I don’t remember where my locker was or why I found it funny to pick a radio jingle for The Shane Company as my senior quote. I don’t remember any of the Latin I studied for three years or even what we did for lunch before we could drive off campus. What I do remember is the way the internet...
All Advertising Looks the Same These Days. Blame the Moodboard
You’ve seen it before: an isolated medicine cabinet, filled with a range of beautifully packaged products, photographed head-on in front of a flat backdrop. The lighting is bold and bright, as if the whole shelving unit is illuminated from behind by a fluorescent lightbox. The shelves themselves are likely made of glass, providing a certain je ne sais quoi that’s...
Almoneda: A Typeface Inspired by Madrid’s Flea Market
Name: Almoneda Designer: Alejandro Santos Foundry: Sudtipos Release date: January 2022 Back Story: Santos found inspiration for his typeface near El Rastro, an open-air market set up on Sundays in the center of Madrid, offering a feast of objects bearing lettering and typefaces from the late 19th and early 20th century. Almoneda the font is the designer’s homage to the...
How a Lifestyle Magazine Became a Form of Everyday Resistance in Post-Stalinist Poland
The best fashion magazines are often the ones that transport readers to other worlds. It’s not just about the clothes or their price tags, but where the photography, the layout, the words, and the styling can take you. When the illustrated monthly Ty i Ja, meaning “You and I,” first appeared on the newsstands in Poland in 1959, its novel...
Marvel’s Comic Book Logos Break All the Design Rules, But That’s Part of Their Charm
My attraction to graphic design started with comic books covers. Like a lot of artistic comic nerds, my pre-teen friends and I would painstakingly redraw our favorite panels from Iron Man; while they drew characters and scenes, I was the guy drawing Iron Man’s shiny, machined logo—rivets and all. I was enamored by the lettering’s three-dimensional form, as if it...
Beauty Packaging Gets a Gender-neutral Makeover
Welcome to Form Factor, our column exploring the intersection of packaging, branding, and culture. When skincare brand Soft Services launched in 2021, it did so with an unorthodox approach to beauty packaging. Founded by Glossier alums Annie Kreighbaum and Rebecca Zhou, the line of “body care” products traded the approach of perfectly-uniform-brand for creating an assortment of unique bottles, tubes,...
How Can Designers Build Interfaces That Avoid the “White Default?”
In 2016, the artist Deborah Roberts created “Pluralism Series,” a series of prints that, borrowing the aesthetic of a Microsoft Word document, lists the names of Black people. Name after name has that jarring squiggly red line underneath it, as if it was a misspelling. I know this squiggly red line all too well. As a Black, Nigerian woman, design...
Ed Fella’s Flyers Blur the Lines Between Design and Art
In 2010, I curated a selection of Ed Fella’s famous flyers, created “after the fact”—as he put it—for his own lectures, in an exhibition about Surrealism and graphic design at the Moravian Gallery in the Czech Republic. I wanted to propose a different way of looking at Fella’s work, which had been, at that point, mostly discussed in relation to...
ABBA’s True Visual Legacy May Surprise You
The art of symmetry is a mathematical one. In its purest form it represents balance, from weights on a scale to the anatomy of the human face. Derived from the Greek summetria (“sun,” with or together, and “metro,” to measure), symmetry can be discovered both physically and metaphorically all around us. In 1972, symmetry was found in a band of...
The Inclusive World of Multisensory Typography
Design does not exist in a vacuum. We are constantly and simultaneously surrounded by textures, contours, smells, sights, and sounds. As designers, we should consider all of the senses when we design—not only so we can more fully connect to our audience, but also so we can be more inclusive. Every person brings their individual history with them when experiencing...
Peace, Love, & Protests: The Creative Community Responds to the Ukraine Invasion
The first missiles fell at 5 a.m. local time on February 24. Following weeks of military build-up and increasingly antagonistic comments, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. As civilians fled their homes, towards the border or into underground shelters, the global creative community was quick to respond. From Poland to Portugal, Russia to Ukraine, illustrators...
Cosplay—a Typeface Inspired By an Abstract Artist (and Even a Bit of Camouflage)
Name: Cosplay Designer: Philipp Herrmann Distributor: Out of the Dark Release Date: January Back Story: Philipp Herrmann studied at the University of Applied Arts in Zurich from 2002–2007—“but I only came in contact with type design during a three-month internship at Dalton Maag in London,” he says. Thereafter, Herrmann took the self-taught route, and he completed his first typeface, the...