Technology

William Drenttel|Essays

Design URLs

Design Observer is not just a name we stumbled upon: we searched hi and low. Delineator was not available, nor was untitled. The Velocity of Modern Life sounded too, well, too obvious and far afield. As a service to our readers over the holidays, here is a list of the twenty URLs we found to be …

Rob Walker|Essays

The Guts of a New Machine

The iPod, a digital music player, it weighing just 6.5 ounces and holding about 1,000 songs.

Rob Walker|Essays

Digital Tools for Making Brilliant Mistakes

The many options for digitally antiquing your 21st-century self-expression.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Mark Lombardi and the Ecstasy of Conspiracy

Artist Mark Lombardi's intricate handdrawn diagrams describing the relationships behind contemporary political and financial scandals are both beautiful objects and extraordinary feats of information design.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Implausible Fictions

At a symposium several weeks ago at the Annenberg School for Public Policy in Philadelphia, we gave a presentation in which we discussed some of the more vexing consequences of graphic design and what we've come to call faux science: namely, that making facts pretty and palatable, while …

William Drenttel|Essays

Information Archaeology

The New York Times recently ran a front page story about a U.S. Justice Department report on the agency's diversity efforts. The final assessment was posted on the web last month, but over half of the report was "blacked out." Obviously, a scandal in the making: the agency responsible for …

William Drenttel|Essays

Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician II

In a recent interview (here and here) with Edward Tufte by Dan Nadel (I.D. Magazine, November 2003), I was surprised to read Tufte saying that he discovered how "horrifying" PowerPoint was while doing a Google search for people who were teaching his work. In other words, he recognized …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician I

I went to college with a very sharp guy who once claimed that the problem with sociology was sociologists, who were, as far as he was concerned, merely self-proclaimed experts on the obvious. "All sociologists really do," he once observed, "is give names to stuff we already know." This …