design snob, I've always wondered why anyone with taste would pay thousands of dollars to publish one of those text-heavy, type-awful, full-page magazine …

Michael Bierut|Essays

May I Show You My Portfolio?

My art school portfolio has sat in a box, largely untouched, in the closets and basements of the three places I've lived in the last 27 years, sort of like a slowly decaying design time capsule. A few weeks ago, I opened it up for the …

Michael Bierut|Essays

You're So Intelligent

Wanting to be taken seriously, designers yearn to be respected for their minds. Yet they take their real gifts — a miraculous fluency with beauty, an ability to manipulate form in a way that can touch people's hearts — for …