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.
I come to you, like all commencement speakers, as an emissary from the future." The commencement address delivered by Julie Lasky at the Cranbrook Academy of Art on May 9, 2008.
It turns out that the "recycling symbol" at the bottom of my yogurt container had nothing to do with its recyclability. So why was it there? My curiosity led to findings around which I built a design class.
Paul Rand held Hadank in the highest esteem because he practiced modernist formal principles even though he did not follow its dogma or style. And most important, as Rand said "Hadank was then and always an original." A profile of
Iron Man is the fulfillment of all the computer-integrated movies were ever meant to be, and by computer-integrated, I mean just that: beyond the technical wizardry of special effects, this is a film in which the computer is incorporated, like
On a sunny morning in the early 1970s my neighbor, the small shrill widow of a minister and professor of theology at Harvard, dragged me into her house and opened the drawer of her late husband's desk. Choose, choose...
1967's "Toy of the Year" was the embodiment of controlled emotion in the face of that decade's social unrest and conflict: John Bowers remembers The Spirograph.
were announced today, and Michael Bierut is the recipient of the Design Mind award. We can think of no more suitable award for this writer, critic and working designer.
scenarios would not, as Dr. Flicker said, "happen for billions of years yet," the doomsday clock is steadily ticking away. Wouldn't it be nice if we could go back to the days when fiction was not fact.
Scrapbooks (like these) remind us that creating an album from saved matter does not necessarily provide an accurate self-portrait..." An essay by Jessica Helfand from her new book on the occasion of National Scrapbooking Day.
A reminder to our many readers that Design Observer has a rich archive of slide shows for your enjoyment: Design Observer: Tables of Contents Tom Vanderbilt: Blast-Door Art Don Hamerman: Baseballs Tom Manning: Spam Cartoons Andrew Blauvelt: Peter Seitz Portfolio...
After seeing the Fella and McFetridge show, in its context — in California, in LA, in the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall — it occurs to me that this was also a show about the trajectories of modernism, specifically, the
Standard Operating Procedure is a gorgeous, pulsing stopwatch of a movie, and like all of Morris's best work, its structure is based on a rhythmic series of revelations.
How adman George Lois chronicled the sixties with his cover designs for Esquire magazine, with a peek behind the scenes at the legendary famous Muhammad-Ali-as-St. Sebastian photoshoot.
I've never worked in a design studio where music wasn't played pretty much constantly. Nor can I recall visiting a studio where music wasn't being played, or where designers weren't wired up to headphones and bobbing rhythmically to unheard sounds.
Last year, on the occasion of "Next," the AIGA's Biennial National Design Conference in Denver, Design Observer published a little book, The Next Page: Thirty Tables of Contents. We are sharing it here as a slide show...
One night in 1991, just before Christmas, I was walking down St. Mark's Place in Manhattan, heading for my tiny but charming bed-sit on Sixth Street. I'd been around the neighborhood for more than twenty years by then. I...
