Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
“Why another graphic design magazine?” asked the cover of the first issue of Dot Dot Dot, published in April 2000. “The pilot issue hopes to answer itself, being an encyclopedia of previous attempts.” And so begins this new magazine founded by graphic designers Peter Bil’ak, Stuart Bertollotti-Bailey, and Jürgen X. Albrecht. A quasi-meta analysis of design magazines and publishing, the...
Name: Immortel Designer: Clément Le Tulle-Neyret Foundry: 205TF Release Date: April 2021 Back Story: Immortel, the first retail typeface by Paris-based typographer and graphic designer Clément Le Tulle-Neyret, is a type family divided not into weights, but four “variants” that each align with one of the physiological “humors” as laid out in Hippocratic theory. Essentially, these humors are bodily fluids that...
What does it mean to design “normal” things for “normal” people? Western society defines certain individuals and communities as average and ordinary, while everyone else is something other. People living inside the norm bubble often don’t recognize their own special status, because norms aren’t supposed to be special. Synonyms for the word normal include standard, average, typical, and ordinary. Norms...
I walk out of the Javits Center wearing my vaccine sticker like a medal. People are looking at me, I think, passers-by in Hudson Yards, the barista at O Café, the cashier at the Container Store. “Mind if I ask where you got your vaccine?” asks the latter, with a nod to the sticker on my lapel. “Javits Center,” I...
“ο καλύμνιος σφουγγαράς ψιθύρισε πως θα βουτήξει χωρίς να διστάζει” “the Kalymnos sponge-diver whispered that he would dive without hesitation” Yannis Karlopoulos is, among other things, an amateur poet. But this isn’t one of his lines. “I write this when I find a typewriter,” explains the influential Greek graphic designer, standing in his basement studio in the central Athens neighborhood...
Name: Norbert Designer: Philipp Neumeyer Foundry: TypeMates Release Date: January 2021 Back story: In 2016, Phillipp Neumeyer was smitten by some gorgeous metal lettering he spied on the signage wrapping St. Petersburg’s 1907 Au Pont Rouge department store. “The letters were rather squarish, which I didn’t care for at all, but the R and G had these little tails at the end,” he...
Like many people, Caroline Reid experienced a sudden and unwelcome drop in business when the pandemic hit the U.S. last spring. An Australian comedian based in Miami, Reid went from giving live performances to figuring out online shows, some of which, she says, “were absolutely awful and horrendous.” The shutdown of global travel didn’t mix well with the content of...
One of the most enlightening, empowering, and transformative experiences I had as a design fellow at the Walker Art Center was organizing last March with my colleagues and comrades to form the Walker Worker Union. Now over a year later, as I freelance away, waiting for my stimmy to drop, with no health insurance and an even more uncertain future...
Hugh Francis has just over two months of payroll in the bank, and he doesn’t care who knows it. That’s because the founder of the New York City technology studio Sanctuary Computer has little to hide from clients and even less to keep from his own employees. The company’s policy of radical financial transparency means its profits and losses, its...
A few years ago, a friend of Cherise Lavah’s told the self-taught designer she should try freelancing on Fiverr. It’d been in the back of her mind for a couple years, and then the pandemic happened. “I was working in restaurants; everything shut down,” said Lavah, a Salt Lake City resident. “I’ve been teaching myself design for the past five...
Part 1: Can I Be An Artist Here? I’m an artist working as a graphic designer. There’s a blurry boundary separating these two disciplines, yet at the same time, they are elaborately intertwined. I use many of the same tools and skills for both. Still, I often keep these two selves separate to maintain the appearances of professionalism as a...
In the latest of our Under the Covers series looking at seminal records and their design, we speak with seminal German electronic musician and composer Roedelius, known for his work with krautrock band Cluster. Here, he talks us through the designs of five records he’s been involved in creating—as best as he can recall. Hans-Joachim Roedelius likes to give the...
