Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
If you lived in the state of Maharashtra in India during the ’70s and ’80s, you probably had the Kalnirnay hanging on your kitchen wall — a calendar almanac that has now become the largest selling publication in the world, with over 18 million copies sold annually. If you’ve ever had it hanging on your wall, then its distinctive lettering...
On a recent afternoon I visited Dribbble, a popular community and portfolio website used by designers to share and discuss their work. On Dribbble, you can skim through designs for sophisticated banking apps, marketing websites for yet-to-ship startups, and designs for crypto mobile apps to buy and sell NFTs — the latest craze in the startup world. Browsing the portfolios...
Name: Camera Designers: Team Dinamo (Johannes Breyer, Fabian Harb, Robert Janes, Fabiola Mejía) with Sascha Bente Foundry: Dinamo Release date: April 2022 Back Story: Ever since the early days of Swiss type foundry Dinamo, which was founded in 2013, the team has been interested in the idea of updating light traps — typographic nuances that originally compensated for the low...
“The details are not the details,” said Charles Eames. “The details make the design.” I think Eames is saying that all the little, seemingly invisible decisions that no one else will notice, these are the things that make a piece of design work or not work. This idea is perhaps never more evident than in designing a photo book. As...
In the past decade, cold shipping has grown from an industrial need to an everyday occurrence. From meal kit deliveries to salmon subscriptions, perishable goods abound. Perhaps the most logic-defying category of frozen food delivery is ice cream. What started as a niche industry has become a familiar trope: a scrappy ice cream maker starts selling their homemade wares. That...
For years, I’ve swooned at the thought of commissioning an oil painting of my rescue greyhound, The Turtleman*. I used to think I was swooning alone, or at least swooning among a very few; that I was a specific (read: exhausting) type of pet owner, which I probably am. But then the pandemic happened, and custom pet portraiture seemingly exploded....
Colin Forbes, who passed away just a little more than a week ago, was a key part of the design community, the AIGA, Pentagram, and my life. He was a founding member of Pentagram and the architect of a unique approach to design. Among many of his leadership roles and accolades, Colin served as AIGA’s president for several years in...
Name: Exposure Designer: Federico Parra Barrios Foundry: 205TF Release Date: April 2022 Back Story: If you are not a recent addition to the graphic design field, you may remember your first internship at a New York City studio as a series of dreary winter afternoons spent laboriously typesetting one word at a time using an ancient phototypesetting machine. No need...
When the first issue of Tradeswomen first appeared in subscribers’ mailboxes in 1980, they were “delighted,” said Molly Martin, its founder and editor. Women in blue-collar work “had never seen themselves represented before” — and now here they were, photographs of hard-hatted women in plumbing, carpentry, construction, iron-work, industrial machine work, and more gracing the cover of a magazine. Martin...
The face of biotech has no face at all. It doesn’t have a spine. It doesn’t have complex organs. Hell, it sometimes doesn’t even have membrane-bound nuclei. Instead, designers have found their way into the lab. They’ve taken a look under fancy microscopes and been inspired by all those beautiful E. coli cultures blooming under gel lights. A new world...
When Claire and Pann Lim floated the idea of starting a magazine with their two children back in 2013, their daughter, Aira, then 6, was bewildered. “Who’s going to want to read a magazine about our family?” she asked. Close to a decade later, the Singapore-based Rubbish famzine (think “family” plus “zine”) has just released Blood Sweat and Tears—a compilation of...
Name: Timezone Designers: Elias Hanzer and Lucas Liccini Foundry: Hanzer Liccini Release Date: November 2021 Back Story: Berlin-based graphic design studio and type foundry Hanzer Liccini works across identities, publication design, web design, type creation, and print; often using the type side of its practice to inform the graphics side, and vice versa. Most of its work involves the use of...
