Media
Showing 1189 – 1200 of 1,213 results
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 …
Rick Poynor|Essays
How to Say What You Mean
There is a crucial difference between subtle and complex ideas and needlessly convoluted forms of expression. The challenge now for design writing is to move outwards into a world in which design is everywhere.
Michael Bierut|Essays
Stanley Kubrick and the Future of Graphic Design
Stanley Kubrick's attention to the nuances of graphic design, typography, and branding went far beyond his well-documented obsession with Futura Extra Bold. 2001: A Space Odyssey in particular projects a perfectly designed vision of the …
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.
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Annals of Typographic Oddity: Mourning Becomes Helvetica
It isn't often that The New York Times runs a 6-column headline on the front page. This kind of editorial real estate is typically reserved for something cataclysmic a coup d'etat, for instance and looks goofy and …
William Drenttel|Essays
Defamiliarization: A Personal History
In 1977, I wrote a college thesis about Michelangelo Antonioni. Fueled by illusions of scholarship, I attempted to evaluate this great Italian filmmaker through the lens of Russian formalist literary criticism. Out of nowhere, I …
Michael Bierut|Essays
The Final Decline and Total Collapse of the American Magazine Cover
Comparing the magazine covers of today to those created for Esquire magazine in the 1960s by George Lois leads to only one conclusion: today's magazine ideal magazine cover is enticing, not arresting, aiming not for shock, but for …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
You're Going to Hollywood, Baby
Michael Bierut|Essays
Rob Roy Kelly’s Old, Weird America
The late educator and designer Rob Roy Kelly has had a lasting influence on the profession of graphic design, particularly through his landmark book "American Wood Type."
William Drenttel|Essays
Adolf Wölfli Invents Design Brut?
[Adolf Wolfli, The Cevelar Mary (Funeral March, p.4038), (detail), 1929]Adolf Wölfli was a mad artist, a schizophrenic who molested three-year-old girls. Born in Bern, Switzerland in 1864, Wölfli died in 1930 at the age of 66. …
Michael Bierut|Essays
The Forgotten Design Legacy of the National Lampoon
In a bookstore over the holidays I happened to come across a new edition of something had thought I would never see again: the legendary National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook. Originally published in 1971, the publication has at its …
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