Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
In April 2020, A/D/O—the design incubator-meets-community center-meets-café-meets-design shop—announced its impending closure ostensibly due to the pandemic. Since opening in 2017, the space, an initiative of BMW Mini, had become a community hub in North Brooklyn where you could find local moms having breakfast with their toddlers, writers using the open lobby as an informal coworking area, designers sitting at their...
There’s a quote, perhaps apocryphal, from Massimo Vignelli that you’ll sometimes hear from alumni of Cranbrook Academy of Art’s design department. “Cranbrook”, he supposedly said, sometime in the ’80s or ’90s, “is the most dangerous design school in America.” They recite this like a badge of honor, though no one I spoke with is quite sure when or where he...
What are you seeing? The ’90s are back. The 1890s, that is. Turn of the century inspired typefaces (we’re calling them “Jugend-ish”) are suddenly everywhere, bringing an often overlooked era into a new light. The trend is named for the similarity of these contemporary typefaces to the fonts that emerged from the German art magazine Jugend and the Jugendstil movement,...
On first sight, Mantar is a jovial typeface family. High-contrast, serif-forward, wide-faced, with details that seem to jump from letter to letter. I’m struck by the exaggerated serifs and tightness in the capital M, W and R. The numbers, particularly the 2 and 3, swirl into themselves in a playful game with the punctuation. A newly-released font family distributed by...
The day before Juneteenth was commemorated as a national holiday, recognizing for the first time, as a country, the day in June 1865 when the Black folk in Galveston, Texas, were told of their emancipation, I had the honor of sitting down with designers Dr. Cheryl D. Miller, Maurice Cherry, and Mitzi Okou to discuss a question that has been...
Social media has changed the way creators and visual artists think about representing their work. For many, Instagram, Behance, and Twitter have replaced or profoundly augmented how they can showcase their designs, gain a new audience and, ultimately, get more work. With Covid-19 bringing most of the world into the online space as a powerful mode of communication and interaction,...
In August 2014, a month before I became chair of the graphic design program at California College of the Arts, I was invited to a mysterious event: an evening with the celebrated Google Glass designer Isabelle Olsson at the Battery, a members-only club in San Francisco for tech elites. According to the invitation, the gathering was part of “Facebook’s Women...
In an ocean of Squarespace sites and Behance portfolios, it can be easy to forget that there are limitless ways to represent your work. Not all of them require custom coding, or even fancy images. In fact, some of the most compelling portfolios we’ve seen use what you could call “off-the-rack” solutions that designers have taken advantage of to bring...
The first step to getting work is building an impressive portfolio. The second step is less obvious: pitching your portfolio, and yourself. The perfect pitch—does such a thing exist? It depends on who you ask, so we asked five art directors, each hailing from a different set of coordinates across the media and publishing landscape. How do they find and...
In the latest of our Under the Covers series looking at records and their design, we looked at how how French electro duo justice turned the cross symbol into a third band member. Here, we speak to some of the designers behind the more recent releases from the legend that is Sun Ra. Few artists have embodied gesamtkunstwerk, or a “total...
Throughout the last decade, the nonprofit and branding universes have intersected to the point where it’s no longer surprising to find the two words in the same sentence. For some designers, that overlap has become the foundation for a whole portfolio of work that focuses on nonprofit-centric projects. Designers working in this space are handed a laundry list of constraints—small...
Air raid sirens echoed through the streets of Belgrade. Olivera Stojadinović was designing fonts. It was 1999, and the NATO-initiated bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War was underway. The decade was a turbulent period for the country which saw its dissolution under the presidency of Slobodan Milošević, who died in 2006 before the verdict of his trial for war...
