Graphic Design

Michael Bierut|Essays

Catharsis, Salesmanship, and the Limits of Empire

Nozone #9: Empire and a new promotional campaign for the radio station Air America demonstrate alternate ways that graphic design can engage political issues and their audiences.

Michael Bierut|Essays

I Hear You’ve Got Script Trouble: The Designer as Auteur

Screenwriter William Goldman has written about how difficult it is to ascribe authorship for a film. The same may be true for graphic design, which, like filmmaking, is essentially a collaborative activity.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Graphic Flanerie

I have often wondered what a reality TV program about graphic design might be like. Would it feature, say, an imperious figurehead who could make or break the nascent career of a young designer? Would it be modeled on survivalism? On …

William Drenttel|Essays

El Lissitzky for Pesach

We all have images in our mind of the work of the Russian artist El Lissitzky: formal modernism, geometric constructions, typographic abstractions. This image was enlarged when I encountered the wonderful illustrations from an early book …

William Drenttel|Essays

The Lying Game No. 2 (Or Vietnam Redux)

New York City - (AP Photo/Shawn Baldwin)In America, we are experiencing the most polarized populace since Vietnam. Millions of people may have disapproved of Bill Clinton's immoral behavior, but even at the height of his impeachment trial …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Lying Game

Agence France-Presse—Getty ImagesEarlier this week, Nationalist Party protesters in Taiwan picketed their highly disputed political election with doctored images of President Chen Shui-bian: the idea was to depict his shame by …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Typographic Oddity No. 2: Spaceship Gothic

An upcoming auction of space memorabilia at Swann Galleries features a number of unusual specimens of paper ephemera which have miraculously survived the last half-century of American (and Soviet) space exploration. Who designed them? …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Jan van Toorn: Arguing with Visual Means

Jan van Toorn’s designs embody an idea about citizenship. They address viewers as critical, thinking individuals who can be expected to take an informed and skeptical interest in the circumstances of their world.

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Book (Cover) That Changed My Life

The deceptively simple 1960s paperback cover of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" is redolent of a very specific time and place to readers who discovered the book then.

Michael Bierut|Essays

George Kennan and the Cold War Between Form and Content

Diplomat George Kennan's "Long Telegram" of 1946 is a memorable synthesis of form and content, and a demonstration of how powerful form can be.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The DNA of AND: Ampersand as Myth and Metaphor

From corporate rhetoric to consumer cliché to faux finishes and desktop veneer, truth has gone from being a steadfast principle to a silly posture. Once the stuff of morals and fables, its presence in everyday life has become an …

Michael Bierut|Essays

1989: Roots of Revolution

"Dangerous Ideas," the 1989 conference of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) chaired by Tibor Kalman and Milton Glaser, introduced many themes -- social responsibility, political engagement, professional ethics -- that still …