History

Steven Heller|Essays

Designing for the Masses

The ultimate case for anti-design: The Communist Manifesto

Lilly Smith|Interviews

Assessing the Past; Looking Toward the Future

How the new AIGA Google Art Project “Across Borders: A Look at the Work of Latinx Designers” revealed insights about archived Latinx work of the past—and clues to its ascendance in the future of design.

Sean Adams|Evidence

The Meticulous Bruce Rogers

Classical structure and typography, paired with a modern aesthetic, typified Bruce Rogers work.

Sean Adams|Evidence

Gateway Drug of Dessau

The typography and graphic design at the Bauhaus represent the most religious allegiance to Modernism. But, it is the photography at the Bauhaus that serves as a gateway drug.

Steven Heller|Essays

Earnest Elmo Calkins: Founder of Modern Advertising and a Designer You Probably Don’t Know

“It is arguable that without the puritanically raised Calkins, Modern art would never have washed up on American advertising’s shores, creative advertising teams might not have existed, and graphic design would be a different profession today.”

John Foster|Accidental Mysteries

An Archive of Czech Film Posters

Real life #TBT: a publicly accessible database with over 6,000 original, vintage posters from all periods of cinema.

Bill Shaffer|Essays

Modern Survivor

An enormous, glorious, digital clock: a quintessential expression of the design ethos of the 1960s.

Steven Heller|Essays

Victims of the Image: Yellow Peril

Visual hazing in popular art and design of Asians was long maintained for different purposes.

Steven Heller|Essays

Victims of the Image: Black Smears

The power of mainstream, routinely accepted, racial and ethnic stereotype images widely published in the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did more to foster the stigma of being different than even more venal forms of supremacist rhetoric.

Sean Adams|Evidence

Manifesto of Surrealism: 3 Tragedies

We pass through our days creating fictions to make sense of the world.

Steven Heller|Books

Cosmos of Signs

The universe of signs and symbols devised throughout the ages of human history is head-spinningly immense and forever expanding.

Manuel Lima|Books

Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge

The circularity exhibited in nature turned out to be much more than a source of wonder. It soon became a chief guiding principle of human culture, emulated and reinvented in art, religion, language, technology, architecture, philosophy, and science.