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Reflections on The Ephemeral World, Part One: Ink (Design Observer)

[4 views] 6 months ago

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.

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Cranbrook Commencement Address (Design Observer)

[5 views] 6 months ago

"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.

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KT Meaney: Greening the Grocery Store (Design Observer)

[4 views] 6 months ago

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.

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O.H.W. Hadank: The Classicist Even a Modernist Could Love (Design Observer)

[4 views] 6 months ago

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 O.H.W. Hadank by Steven Heller...

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Credit Where Credit Is Due...Or Not (Design Observer)

[1 views] 6 months ago

Dmitri Siegel explores the various practices of design attribution.

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Iron Man: The Screen Behind the Screen (Design Observer)

[3 views] 6 months ago

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 a cast member, into the development of the plot itself.

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Rosamond W. Purcell: Taking Things Seriously XII (Design Observer)

[1 views] 6 months ago

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...

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Fitting (Design Observer)

6 months ago

Charles Brannock only invented one thing in his life: that metal thing in shoe stores that the salesman uses to measure your feet. Is it the most perfect invention of the 20th century?

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John Bowers: A Lesson from Spirograph (Design Observer)

6 months ago

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.

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National Design Awards (Design Observer)

6 months ago

The National Design Awards 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.

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Chicago International Poster Biennial (Design Observer)

6 months ago

Contemporary posters published within the last two years are eligible for the Chicago International Poster Biennial and may be submitted by any poster designer in the world with no entry fee. Physical entries must be received in Chicago no later than May 27, 2008.

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National Scrapbooking Day (Design Observer)

7 months ago

"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.

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The Sky Is Falling (Design Observer)

7 months ago

Where once the sky is falling 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.

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Slide Shows on Design Observer (Design Observer)

7 months ago

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...

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David Cabianca: Two Lines Align (Design Observer)

7 months ago

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 trajectories of American modernism...

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Teddy Blanks: Errol Morris's Problem With Photography (Design Observer)

7 months ago

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.

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Adam Levy: The Passion of George Lois (Design Observer)

[2 views] 7 months ago

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.

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Allan Chochinov: Ode To My Toaster (Design Observer)

7 months ago

Ode To My Toaster, a poem by Allan Chochinov.

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The Design Observer Playlist (Design Observer)

7 months ago

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. What is it with graphic designers and music?

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The Next Page: Thirty Tables of Contents (Design Observer)

7 months ago

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...

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Luc Sante: Taking Things Seriously X (Design Observer)

7 months ago

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...

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Underground Mainstream (Design Observer)

7 months ago

Today, designers for mainstream advertising companies, weaned on alternative approaches, have folded the underground into the mainstream and called it cool.

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100% (Design Observer)

[1 views] 7 months ago

So, it’s 1966 and two guys are hanging around their Los Angeles apartment, musing about the sort of things that people mused about in the Sixties. The aesthetic philosophers in question were the artist Ed Ruscha and the artist/comedy writer/composer/performer Mason Williams...

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Blast-Door Art: Cave Paintings of the Nuclear Era (Design Observer)

8 months ago

Welcome to the mordant, jingoistic and occasionally crude world — but rarely before seen world — of “blast-door art” — the cave paintings of the nuclear era.

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The (Faux) Old Ball Game (Design Observer)

8 months ago

Since 1992, every ballpark in America has been designed on the nostalgic model of Baltimore's Camden Yards, including the new parks for the Yankees and the Mets. Why is it impossible to build a baseball stadium that looks like it belongs in the 21st century?

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Matthew Peterson: The Cuckoo Bird and the Keyboard (Design Observer)

8 months ago

Designers are famously nauseated by novices' use of neutral quotes — or dumb quoes — in place of true quotes. Why do we care so much? Should we?

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Joshua Glenn: Taking Things Seriously IX (Design Observer)

8 months ago

Baudelaire's death mask gathered dust for years on top of a tall bookshelf in the front hall of my childhood home in Jamaica Plain. When I was a teenager I scaled the shelf one day after school looking for...

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The Magic of the Peace Symbol (Design Observer)

8 months ago

There was probably no more galvanizing nor polarizing emblem during the 1960s than the peace symbol. And perhaps few symbols have had origins surrounded in as much mystery and controversy

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Viewer Discretion Advised (Design Observer)

8 months ago

One of the great ironies of contemporary culture is the degree to which pro-forma warnings read as largely invisible. “Viewer Discretion Advised” tells us we’ve been warned...

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Matt Soar: Fail Again, Fail Better (Design Observer)

8 months ago

So, what of productive failure with respect to graphic design and typography? The idea of failing again and again for a reason? Does it somehow help to define the limits of professional practice?

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