Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
The ossified binary of climate change discourse in the United States has been grievously fractured by reality. Out has spilled a torrent of new questions about how to exist in a society, and on a planet, in crisis. In an effort to tell the stories of our troubled climate, a number of independent magazines have set out to cover climate...
Welcome to Spotted, Eye on Design’s column that turns an eye on the styles and graphic trends you’re seeing everywhere. What are you seeing? Gone are the days of laboring over 1,000 pieces of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night;” in their place is a new breed of the jigsaw puzzle, which has undergone a major rebrand thanks to direct-to-consumer companies promising...
Name: Lektorat Designer: Florian Fecher Foundry: TypeTogether Release Date: October 2020 Back Story: Many a design student dreams of producing a senior year project that might evolve into a professional future. Fecher, a German graphic designer, calligrapher, letterer, typographer, and writer, found a way for his student work to reach a wider audience beyond professors and classmates. He first developed Lektorat under...
2020 was tough. Between a global pandemic, a divisive election, and rising racial tensions, it sometimes felt like the year was a never-ending parade of bad news. But here we are in 2021. A new calendar, a blank page. We think designers have an important role to play in making sure the future is better than the past. (All design,...
Writing about design is never just writing about design. Oftentimes, the language of design creeps into other parts of our lives—the way things look, the way things work, how the things we care about are presented to the world. Viewed through that lens, design writing isn’t just the purview of website like our own. Good design writing happens everywhere, and in...
It’s that time of year when we glance back at the last 12 months in an attempt to understand what it all means. And while we can’t promise you all of the answers, throughout the year we do our best to articulate moments that can lend some clarity on where design was, is, and where it’s heading. We’re hesitant to...
Another year passed, another season of “best ofs” is upon us. It’s time to look back at the last 12 months, reflect on all we’ve published, and wrap it all up with a big batch of roundups. It’s always fun for us editors to dig back through the most popular stories, and this year’s correlated pretty directly to the big...
In 2012, good kid, m.A.A.d city brought hip hop’s finest new storyteller to the attention of the masses. Kendrick Lamar’s major label debut tells the story of a kid growing up in Compton, Los Angeles, circumnavigating the pitfalls of gang life, whether by accident or design. The cover art meanwhile provides two stories, perhaps offering us a glimpse into an...
QR codes have been the subject of various cycles of derision over the past 20 years, and yet, walk around today and you’ll find them everywhere: posted on storefronts inviting onlookers to place online orders, or scan a menu for takeout. They’re used to indicate completed health screenings so people can enter schools and hospitals without having to lift a...
Name: Carta Nueva Designer: My-Lan Thuong Foundry: Sharp Type Release Date: November 2020 Back Story: Type history 101: once upon a time, beautiful cursive handwriting was a fact of life. In the 19th and early 20th century, the grade-school taught Spencerian script (and its simplified cousin, the Palmer method) ensured that the ephemera of daily existence—a handwritten receipt from your plumber,...
Carolina Laudon is a Swedish typographer and type designer living in Gothenburg. Laudon studied Fine Art in Painting (Gerlesborgsskolan), earned her Master’s Degree in Graphic Design (University of Gothenburg), then followed that up studying Book History, Intellectual Properties, and Digital Information (Lund University), Practical Design Research and Compulsory Higher Education Teacher Training (Linnaeus University), and Writing as an Artistic Tool,...
In 2001, students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, under the direction of architect Rem Koolhaas, published The Harvard Guide to Shopping, a wide-ranging survey of the spaces, techniques, and ideologies embedded in contemporary retail experiences. Moving from early village markets to the first arcades, then into malls and airports, they argue that shopping has infiltrated every aspect of...
