Technology

Steven Heller|Essays

Father of Shrek, Grandfather of Tweet

The cover of William Steig's book CDBWilliam Steig (1907-2003), was often way ahead of the curve. His book of drawings, The Lonely Ones (1942), prefigured the now common practice of satirizing personal neurosis; his children’s book, …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

What's The Story?

And what becomes of all those dead tweets, anyway — all those long-expired, evaporated updates?

Mark Lamster|Essays

Wiretapped!

Would you believe it's those shifty Canucks, and not the spooks at the NSA, who have the Lamster phonelines tapped? Outrageous but true.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

My Facebook, My Self

But as projections of ourselves, one’s Facebook identity, made visible through one’s photo albums, inhabits a public trajectory that goes way beyond who and what we are.

Gabrielle Esperdy|Essays

Less Is More Again — A Manifesto

A Duralex Picardie tumbler, photo by Gabrielle EsperdyThe time has come to update William Morris and Adolf Loos for the 21st century. A hundred years ago Loos told us to suspend the use of ornament so that design could catch up with …

Rob Walker|Essays

Dumb and Dumber 2.0

American consumers have long shown an “exceptional willingness” to buy, for instance, technology products before their utility is clear.

Debbie Millman|Audio

Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand discusses growing up in a family of collectors, her love of visual biography and why history should be more important to designers than it seems to be.

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Design by Numbers

Business reporter Stephen Baker’s new book The Numerati explores the way that marketers and retailers are leveraging personal data to create customized experiences and targeted messages. The book details the staggering amount of data we …

Gong Szeto|Interviews

Interview with Brian Oakes

It’s not often that graphs and numbers take center stage in a popular film, but in the brilliant hands of graphic designer Brian Oakes, information design is not a backdrop but a main character in the recently released documentary …

Tom Vanderbilt|Essays

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do

This article is adapted from Tom Vanderbilt’s new book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (Knopf).Once, on a driving trip in rural Spain, I decided to take a shortcut. On the map, it looked like a good idea. The road turned out …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Reflections on The Ephemeral World, Part One: Ink

Half-size manila blank paper notebooks with "makeready" covers by Trip Print Press, TorontoI was on a press check recently, deliriously inhaling the pervasive aroma of ink (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it) whereupon, feeling very …

Matthew Peterson|Essays

The Cuckoo Bird and the Keyboard

Easily the most maligned key on your computer’s keyboard lies just to the left of “return” and represents what appear to be single and double quotation marks. It is a cuckoo’s egg in the designer’s nest. It doesn’t belong. …