Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
Two months ago, a wave of news coverage around NFTs began to crest across niche art blogs to the New York Times and everywhere in between. The headlines often assume a baffled posture: “What the Heck are NFTs?”; “What’s An NFT? And Why Are People Paying Millions To Buy Them?”; “What’s this craze for ‘NFTs’ all about, anyway?” Paris Hilton...
There’s something alluring about a clear glass bottle. It says: Nothing to hide here! I am not subject to the deteriorating effects of sunlight! I am more elegant than your plastic, more worthy of being savored and displayed! I am bright and full of life, and if you drink me, you, too, can share in my vitality. Or something like...
“Well, presumably the message is for the media. Get it?” —KTVU-2 News There is a conceptual performance by Ant Farm—that trio of rad architects from the 1970s best known for inflatables, Cadillac Ranch, and restaging the Kennedy assassination—involving a customized 1959 Cadillac El Dorado that crashes headlong into a fiery wall of television sets. Dubbed Media Burn, the enactment took...
I met Bahia Shehab about a year ago at a conference on contemporary Arab graphic design in New York. A professor and founder of the graphic design program at the American University in Cairo (AUC), Shehab briefly mentioned to me that she’d been working on a research project along with Haytham Nawar, the chair of the department of the arts...
Industry surveys are, by their very nature, a snapshot in time. Pull up the questionnaire, and fill it out. What happens tomorrow or the next day doesn’t count, in the most literal sense of the phrase. That reality makes it difficult to get a full and clear picture of what’s happening in the design industry, especially in a moment when...
Name: Altform Text Designer: Mark Bloom Foundry: CoType Foundry Release Date: March 2021 Back Story: Mark Bloom launched CoType Foundry in October 2019, and though he’s been steadily expanding its library of typefaces, until now there was an empty spot in the geometric sans-serif category. “Adding a geometric sans was a logical next step—it’s something I’ve wanted to design for many years,” he...
Open up a newspaper, survey your movie options on Netflix, scroll through Instagram—pick any particularly Pandemic-suited pastime—and you’ll no doubt come across some works of illustration. It’s not a new medium in marketing and editorial design—in fact, it’s one of the oldest—and even before the pandemic, illustration seemed to be enjoying a resurgence of sorts. But amid COVID lockdowns, art...
Earth Day doesn’t have an official visual identity, simply because it has had so many over the years. For the first Earth Day in 1970, a young designer named David Powell created an illustration for Philadelphia Earth Week that depicted an unusual vision of the planet. The image featured a circle with deep blue on the bottom, representing water, a...
“We had the first lockdown on the 13th of March, and I think I sent both posters to print on the 11th,” Zurich-based independent designer Dorothee Dähler says, recalling last spring’s shutdown. Hoping to save her designs for Lucerne’s Museum of History and for an exhibition space in the neighboring village of Emmen, Dähler created stickers listing later opening dates,...
Name: Logic Monospace Designer: Jeremy Mickel Foundry: MCKL Release Date: Fall 2020 Back Story: Mixing technical precision, typewriter fetishization, and “renaissance flair,” according to its creators, Logic Monospace/Monoscript takes in a number of reference points, including midcentury typewriter fonts (such as IBM Selectric’s Advocate and that old familiar system font, Courier), slab serifs like Stephenson Blake’s Scarab and the very...
In July 2020, Briar Levit, a professor of graphic design at Portland State University, uploaded an early 20th century sign for an ice delivery business to the online archive of typography, Fonts In Use. Yellowed and battered with age, the sign for “John Finnegan Ice” used five distinct typefaces, which the community helped identify along with a probable geographic location...
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...
