Social Good

Steven Heller|Essays

Closing New York’s Penal Colony

How design is playing an integral role in the campaign to close Rikers Island.

Toby Bottorf|Essays

Past Security: Notes on the Experience of Airports

Airports are designed to feel deliberately like nowhere. It’s sterility as a design choice.

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

The Politics of Desire and Looting

The part designers have played in the London riots.

Mary Badon|Essays

Red Light, Green Light: The Invention of the Traffic Signal

The traffic light — invented in 1912 by a policeman in Detroit — has radically impacted the way transportation rules have developed over the past 100 years, all over the world.

Kathleen Meaney|Essays

Wing It: Testing Out Exhibit Design Using Virtual Reality

The field of environmental (or experiential) graphic design is young and on fire.

Michael Bierut|Audio

Episode 77: Cape to California

Cape Town’s water crisis, Los Angeles’ first chief design officer, Lubalin 100, Walter Dorwin Teague’s Design This Day

Rick Poynor|Essays

Herbert Spencer and The Book of Numbers

The Book of Numbers by Herbert and Mafalda Spencer was aimed at children, but its intriguing visual approach is more “photobook” than “schoolbook.”

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Small Town Life: The Logo Stops Here

Working with Florence Knoll, Lucille McGinnis convinced her husband, Patrick B. McGinnis, that the New Haven Railroad needed a new logo. Enter Herbert Matter, Swiss-born designer, photographer and Yale professor whose own education was …

Ken Gordon|Essays

Jane Jacobs Took It to the Streets

So much of our legendary urbanist’s accomplishments involved bringing the design of cities down to earth from the soaring views of modernists.

Julie Anixter|Essays

Speaking of Home: Saint Paul Skyways become Immigrant Portrait Gallery

“The goals of empowering new Americans, supporting diversity, and teaching tolerance are all critical to the long-term health of our city.”

Thomas de Monchaux|Books

Something Elemental About Something Artificial

Exploring the complex space between the formal and informal, the formed and formless with LOT-EK.

Bill Shaffer|Essays

Modern Survivor

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