Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
As gender-neutral pronouns become more commonplace in spoken language, they haven’t yet found a secure perch in written text. With the growing embrace of fluid and nonbinary gender identities in Western culture, is it time to introduce a new character on our keyboards? Plenty has been written and debated on the perceived visual gendering of typefaces (big/heavy = masculine, curly/decorative/light...
For as long as non-designers have needed to create design-centric work, there have been tools and services that help them get around hiring a professional. Need a resume? Use the template on Google Docs. Want to make a deck for your big presentation? You can use Canva, whose users mockup presentations, posters, and social media posts using the service’s templated...
Toward the end of my call with New York artist Blake Jamieson, I could hear the unmistakable rattling of a spray can ball bearing, followed by a serpentarium’s worth of hisses. Jamieson was cranking out a last-minute portrait of some friends who were coming over for a dinner party later that night, and our conversation about his work with a...
Name: Arras Designer: Barrett Reid-Maroney Release Date: August 2021 Back Story: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” Shakespeare wrote in Act three of Hamlet. In the case of Arras, a new typeface from designer Barrett Reid-Maroney, the typography wears a suit of its own inspiration. While completing his Master’s in English literature concentrating on book...
Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby (designed by Random House’s Rachel Ake Keuch) has been one of the most consequential pieces of mainstream fiction to publish this year: a modern relationship story that offers a view into urban trans culture. It’s a singular book wrapped in a familiar package: neon color palette, sans serif title, ambiguous silhouettes. If you look too hastily...
Name: Pimpit Designer: Benoît Bodhuin Foundry: BB Bureau Release Date: June 2021 Back Story: Nantes-based graphic designer and typographer Benoît Bodhuin first started drawing Pimpit in November last year for a personal graphic deign project, aiming to create an “evocative” typeface with letters that can swell and contract. It was largely born of a “desire to have fun and get out of...
For more than four decades, Terry Irwin, one of this year’s AIGA Medalists, has been a formative figure in design both as a practitioner and educator. A founding partner of the international design firm MetaDesign, Irwin made a major mid-career shift, walking away from a professional life where she worked on big-budget design projects for Apple, Nike, Bank of America,...
The late Ken Garland’s First Things First manifesto, written in 1963 on the spur of the moment during a public meeting, has become a tradition of enduring protest that its originator could never have predicted. Last year, the fourth version of the text arrived and it’s the most urgent and powerful iteration to date. In the nearly 60 years since...
For Eiko Ishioka, one of Japan’s most groundbreaking designers, creativity was an amorphous, fluid medium that she dipped into, gently molding materials into whatever form she was currently creating—a poster, an advertisement, or a costume. Born in 1938, Ishioka grew up in uptown Tokyo, raised by her father, a self-taught commercial graphic designer, and her mother, a housewife. After earning ...
Ritu Ghiya is an artist, designer, and web developer. She helps design Sounds About Riso, a risograph fair founded by lucky risograph and Zinehug founded in 2019. In 2020, when the lockdown began in New York, Ghiya designed and built a new site to sell zines and prints online. Their selection is always thoughtfully curated, visually interesting, and narratively compelling...
Name: BN Grimer Designer: Brandon Nickerson Foundry: Brandon Nickerson Studio Release Date: June 22, 2021 Back Story “A font’s main purpose is to proclaim, and that is exactly what she was designed for,” says Brandon Nickerson of his new BN Grimer,a bold, sans serif that seamlessly mirrors the minimalism trend. Before designing Grimer, Nickerson found himself sifting through archive.org where...
The design industry can feel like a black box, especially when it comes to finding a job and getting paid. Everyone has been there—the anxious feeling of negotiating a salary, the fear of asking for too much, or too little. This lack of transparency can impede progress towards creating more equitable, diverse, and inclusive workplaces. We dug into the latest...
