Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
This article is an excerpt from Growing Up Underground, the new coming-of-age memoir by Steven Heller published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book is about, you guessed it, me. However, it is not a trek through the hills and valleys of my autobiographical topology. I focus instead on how blind luck put me in intriguing places with curious people...
I recently invented a skin-care oil that is guaranteed to make you look 20 years younger. It is a revolutionary product but unfortunately, I have to test this skin oil on rabbits in order to make sure my experimental oils won’t burn people’s skin off or poison them. However, I am really hoping to sell this rabbit-tested oil as “ethical”...
Long before higher education in art and design was within reach for me, and before my imagination stretched to even considering book design as something one could do for a living, I accidentally found a publication in the school library that absorbed me and still sits in my heart as one of the “magic” books of my life. It was...
What do you do when you’ve secured your legacy as one of the great creative minds of the 20th century? You make children’s books, apparently. From Milton Glaser’s If Apples Had Teeth, Saul Bass’s Henri’s Walk to Paris and Paul Rand’s I Know a Lot of Things, to Bruno Munari’s Zoo, Dick Bruna’s Miffy and Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry...
It is safe to say that for anyone who grew up in India in the decades following the 1950s, Air-India’s Maharaja was a very familiar face. The airline’s potbellied, beloved mascot was instantly recognizable with his curling, oversized mustache, aquiline nose, striped turban, and serene, placid expression that can only be dubbed ‘resting Maharaja face.’ The Maharaja — meaning emperor—...
Jack Self looks both relieved… and daunted. His Kickstarter campaign for the Real Review membership community has met its funding goal of £26,880… thanks, in part, to a sizable $10,000 lifetime membership from a DJ in Croatia. “It was amazing to think that someone would be prepared to put that type of value on what we’re doing,” Self, the editor-in-chief...
Name: Silvana Designer: Siri Lee Lindskrog of Formal Settings Foundry: Blaze Type Release Date: September 13 2022 Back Story: Siri Lee Lindskrog — one half of Berlin-based studio Formal Settings — started work on Silvana about two-and-a-half years ago. It’s not unusual for Siri and Formal Settings cofounder Amanda-Li Kollberg to work on custom type projects, but around the beginning...
This interview was originally published in Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, a new book published by Onomatopee. Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business.” He is the time-honored founder of floppydisk.com, a US-based company dedicated to the selling and recycling of floppy disks. Other services include disk transfers, a...
Today, what you watch can say a lot about who you are. In our era of Peak TV, you can tell a lot about someone if they’re a Game of Thrones fan vs. a devotee to Netflix’s “Strong Female Lead” category. And the design for TV has the power to shape cultural moments: the costumes from The Handmaid’s Tale became...
For the organizers of Afrophon’, a recent art book fair in LUMA Arles, France centering contemporary independent publishing from the African continent, there’s a significant lack of knowledge, acknowledgement, and access to African art books in the West. In 2018, the project’s guest curator Gee Wesley, came together with friends who run Ulises — an artspace in Philadelphia — to...
In 1966, Scott Paper Co., an American company that made a range of paper products, released an advertisement for their new ‘Color Explosion’ range of toilet paper and paper towels. In it, two smiling young girls were pictured in knee-grazing shift dresses, hands tucked into pockets. The two dresses in the photograph — one flooded with a monochromatic Op-Art pattern,...
Like Go-Gurt before it, the playful ethos of olive oil brand Graza, which launched earlier this year, is defined by its equally carefree form factor. While Go-Gurt’s squeezable plastic sleeve made yogurt more appealing to children, Graza’s squeezeable bottle makes inherently appealing high-quality olive oil less precious to everyone. Or, in as Gander partner Katie Levy, put it, with its...
