Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
Elvis Costello has been a songwriting heavyweight for as long as most people reading this will be able to remember. His literate, seething post punk singles at the tail end of the ’70s helped establish him as one of Britain’s most important musical voices; and his third album, 1979’s Armed Forces, broke him in the U.S. Declan MacManus was given...
Over the course of 15+ years, Debbie Millman has interviewed more than 450 people on her podcast Design Matters. But in the long line of creative journeys that have been probed on the interview-based show, there was always one notable exception: Millman herself. When Design Matters celebrated its 15th anniversary with a special live episode at WNYC’s Greene Space, Millman...
The first time I rode the subway after lockdown ended, I was nervous. And a little excited, too. For the most part, I had been biking and walking to get around New York City and hadn’t taken the train—which I normally love riding—in about five months. As I descended into my station, I felt choked up. I had made this...
There are more than 20,000 fonts available on Adobe Fonts, well over 10,000 from the Monotype library, and another 915 on Google. Faced with this dizzying number of options—not to mention the marketing might and visibility of these giant corporations—why would anyone pursue a career as an independent foundry, building small libraries of retail typefaces that can take years to...
It started, as most things do in this era of digital habitation, with a post. Amidst the 2020 uprisings in support of Black life, artist and writer Annika Hansteen-Izora, created a list of Black Creative Ecosystems, housed in a humble Google Sheet, to redirect the overflowing public donations to bail funds into a multitude of initiatives that prioritized Black trans,...
Four decades ago, no matter where you looked, you saw Max Headroom—or as the Los Angeles Times called him, “the ultimate TV star of the ’80s.” He had shows on two continents and three networks. David Letterman hosted Max for his American network television debut. And Max, the media darling, even made his way to the covers of both Newsweek...
When Charlotte Strick and Claire Williams Martinez of Strick&Williams were invited to design Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Strick was already intimately familiar with the work. As the designer of The Paris Review, the magazine that serialized Cusk’s first book in the series, Strick had already acquainted herself with the roving narrative, which traces the journey of a woman enroute to...
Lucille Tenazas has had a front-row seat to the evolution of design education over the last 30 years. An AIGA medalist and the 2002 recipient of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, she is currently the Henry Wolf Professor in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School of Design in New York City. She previously spent 20...
Name: Super Tramp Designer: Vivian Dehning Release Date: December 2021 Back Story: Dehning sees type design as a way to express human diversity and personality. For Super Tramp, she envisioned a typeface with a variety of forms based on a classical framework. The designer says, “When I look at a letter, I picture actual characteristics I see in humans. Every...
Welcome to Form Factor, our new column exploring the intersection of packaging, branding, and culture. Packaging acts as a heuristic. When presented with more options than we can process, we use it to decide what to grab off a shelf or add to cart. But what about purchases that are purely functional? Does the box, bottle or label really matter?...
In a scene from Netflix’s new stop-motion anthology The House, a little girl called Mabel walks down the hallway in a Georgian mansion as the dusk rose carpet that lines the passage gently quivers under her feet. The anthology, divided into three chapters laced with deep-rooted elements of psychological horror, is full of such delicate, delicious details. It is a...
Name: Platia Designer: Toshi Omagari Foundry: Omega Type Foundry Release date: December 2021 Back Story: Omagari has a long-standing fondness for the Hellenic Wide genre of typefaces (especially those seen in antique ephemera such as booklets, maps, and tickets). Hellenic Wide is a subcategory of wide, low-contrast 19th-century slab serif typefaces, originally available from several foundries under a variety of...
