Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
In 1981, a design competition for children launched a road sign that would become one of the most ubiquitous images in Britain. The sign, used in traffic codes to indicate that there are “road users requiring extra care”, depicts two hunched stick figures, one clasping a walking aid and both encased in a red triangle with little else to define...
J. Dakota Brown studied graphic design at North Carolina State University and critical theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently completing a PhD in the Rhetoric and Public Culture Program in the School of Communication at Northwestern University, where his primary research focuses on typography as contextualized by historical transformations in labor, technology, and...
Name: Sagittarius Designer: Jonathan Hoefler Foundry: Hoefler&Co Release Date: 2021 Back Story: A few years ago, Jonathan Hoefler was working on Peristyle when he started noticing some unexpected stylistic quirks. “I kept getting this kind of vaguely sci-fi vibe from it, and I couldn’t figure out where it came from,” he says. There was something about the typeface’s art-deco influence...
Welcome back to Spotted, Eye on Design’s column that turns an eye on the styles and graphic trends you’re seeing everywhere. This time around, we’re looking at the fuzzy world of tufting, the oddly satisfying trend we’ve seen takeover designers’ social media feeds (especially TikTok). See a similar trend you think is worth exploring? Email submit@aiga.org, and we’ll be in...
If you’re a designer and a lover of nature, then you might have on your shelf one of the many reprintings of the 1899 collection of illustrations, Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms in Nature) by Ernst Haeckel. I myself have the 2008 printing from Prestel, that has since been replaced by a 2019 edition. Last year, Taschen published a lavish...
The design process is always the result of a negotiation. Design for and from a theater is no exception, reaching the public in the form of posters, booklets and pressbooks, newspapers, postcards and a variety of digital formats on social media. Yet the end result—the finished work—obscures that process, hiding the interpersonal relations, tensions, mistakes, improvisations, research, randomness, planning and...
Dave 1 and P-Thugg of Chromeo, the guys behind Juliet Records, love typefaces so much they commissioned their own. Juliet Grotesk, the label’s new official typeface, is a Swiss/German face designed by Matter Of. The typeface embodies the traits that gives the style its reputation: efficient, versatile, straightforward. It features a playful approach to weight distribution, bowl shapes, tail endings,...
You can spot a natural wine before you taste it: a hazy, jewel-toned color fills a clear bottle with a child-like illustration sprawled across the front. Sometimes there’s a playful visual metaphor—a lightning bolt, perhaps. Or maybe there’s barely anything to it at all. Like its muddled viticultural definition, natural wine labels take many forms, but almost all of them...
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Company X announces a new logo with a buzzword-filled press release. We’ve been hard at work for months in rethinking how to best represent ourselves to our customers, it reads. We think this new logo reflects our values by signaling simplicity and approachability. Can you picture it? It’s a sans-serif wordmark (bonus...
A year into the pandemic, many of us are longing to do what once might have seemed mundane: leaf through the design section at the library, walk maskless through the galleries of a museum, or just spend a quiet afternoon at a local bookstore. For Valery Marier, a Toronto-based graphic design student in her final semester at the York/Sheridan Program...
Name: Outward Designer: Raoul Audouin Foundry: Velvetyne Release Date: March 2021 Back Story: When Amsterdam-raised graphic designer Raoul Audouin moved to Paris in 2016, he biked to different suburbs every weekend to buy second-hand furnishings for his new home. Finding the city hostile to cyclists, the designer improvised his own routes and discovered incredible buildings, squares, parks and neighborhoods forgotten...
In the week following the tragic shootings in Atlanta, and in the months beforehand amid a wave of violent attacks on those in the AAPI community, we’ve seen an outpouring of grief as well as a reckoning with the racism faced by Asian Americans. We’ve also seen calls to action, links to donate, resources to raise awareness, and shows of...
