Theory + Criticism

Alice Twemlow|Essays

When Did Posters Become Such Wallflowers?

What was odd about many of the posters Alice Twemlow judged in a recent competition was that they didn’t promote an idea, event or product; their only purpose seemed to be entering numerous annual poster competitions.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

I'm Not Ready to Make Nice

It's a tough time to be a critic. Everyone's got an opinion they're all-too-eager to deliver, and in today's wiki-esque maelstrom of information sharing, we're all supposed to be equal. In the best case scenario, knowledge aggregation is …

Justin Good|Essays

What is Beauty? Or, On the Aesthetics of Wind Farms

Green Energy, Michael Tyas, 2006What is beauty and how does it relate to ecology? A look at contrasting aesthetic intuitions about wind farms reveals a paradigm shift in how we understand beauty. Our sense of the nature of beauty cannot be …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content

Design is that it is almost always about something else. The more things you're interested in, the better your work will be.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Wilson Pickett, Design Theorist, 1942 - 2006

Wilson Pickett's advice on hitmaking, "Harmonize, then customize," would make good advice for any designer.

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Bartleby™

In his classic story of Wall Street, Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville recounts the tale of a humble copyist employed by the story's narrator. Could Bartleby's perfectly crafted refrain be the appropriate response to a world where …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Emigre: An Ending

Issue 69 of Emigre will be the last. In its heyday, it was the most consistently interesting design publication produced by anyone, anywhere. By 1990, it was one of those magazines you simply had to get hold of and read straight away.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Where Are the Design Critics?

There is no reason why design criticism shouldn’t take an oppositional view of design's instrumental uses and its social role, but few design writers seem motivated to produce this kind of criticism.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Mevis and Van Deursen: Rueful Recollections, Recycled Design

In their self-edited monograph, Dutch graphic designers Mevis and Van Deursen turn their backs on their professed commitment to ideas and treat the book mainly as an opportunity for undemanding aesthetic play.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Extremely Young and Incredibly Everywhere: The Public Art of Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer published his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, to critical acclaim only three years after graduating from Princeton University, where he won the Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior Creative Writing thesis …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot

Dot Dot Dot is the most stimulating and original visual culture magazine produced by designers since Emigre's heyday in the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.

Rick Poynor|Essays

Why Architects Give Me the Willies

No matter how central graphic communication might be to our lives, architecture always dominates press coverage because it is very expensive, expresses the conditions of power, and is just plain big.