Obituaries
The Editors
Remembering Hugh
 It is with great sorrow that we share the news that Hugh Weber—network theorist, design advocate, and one of our industry’s most evangelical believers in the power of design and community—has died.
Steven Heller
Peter Bradford, American Modern
 Steven Heller remembers Peter Bradford, American Modern.
Jessica Helfand
Remembering Ralph Caplan
 "If it were a religious denomination", Caplan once wrote, "design would be Unitarianism"
Lana Rigsby
Remembering Jack Summerford
 Lana Rigsby shares fond memories of the legendary Texas designer Jack Summerford.
Steven Heller
Robert Massin
 Steven Heller remembers Robert Massin.



Steven Heller
Dave King (RIP)
 Last January I thought I had received an email from a ghost.
Michael Bierut
Remembering Gordon
 Michael Bierut remembers the best teacher he ever had, Gordon Salchow.



Steven Heller
Thanks, Robert Grossman
 Bob’s death was unexpected. I felt kicked in the stomach when, on Friday morning, I read an email from his companion, Elaine Louie, announcing the tragic news.
Brian LaRossa
The Shape of a Design Mentorship
 Before the advent of writing, everything was taught through mentorship. How to chip a stone into an axe. How to build a shelter. How to love. How to lead. Mentorship is hardwired into our DNA.
Steven Heller
Memory of an Eclectic Modernist: Ivan Chermayeff
 Remembering Ivan Chermayeff, who died this past Saturday, December 2. He was 85.
Steven Heller
Nuclear Fear
 Remembering the late Robert Blakeley, designer of the fallout shelter symbol, and the nuclear fear of the 50’s.
Chris Pullman
Jack Stauffacher: Typographer, Scholar, Teacher, and Polymath
 Chris Pullman remembers AIGA Medalist and revered typographer Jack Stauffacher, who passed away a few days before his 97th birthday.
Sean Adams
Remembering Clive Piercy
 Without Clive the world will be a little less colorful.
Sean Adams
Margo Chase
 The design profession and all of us lost a treasure last weekend when Margo Chase died.
Sean Adams
Harris Lewine
 In the age of the art director Harris Lewine was without equal.
Steven Heller
Elaine Lustig Cohen, Pioneer
 Steven Heller remembers Elaine Lustig Cohen, passionate historian, avid collector, and design practitioner.
DJ Stout
Remembering Mike Hicks
 The embodiment of everything a great designer should be



DJ Stout
Jack Unruh
 The House on Fairmont
Jessica Helfand
Remembering Ruth Sackner
 An inveterate collector



Marvin Heiferman
Mary Ellen Mark, 1940–2015
 Remembering the noted photojournalist



Jessica Helfand
Howard Paine: 1929–2014
 Remembering Howard Paine, National Geographic art director and stamp designer extraordinaire



Steven Heller
A Memory of Mickey
 Steven Heller remembers Mildred Friedman, who passed away late Wednesday.
Elizabeth Guffey
Deborah Sussman: Los Angeles Design Pioneer
 Remebering her rise and influence as a woman working in the male-dominated world of postwar design.
Michael Bierut
Massimo Vignelli, 1931-2014
 A personal memory of the late designer Massimo Vignelli.
Alexandra Lange
Lucia Eames, 1930-2014
 An appreciation of Lucia Eames (1930-2014).
Alexandra Lange
Year of the Women
 A year-end wrap-up of my favorite stories. The common theme? Women and the making of design.
Rick Poynor
The Writings of William Drenttel
 Essays from the Design Observer archive show the wide scope of William Drenttel's interests and concerns.
The Editors
In Memory of William Drenttel


Rick Poynor
Martin Sharp: From Satire to Psychedelia
 The late Martin Sharp was a visual innovator whose work erased artificial distinctions between applied image-making and fine art.



Chris Pullman
Remembering Alvin Eisenman
 Alvin Eisenman received the AIGA Medal in October, 1991. Chris Pullman, a student in Eisenman's class of 1966 — and a member of the faculty ever since — gave these remarks at the event.
Phil Patton
Niels Diffrient: The Human Factor
 Phil Patton remembers Niels Diffrient. Photographs by Dorothy Kresz.
Alexandra Lange
Kicked A Building Lately?
 That question, the title of the 1976 collection of Ada Louise Huxtable’s work for the New York Times, embodies her approach to criticism.
Michael Bierut
Positively Michael Patrick Cronan
 Michael Bierut remembers the late Michael Cronan.
Jessica Helfand
Bill Moggridge 1943-2012
 Jessica Helfand remebers Bill Moggridge.



Observed
Hillman Curtis Celebration Benefit
 A Hillman Curtis celebration benefit has been organized by his friends and colleagues.
Debbie Millman
Hillman Curtis, 1961-2012
 “I met Hillman Curtis for the first time in February 2006 when I interviewed him for my radio show Design Matters.” Debbie Millman remembers her friend, Hillman Curtis.
Rick Poynor
Richard Hamilton, the Great Decipherer
 The artist Richard Hamilton, who died this week, was an acute observer of design and the contemporary world.
Rick Poynor
Paul Stiff, the Reader’s Champion
 For the late Paul Stiff, design educator, writer, editor and skeptic, typography must never neglect to serve the reader.



Gerry Shamray
Harvey and Me
 A remembrance of comic artist and graphic novelist Harvey Pekar by an illustrator who worked with him throughout his career, fellow Clevelander Gerry Shamray.



Julie Lasky
Protect Me from What I Want
 Photo in memory of Tobias Wong.



Owen Edwards
Irving Penn, 1917-2009
 Irving Penn, who died on October 7th at the age of 92, marks the end of the great age of glamour in magazines, a remarkable period when brilliant photographers who happened to make their livings in fashion and advertising were finally recognized for the artistry of their eyes.



Michael Bierut
Spoiler Alert! Or, Happy Father's Day
 Dad couldn't help it. He was a natural born spoiler.



Michael Bierut
The Four Lessons of Lou Dorfsman
 For over 40 years, Lou Dorfsman designed everything at CBS from its advertising to the paper cups in its cafeteria. Getting great work done in giant institution is supposed to be hard. How did he make it look easy?



Adam Harrison Levy
The Inventor of the Cowboy Shirt
A few years ago, I found myself lost inside a shopping mall with Jack A. Weil, better known as Jack A, the man who, in 1946, invented the snap-buttoned cowboy shirt.



Gong Szeto
Lehman's Bankruptcy Statement
 I'm just a designer, but it doesn't take a genius to read a bankruptcy statement. Take a look at the Lehman Brothers statement dated Sunday, September 14, 2008. Read the whole thing down to exhibit A and the list of creditors — this is an historical document.



Michael Bierut
David Foster Wallace, Branding Theorist, 1962-2008



Glen Cummings
Athos Bulcão, The Artist of Brasilia
 Athos Bulcão was a public artist, interior designer, muralist, furniture and graphic designer who collaborated with Oscar Niemeyer and others to define Brasilia — one of the 20th century’s most radical and controversially received urban experiments. Bulcão died on July 31 at the age of 90, and left behind an astonishing body of work.



Jessica Helfand
Reflections on The Ephemeral World, Part One: Ink
 An elegy to the makeready — those sheets of paper, re-fed into a press to get the ink balances up to speed, leaving a series of often random, palimpsest-like, multiple impressions on a single surface — in the digital age.



Michael Bierut
Rest in Peace, Herbert Muschamp
 Officially published for the first time as a posthumous tribute: a loving parody of the writing of the late, great architectural critic Herbert Muschamp.



Michael Bierut
Flat, Simple and Funny: The World of Charley Harper
 A tribute to the late designer Charley Harper, "the only wildlife artist who has never been compared to Audubon and never will be."



Peter Good
Remembering Sol Lewitt (1928-2007)
 I first met Sol Lewitt in 1986, when he and Carol and their young daughters moved to Chester, Connecticut, a small town on the Connecticut River where I have a graphic design studio. We met at an opening at the Chester Gallery...



Steven Heller
Silas H. Rhodes, Founder of SVA
 Silas H. Rhodes, chairman of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, died last Thursday at 91. He was a progressive educator who established a uniquely collaborative learning environment that delicately balanced creative independence with academic rigor.



John Corbett
Sun Ra, Street Priest and Father of D.I.Y. Jazz
 Before the 1950s, artist-owned record companies were unheard of, but Sun Ra pioneered the idea along with a couple of other musicians and composers. Sun Ra and Alton Abraham helped define the do-it-yourself ethic that came to be a central part of the American independent music industry, designing and in some cases manufacturing the covers themselves. In the process, they maintained a previously unimaginable degree of control over the look and content of their jazz releases.



Steven Heller
Martin Weber in the Third Dimension
 You may not have heard of Martin J. Weber, but he was a graphic artist, typographer, art director, and most important, inventor of various photographic techniques that gave two-dimensional surfaces the illusion of being reproduced in three dimensions.



Alissa Walker
War Is Over! If You Want It
 When the star of the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon is asked by a reporter what he thinks Nixon should do to end the Vietnam War, Lennon stares incredulously into the camera. "He should declare peace." As if this was the most obvious solution in the world.



Willis Regier
In Remembrance of Richard Eckersley
 Richard Eckersley died on April 16, having given the best years of his life to establishing the importance of high-quality book design for university presses. Here, a remembrance by Willis Regier, director of the University of Illinois Press.



Michael Bierut
Wilson Pickett, Design Theorist, 1942 - 2006
 Wilson Pickett's advice on hitmaking, "Harmonize, then customize," would make good advice for any designer.



Paula Scher
Remembering Henryk Tomaszewski



Jessica Helfand
Greer Allen: In Memoriam
 Designer, critic, pundit and historian, Greer Allen was Senior Critic in Graphic Design at Yale School of Art. He designed publications for The Houghton Library at Harvard, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and a number of other distinguished cultural institutions around the country. Greer Allen died last week after a short illness. He was 83.



Rick Poynor
Eduardo Paolozzi, 20th Century Image-Maker
 If a visual artist created more concentrated, exhilarating images of science, technology and the media realm during the mid-20th century than British artist Eduardo Paolozzi, then I would like to see them. Paolozzi, who died on 22 April aged 81, was first of all a sculptor, but the screenprints he produced in the 1960s rank as masterpieces of the medium.



Michael Bierut
The Best Artist in the World
 Alton Tobey, a little-known commercial illustrator, created a body of work in the early sixties that continues to inspire.



William Drenttel
In Remembrance of Susan Sontag
 In Remembrance of Susan Sontag: a designer's twenty-five years of interaction with the legandary writer.



Jessica Helfand
An Instrument of Sufficiently Lucid Cogitation
 The legendary French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died on Tuesday at his home in the South of France, always carried a sketchbook with him. Today's obituary in The New York Times alleges that he described drawing as meditative, while photography was intuitive: though certainly both activities might have been informed by a relentless need to observe and in a sense, preserve the world around him.



Michael Bierut
Rob Roy Kelly’s Old, Weird America
 The late educator and designer Rob Roy Kelly has had a lasting influence on the profession of graphic design, particularly through his landmark book "American Wood Type."



William Drenttel
Paul Rand: Bibliography as Biography
 This is bibliography as biography, and a posthumous testament to the considerable scope — and ongoing life — of one designer's mind. A Selected Bibliography of Books from the Collection of Paul Rand



Observed


“This is her fifth long-form visual project,”writes Wesley Morris in his review of Renaissance, Beyoncé’s newest movie, out now in theatres. “We’re now talking about an auteur.” Morris doesn’t stop there. “Simply at the presentation level, coherence and visual imagination are in the house.”

Did you know that the Institute for Scrap Recycling sponsors a design award? And that it has done so for more than three decades? Friends, you have until February 12 to submit your game-changing ideas. Get cracking.

Legendary architect William McDonough—who was one of the first proponents of “circular” design—thinks we’re talking about the issue all wrong. And on that same topic, this year's Business of Design summit brings together policymakers, business executives, and creative leaders to identify critical challenges, innovative ideas, and smart design processes driving circular design. (More here.)

Thanks to a number of new collective projects in Paris, Ukrainian design is becoming a fully-fledged part of the global creative industry.

This just in from the Department of Dystopian Prognostications! A new AI tool— called COLE, named in honor of Henry Cole (the creator of the first graphical Christmas card in 1843) lets you type in a graphic design project idea and have an AI generate not only the image, but the text to support it baked in. 

The Female Design Council names a new director: Angharad Coates previously served as director of communications at the New York Academy of Art and was most recently a managing partner at Camron, a design-focused public relations agency.

Designing better (and more inclusive) (and more innovative) meetings.

"It’s interesting, highly random, and even has the excitement of gambling and card drawing." A designer uses MidJourney to explore new dimensions in typography. 

As the talent pool for luxury artisans in Europe dwindles, fashion brand LVMH has created a unique apprenticeship program in the US in partnership with Tiffany & Co., the  Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, the trade school Studio Jewelers, and RISD. “We are teaching the next generation of craftspeople how important the details are,” says Dana Naberezny, chief innovation officer of jewelry at Tiffany and head of its workshop in Manhattan.

Loon-loving Minnesotans, this is your last chance.

Hundreds of documents related to chattel slavery — including wills that bequeathed enslaved people to relatives —have been discovered among probate records in Fulton County, Ga. "We were able to uncover some interesting stories about slave owners," says Chief Probate Judge Kenya Johnson. "A story that I hadn’t heard before: Slave owners paid for their slaves to go back to Africa."

Due to climate change, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been forced to update its "plant hardiness zone map," an essential tool for gardeners (and anyone wondering why native plants are dying.)

Russia’s Supreme Court has banned "the international LGBT public movement," calling it an extremist organization.

There’s another Mona Lisa. Or is there?

Michael Latt, a film marketing consultant who had become a beacon for social justice, was murdered by an intruder in his Los Angeles home. Latt, 33, was the founder and CEO of Lead With Love, a social impact marketing agency that deftly married activism and art. His collaborators included directors Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, and Barry Jenkins.

Save the date: Riyadh, the capital city of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has been selected to host the 2030 World Expo, according to the Bureau International des Expositions.  "Expo 2030 Riyadh, The Era of Change: Together for a Foresighted Tomorrow,” will run between October 2030 and March 2031.

Acclaimed American photographer Larry Fink, the self-described “Marxist from Long Island,” has died at 82. His black-and-white photographs ranged from portraits of working-class people to the entertainment elite. “He was a dear friend and a free spirit,” said his longtime gallerist, Robert Mann.

Uh, what’s wrong with networking? The COP28 president-designate Sultan Al Jaber is facing accusations that his team has been using this year’s climate convening as an opportunity to make fossil fuel deals for the UAE’s state-owned oil and gas company, allegations he vehemently denies.

New data from McKinsey & Co. show companies are no longer promoting Black professionals into leadership jobs at the rate they were two years ago. And that’s a problem. “If you were borderline committed, you’ve just kind of exhaled and retreated,” said Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place to Work, a research and consulting firm.

It may surprise you to learn that £88 billion of UK pension savers' money is invested in fossil fuels. Still unconvinced? Climate deniers, meet Oblivia Coalmine! 

A Japanese economist, Tatsuyoshi Saijo is at the forefront of the Future Design movement, which aims to figure out how to get the world to care more about future generations. He is one of the fifty individuals shortlisted on Vox's Future Perfect list—identifying the  thinkers, activists, and scholars working on solutions to today’s (and tomorrow’s) biggest problems.

We are all redesigners, now—or at least we're all becoming engaged design critics. In the US, Kansas citizens reject their state's proposed new license plate design (claiming, among other things, that it looks too much like New York's plate) while in the UK, residents of Gloucester dispute the design of a Covid memorial. 

Every front page in the New York Times—since 1852.

Design thinking has missed the mark, says Anne-Laure Fayard and Sarah Fathallah in this must-read piece in the Stanford Social Review. “We reject design thinking as a singular tool kit prescribed to solve social problems,” in part because, it has failed to do so. “Instead, we call for a critical stance on design, where critical means both discerning and important.”

The United States, Britain and more than a dozen other countries on Sunday unveiled what a senior U.S. official described as the first detailed international agreement on how to keep artificial intelligence safe from rogue actors, pushing for companies to create AI systems that are "secure by design." .

Dasha Tsapenko is one of a growing number of designers growing clothing from mycellium. (More here.) 

A brief respite of eye candy: this exquisite scrapbook—with typography made from matchboxes, dating from 1875—will bring you a rare moment of analogue joy. (Thanks to Debbie Millman for sharing it!)

Design Observer's approach to paying it forward includes supporting big dreams for those who deserve to see those dreams become a reality. (Spoiler alert: you won't find any “top fifty gifts for creatives” lists here this, or any holiday season.) Instead, we'll be sharing ideas over the next few weeks for ways that you can help someone else. Start here.

South African designer Thebe Magugu incorporates vintage (family) photos into a new line of clothing. (Read more about the Heirloom Shirt Project here.)

Remembering George Tscherny, the graphic design powerhouse whose work defined a post-war golden age of corporate growth, innovation, and consumerism.



Jobs | December 04