History

William Drenttel|Essays

Does Aspen Have A Future?

From Aspen Magazine, Vol. 1 No. 1, 1965The American Center for Design was for many years the most dynamic, innovative design organization in America. It spearheaded conferences about interface design and business-design case studies. It …

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 …

William Drenttel|Essays

Penmanship: The Voice of A Future Designer

Reading handwriting is an old art: graphology is one of the more articulated forms of divination, and handwriting analysis has long had the trappings of a science with its history and court experts.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Take Two Logos and Call Me in the Morning

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Idealistic Corporation

American corporations in the mid-twentieth century, such as IBM, Container Corporation, and General Dynamics, worked with designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Herbert Bayer and Erik Nitsche in the conviction that design was not only a …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Modernising MoMA: Design on Display

MoMA is broadening its approach to graphic design. Recovering this material history will assist us in understanding our broader cultural history and help to educate a more aware generation of visual communicators.

William Drenttel|Essays

Learning from Las Vegas: The Book That (Still) Takes My Breath Away

Why did its authors hate the design of Learning from Las Vegas so much?

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 …

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

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.