Graphic Design

Rick Poynor|Essays

Notes on Experimental Jetset

Experimental Jetset’s argument that design should have a certain autonomy and an inner logic separate from tastes and trends makes sense, but as a rationale for defaulting to Helvetica, is it convincing?

Michael Bierut|Essays

Errol Morris Blows Up Spreadsheet, Thousands Killed

Errol Morris’s documentary "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara" demonstrates his mastery of information design as a poetic narrative device.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Adbusters in Anarchy

Adbusters’ once orderly pages are in a state of heaving agitation. The magazine seems to be seduced by the coolness of design as a gesture, even though this is part of the surface-fixated postmodernism it deplores.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Sign Language: Endangered Species or Utopian Uprising?

Many of my students have, over the years, considered the street writ large as a kind of flexible, experimental canvas. Their sources — and here I would include everything from Aaron Siskind to Gabriel Orozco — inform work in …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Remember Picelj

The English-speaking world knows little about the design history of Communist Europe. Few will have heard of the distinguished Slovenian Ivan Picelj. His prints ask us to remember; they are full of yearning.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Unnecessary Revival

As a first-time enthusiast for American Typewriter, I was happy to see it pass into history. Resurrecting the typeface now that the typewriter has given way to digital technology is just nostalgia ― soft at the core.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Implausible Fictions

At a symposium several weeks ago at the Annenberg School for Public Policy in Philadelphia, we gave a presentation in which we discussed some of the more vexing consequences of graphic design and what we've come to call faux science: …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Graphic Design and the New Certainties

Graphic designers claim to want total freedom, but even in this intuitive, arbitrary, "creative" profession, many of us secretly crave limitations, standards, certainties. And certainties are a hard thing to come by these days. I was …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Those Inward-looking Europeans

Three American design teachers visit London and the Netherlands. European designers, they say, are not paying attention to design history. Maybe the visitors are missing local factors and broader global issues.

William Drenttel|Essays

Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician II

In a recent interview (here and here) with Edward Tufte by Dan Nadel (I.D. Magazine, November 2003), I was surprised to read Tufte saying that he discovered how "horrifying" PowerPoint was while doing a Google search for people who were …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Fatal Grandeur

In one of the annotations to my design manifesto, "Me, The Undersigned," I wrote somewhat sarcastically of the seriousness with which some of us view our profession by noting, "Design is probably not going to kill you if it falls on your …

William Drenttel|Twenty Years of Design Observer

Culture Is Not Always Popular

A keynote presentation by Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel at the AIGA conference in Vancouver, October 25, 2003.