The Design Observer Twenty




Books
Adrian Shaughnessy
Hello Human
 A review of Michael Horsham’s Hello Human: A History of Visual Communication, out now from Thames & Hudson.
Jessica Helfand
Henry Leutwyler: International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum
 An interview with photographer Henry Leutwyler that explores his photographic record of some of the nearly 30,000 objects in the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva.
Manuel Lima
The New Designer: Design is Local
 An excerpt from Manuel Lima’s latest book, The New Designer.



Susan Magsamen, Ivy Ross
Your Brain on Art: Creating Community
 An excerpt from the book Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross.
Don Norman
Design for a Better World
 An excerpt from Don Norman’s new book, Design for a Better World.
Dana Arnett, Kevin Bethune
S10E12: Decolonizing Design
 Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook is a guidebook to the institutional transformation of design theory and practice by restoring the long-excluded cultures of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities.
Daniella Zalcman
What We See
 The inaugural book from Women Photograph, What We See, is a broad survey that represents the equally broad careers of our members.
Pamela Hovland
Ecological by Design: A History From Scandinavia
 Dr. Kjetil Fallan’s "Ecological by Design: A History From Scandinavia" is a book I will be thinking about for a long time.

A Story Made of Pictures
 An excerpt from A History of the World (in Dingbats) by David Byrne.




Snails & Monkey Tails
 There are countless books that can teach you the alphabet, but almost none that focus on the tiny designs that run interference among the letterforms: those easily overlooked punctuation and typographic symbols.
Sloan Leo
The Infrastructure of Care: Community Design, Healing & Organizational Post-Traumatic Growth
 This essay interrogates the relationship between power, decision-making, and organizational healing. It asserts that community design as a practice offers a theoretical framework for organizational dynamic healing that structurally enables those harmed to set the pace and nature of resolution and repair.
Maurice Cherry
Make the Path by Talking
 The Birth of Revision Path: The year is 2006.
adrienne maree brown + Lesley-Ann Noel
This Is Our Time!
 adrienne maree brown on design, liberation and transformation as told to Lesley-Ann Noel.

Health Design Thinking



Our Will to Live
 An excerpt from Our Will to Live, a new book out from Steidl featuring 250 rarely seen concert posters, programs, portraits and scenes rendered by imprisoned artists of the Terezín prison camp.

Jens Risom: A Seat at the Table
 An excerpt from Vicky Lowry’s new book "Jens Risom: A Seat at the Table", out this week from Phaidon.



Debbie Millman
Ai Weiwei
 Ai Weiwei joins Debbie Millman to discuss his new memoir 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, depicting a century-long epic tale of China told through a story of his family.
The Editors
Woman Made
 A new story of women product designers is told in Woman Made.



Tucker Viemeister
Drama
 A review of Drama, a new opus from David Rockwell, by Tucker Viemeister.

A Photographer at a Wedding
 Midwife. Funeral director. Wedding photographer. You meet them once on a delicate day. They quickly slip into the inner circle of a family to perform their role during this rite of passage, and then they are gone.

Clara Istlerová, Her Work and Life



äntrepō: Volume 1
 äntrepō is a studio project by the DC-based design practice Spaeth Hill.
Robert Finkel + Shea Tillman
The IBM Poster Program
 IBM’s mid-century corporate creative direction usually brings to mind Paul Rand, but it’s staff graphic designers and photographers developed posters as a platform for elevating internal communications and initiatives within the company.
Jessica Helfand + Ellen McGirt
S9E4: Na Kim
 Na Kim is an associate creative director at the book publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Susan Yelavich
Beings: Unruly Things, Golems, Cyborgs
 Stories of the supranatural would seem to be among those childish things it is long time we put away. But somehow we never do.
Kaleena Sales
Teaching Black Designers
 The vibrant complexities of the urban landscape create visual impressions in the mind, eventually serving as a mental library of stored images to use or reference when necessary.
Ellen Lupton
Confidence Equity
 Are we born with confidence, or do we earn it? If we don’t have it, how can we get it?

Origins of Design Patents
 Although the story of design patents is closely intertwined with that of industrial design, in fact design patents predate the emergence of industrial design as an organized professional discipline by nearly a century.

Sign Painting
 In the last ten years or so we have truly witnessed a resurgence of the sign painter’s craft.
The Editors
Self-Reliance
 To think through making, to know yourself better through the process of producing something.

The New Art of Making Books
 Founded in Philadelphia in 2016, Ulises is a collectively run art bookstore and exhibition space, who edited the recently published Publishing As Practice.
Jason Hill
Artist as Reporter
 In the 1940s the New York daily newspaper PM’s experimented with the then already "lost art" of sketch reporting.
Sean Adams
How Design Makes Us Think
 An excerpt from Sean Adams’ new book "How Design Makes Us Think".
Augusta Pownall
Rational Simplicity: Rudolph de Harak, Graphic Designer
 An interview with Richard Poulin, the long-overdue first comprehensive monograph of Rudolph de Harak’s work.
Adrian Shaughnessy
Impact
 Today, we use the internet and social media feeds to stay abreast of developments, but we used to rely on the design press. Already, most of the major players have left the stage. Will the few remaining stalwarts be around in 10 years’ time?

Covering Black America
 Decades ago, the great artist, poet, musician, and author Gil Scott-Heron famously proclaimed, “The revolution will not be televised.” He was right...It was, however, delivered monthly to newsstands and Black homes within the pages of Ebony.
Steven Heller
A Month With President Obama
 I spent last month, approximately three hours-a-night, seven-days-a-week, with President Barack H. Obama.
Steven Heller
Imagine, Observe, Remember
 The poetically enigmatic title says it all: Imagine, Observe, Remember; it is a book about process, memory, remembrance and interpretation.
Jessica Helfand
On Learning
 What resonates most unequivocally here is Emerson ’s plea for individuality—that iron string—the sovereignty of selfhood.



Steven Heller
Milton Glaser’s First Last Hurrah
Sketch & Finish illustrates Glaser’s teaching agenda, which is to say, one makes sketches to explore the unknown.
Patrick Fry
Magic Papers
 Magic is largely a solitary endeavour, but the channels of its tips and tricks had a little-known heyday around a hundred years ago.
Jessica Helfand + Claire Weisz
On Architecture
 Herewith, the first in a series of conversations with artists, architects, photographers, cinematographers, designers and makers of all kinds, from all over the world.

Word Rain
 In fall of 1969, a strange and brilliant book came into the world.



Steven Heller
The Influence of Nightlife on Design
 Cabarets, cafes, and nightclubs are as essential to the development of Modern avant garde art and design movements as are galleries, salons, and museums.
Steven Heller
Let’s Give Thanks for Books About Magazines
 If you love print magazines and bemoan their demise Steven Heller has seasonal gift suggestions for you.
Steven Heller
The Novel That Took Me Down Jojo’s Rabbit Hole
 Steven Heller interviews the author of "Caging Skies", the novel the new film Jojo Rabbit is based on.



Steven Heller
Dave King (RIP)
 Last January I thought I had received an email from a ghost.



Steven Heller
Booklover’s Guide to Le-Tan
 Steven Heller on illustrator Pierre Le-Tan and his daughter Cleo Le-Tan’s A Booklover’s Guide to New York.



Steven Heller
The Motivational Industrial Complex
 This publishing season I’ve found three motivational books, each on the benefits of creative activity that, despite the biases noted above, I would suggest you read, if only to be entertained.
Jonas Banker + Ida Wessel
Process
 The purpose pf this book is to reveal how physical sketching intertwines with critical thinking in the creative process, well beyond theoretical design jargon.
Steven Heller
The Bauhaus is Forever
 You can never have too much Bauhaus.
Debbie Millman
Austin Kleon
 Debbie talks with Austin Kleon, who describes himself as ’a writer who draws’.
Alex Cameron
On The Graphic Design Reader
Teal Triggs’ and Leslie Atzmon’s The Graphic Design Reader is as challenging as it is necessary.
Steven Heller
Don Wall: Brave New Book Design
Steven Heller talks to architect Don Wall about his radical book from 1971: Visionary Cities: the Arcology of Paolo Soleri.
Brian LaRossa
Why it Matters to Me if Designers Read and Write
 Literacy means being an engaged and responsible citizen. It means building sympathy and empathy. It means being radically curious and pursuing meaning with a sense of purpose.
Ken Gordon
Designers Like You Should Read Machines Like Me
 People, you might have noticed, are wracking their brains to understand artificial intelligence.
Debbie Millman
Elizabeth Gilbert
 Debbie talks with Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love about the love of her life and her latest book City of Girls.
The Editors
Whose Book and Cover Designs are the Best of 2018?
 Announcing the 2018 50 Books | 50 Covers selections.
Brian LaRossa
Should Book Publishing Leave New York City?
 America’s publishing trade took root and flourished in New York because the city’s cultural and geographic conditions created an optimal environment for that to happen.
Steven Heller
Seymour Chwast: Few Words, Many Letters
 Seymour Chwast, a man of few words, wishes there were more than 26 letters in the alphabet.
Ken Gordon
In the Future, Life Online Could Be “The Trial”—Unless We Design Something Better
The Trial is seen as prophetic by many.
Steven Heller
Photographing Science
 The role that image makers have in the fields of science and engineering is more vital, especially now.
Steven Heller
Born to be Posthumous
 Your book on Edward Gorey has been a long term journey for you. I know why I want to spend time reading it, but why did you want to invest so much of your life in Gorey’s head?
Jon Contino
Branding Baseball By Hand
 Baseball, survivial, tradition, make-believe: the most exciting way to spend an afternoon.



Observed


Is the future of refugee housing permanence?

“It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” explores Picasso‘s legacy through a feminist lens, asking if, when, and how modern audiences can separate the artist’s work from his infamously misogynistic behavior.

Quite possibly the most fascinating job opportunity in design right now.

Jessica Helfand on using AI as a tool to reverse-engineer a historical narrative.

Rethinking the city.

Rethinking the planet.

The problems of the user interface, one streaming service at a time. More here.

Urban design, with safety in mind. And that includes parks.

Think design thinking is over? Think again.

A museum renames a vegetable still life by Van Gogh that identified the wrong kind of allium.

Graphic design and typography obsessives—look no further!

“The challenge isn’t just that our systems default to keeping the “unlike” out,” notes Jens Martin Skibsted, “but we are, rather, in need of an interconnected worldview that appreciates the existence of other realities and contexts.”

Neville Brody’s new monograph (his THIRD)—covering his work for Nike, Coca-Cola, Tate Modern and Channel 4, as well as various informational graphics and magazine editorials—will be published next month by Thames&Hudson.

Milan Design Week wants to know your most memorable experience. Ours is easily Shaped by Water, an immersive experience exploring water as a source of inspiration for design. Co-created by Ivy Ross and her design team in collaboration with the water, light, and sound artist, Lachlan Turczan. Vote for your favorite here.

Non-profit design advocacy agency Where are the Black Designers? (WATBD?) has announced a year-long partnership with digital product studio Ustwo.

“He was mulling a career in graphic design when, at 17, he saw a searing image that would change the course of his life.” The American photographer Kwame Brathwaite has died. Considered the catalyst fo the “black is beautiful” movement in the 1960s, Braithwaite’s career spanned art, music, and more. He was 85.

The subtley, simplicity, and curious symbolism of the humble serif.

After a career of looking at pictures, she is now making them. George Gendron talks to Kathy Ryan, longtime director of photography at The New York Times Magazine.

COLLINS co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Brian Collins and co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Leland Maschmeyer will speak on branding and creativity at OFFF Barcelona this weekend.

“I can’t imagine any person with a background in graphic design made that thing without a committee of bland politicians sanding away its edges until they felt safe enough to unveil that to the public.” Behold: Logogate!

Black designers, curators, and more.

How do you stop deep-sea trawlers from harming ecosystems? Commission 10-ton marble sculptures and place them on the ocean floor, of course.

For ten years, Matt Needle has reimagined every best picture award nominee by redesigning their posters.

Coca-Cola...and art?



Jobs | June 09