Observed | December 11
Matisse felt an intense love for books, and the care and attention he lavished on them included not just his illustrations, but also the selection of paper, typeface, and layout. [BV]
Observed | December 10
Stanford’s d.school attempts to
move beyond Post-its on whiteboards. (via
James I. Bowie) [BV]
Observed | December 06
“I simply wanted to explore the interiority of both myself and others. I wanted to focus on what connected us rather than what separated us.”
Painting friends in mid-conversation, Alex Bradley Cohen hides as much as he reveals. [BV]
Yello is a great new newsletter from journalist Hunter Schwarz “about the culture, branding, and visual rhetoric of politics in America.” Here are his 101 picks for visual moments that defined politics in the 2010s, including Edel Rodriguez’s melting Trump. [MB]
Observed | December 04
How do you
bring an 18th-century Agateware teapot to life? Crafting it calls for an intricate process of moulding and layering clay materials, to mimic the agate stone. [BV]
Check out French artist Paul Sougy’s stunning mid-century scientific illustrations of plants, animals, and the human body. [BV]
Observed | November 21
The icons of our popular culture
depicted as ancient ruins. (via
James I. Bowie) [BV]
Observed | November 14
“Other bad films fascinate because they define an area of heroic obsession, horrifically misapplied. The heroism and the misapplication are inseparable. Anyone can commit himself body and soul to a clearly formulated project of obvious importance or quality, but to throw your last dollar, your last scrap of energy, into something ill-conceived and absurd from the beginning: That takes a human being.”
Phil Christman on the reasons we watch bad movies. [BV]
Congratulations to
Côte d’Ivoire-based artist Joana Choumali on being the first photographer from the African continent to be awarded one of the world’s most prestigious photography prizes, the Prix Pictet. [BV]
Observed | November 13
We are very excited for
the next chapter of The Great Discontent and send all our congratulations to Hugh Weber and the TGD community: we look forward to new stories and new journeys. [BV]
Observed | November 12
Gorgeous
redesign of The Atlantic by Peter Mendelsund and Oliver Munday. [MB]
Observed | November 11
Out TODAY, Jessica Helfand’s
FACE: A VISUAL ODYSSEY from MIT Press. From Chuck Close, it’s “Everything you ever wanted to know about the face, plus lots you never knew you would want to know—and a few things you wish you didn’t. A must-read as well as a treasury of images.” [BV]
Observed | November 05
Flo Ngala’s photographs of
Figure Skating in Harlem celebrate young skaters of color. [BV]
Observed | November 04
#BreakingNews:
FACEBOOK goes all-caps (but the app will stay lowercase). (via
James I. Bowie) [BV]
Observed | October 24
The meaning, and enduring appeal, of
seashells. (via
James I. Bowie) [BV]
Observed | October 08
The renaissance of
the Friends logo. (via
James I. Bowie) [BV]
Observed | September 30
Max Hirshfeld shares
his parents‘ poignant Holocaust love story through photographs, letters, and text. [BV]
Observed | September 19
Our dear friend Rob Walker has a new column, Off Brand, for the new Medium business magazine,
Marker. He kicks off with
which tech companies need a Black Mirror unit that focuses on how products can be misused, and design accordingly. [BV]
Watch Charles and Ray Eames put their 1969 spin on one of the world’s oldest toys. [BV]
Observed | September 18
A tribute to the dearly departed
paper sports ticket. (via
James I. Bowie) [BV]
Observed | September 10
The blobification of the American restaurant. (via
James I. Bowie) [BV]
Observed | September 04
Beginning with the Dada and Surrealist movements, Paris nurtured a tradition of artists, including Ernst, Tanguy, Arp, and Léger, illustrating imaginative and important books.
Designers and Books explores Paris and the Artist’s Book in the 1920s and ’30s. [BV]
What‘s the point of album covers in the post-album era? Jon Caramanica and Teddy Blanks discuss. [MB]
Observed | September 03
The history of the Roman Empire, which spans hundreds of years and multiple continents, is chronicled in statues and monuments its citizens left behind. Artsy has a list of
seven ancient Roman sculptures you need to know. [BV]
Over the summer, Hyperallergic interviewed dozens of art handlers about the variable conditions of their workplaces.
This week, their stories of accident and injury come to light. [BV]
Observed | September 02
KCET is back with a new season of Masters of Modern Design. Season 10 kicks off with
the influence of Japanese American artists and designers—Ruth Asawa, George Nakashima, Isamu Noguchi, S. Neil Fujita and Gyo Obata—in postwar American art and design. (h/t Steven Heller) [LY]
Observed | August 30
We use hurricane forecast graphics to warn people. Why do we misinterpret them so often?
A marvelous explanation of misreading hurricane graphics. [BV]
Observed | August 29
When your brain
won’t let you recognize people, how do you navigate the world? [BV]
Pedro Bell, the artist who created Funkadelic’s cosmic album covers, died Tuesday at 69. [BV]
Observed | August 26
On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build
the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe. [BV]
Adrian Shaughnessy is a graphic designer and writer based in London. He is a senior tutor in Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art and a founding partner in Unit Editions a publishing company producing books on design and visual culture. Scratching the Surface, a collection of his journalism, has recently been published. 
