Business

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 …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Another Myth Brilliantly Debunked

Popular Science, June, 1956.In 1933, just three months after the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 13 folding-carton manufacturers met in Washington DC to organize objectives and clarify for their constituents a proposed Code of Fair …

William Drenttel|Essays

The Presidential Rash

Lyme Disease. No caption necessary.[Warning: Another occasional post on Design Observer that involves and invokes political content and satire. Do not read if you do not like your design commentary mixed with politics.]It was reported this …

John Thackara|Interviews

Design for (Im)mobility: Interview with Domus

John Thackera defines and explains the importance of ethnoecology.

Steven Heller|Essays

Martin Weber in the Third Dimension

Pages from "The Weber Process," promotional brochure for the Martin J. Weber Studio, c. 1952When he died on June 9, Martin J. Weber was 102. You may not know his name. I didn't. Like other toilers in the art service bullpens of New York …

Debbie Millman|Audio

Bad Boys of Design IV

Designers Marc Alt, Mike Essl, Alberto Rigau and others.

Debbie Millman|Audio

Josh Liberson + Ethan Trask

Josh Liberson and Ethan Trask are designers and the founders of the firm Helicopter.