Technology

William Drenttel|Essays

Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician III

A year in advance of its publication, a chapter from Edward Tufte's next book, Beautiful Evidence, has been posted on his website under Ask E.T. "Sparklines: Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics," makes a case for the "wonderful …

Michael Bierut|Essays

The Idealistic Corporation

American corporations in the mid-twentieth century, such as IBM, Container Corporation, and General Dynamics, worked with designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Herbert Bayer and Erik Nitsche in the conviction that design was not only a …

William Drenttel|Essays

Learning from Las Vegas: The Book That (Still) Takes My Breath Away

Why did its authors hate the design of Learning from Las Vegas so much?

Jessica Helfand|Essays

One Person, One Vote, One MRI?

In our little New England village, voting takes place at the local Town Hall, a small building on Main Street with two entrances that lead to one large room containing a single voting booth. In the last primary, local officials placed …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Information Design and the Placebo Effect

It turns out that New York City is filled with buttons for pedestrians to activitate "Walk" signals at busy intersections that have never worked. Does pressing these useless buttons provide us with a sense that at least we're doing …

William Drenttel|Essays

Call for Entries: Periodic Table of the Elements

Jessica Helfand and I are building a collection of Periodic Tables and hope to publish a book on their scientific, visual and cultural history. We are looking for examples — historical or contemporary — of interesting, …

William Drenttel|Essays

Uut, Uup and Away

Uut is the periodic symbol for Ununtrium, element no. 113, while Uup is the symbol for Ununpentium, element no. 115. Their discovery was jointly announced a few days ago by the Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia and the …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Mind the Light, Light the Mind

I was driving in the car recently when one of my children asked me to explain Quakerism. (A propos of what, now, I can't recall, though a similarly unprovoked opening conversational gambit came several days earlier, when the same child …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Errol Morris Blows Up Spreadsheet, Thousands Killed

Errol Morris’s documentary "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara" demonstrates his mastery of information design as a poetic narrative device.

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 …

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.