Blog: Design history
3 June 2021
Come to the Eye 101 launch
Please join Anette Lenz, Mario Eskenazi, Jim Sutherland & Elizabeth Resnick next Tuesday 8 June to celebrate Eye’s latest issue
The next Type Tuesday is a virtual launch party, designed to celebrate the publication of…
25 May 2021
The clarity of the innocent eye
ken garland
In this previously unpublished essay from 2003, Ken Garland (who died last week) urges designers to be ‘alert’. In an afterword, Andrew Howard explains the context
I’ve been working as a graphic designer for 50 years, first as an art director…
29 March 2021
Books received #44
Africa State of Mind; The Paper by Christoph Niemann; Modern Heraldry; and Abbatt Toys, Modern Toys for Modern Children.
Time to shine a light on some fascinating books about design and visual culture that…
17 December 2020
Waves of popularity
Graphic Design plays a key role in the re-emergence of Britain’s much-loved coastal resorts. The seventh and final instalment of Justin Burns’s series about seaside graphic design
The tide comes in. The tide goes out. The seaside is, by its very nature…
11 November 2020
From analogue to activism
magCulture Live goes digital next week, for a two-day conference that celebrates the creative and social powers of magazines
Dividing its focus between ‘activism’ and ‘analogue’, magCulture 2020 shows that even in difficult, disruptive…
5 November 2020
An Iranian vision
editorial design, neshan magazine
Despite censorship and sanctions, a bilingual magazine showcasing Iranian and Western design has flourished for two decades. By Steven Heller
The history of visual arts in Iran is divided into two historical periods of Iranian…
29 October 2020
Sea, sky, paint and pattern
Rich, decorative patterns shape our experience of the British seaside. The sixth in Justin Burns’s series on coastal graphic design
Patterns and decoration have long informed the design of seaside architecture – promenades, amusements, hotels…
13 October 2020
Letterpress celebration
Italy’s Tipoteca museum commemorates its quarter century with 25 specially commissioned posters. By Simon Esterson and James Clough
Based in Cornuda in the northeast of Italy, Tipoteca is one of the finest printing…
1 October 2020
Twisted characters
Hamish Smyth’s wordmarks for Gaslit Nation and Bellingcat are memorable graphic identities for organisations that fight populism and disinformation with solid research and truth.
By John L. Walters
Hamish Smyth’s identity for the Gaslit Nation podcast is a smart piece of design for…
19 September 2020
Crouwel’s institutional intuition
On the first anniversary of Wim Crouwel’s death, Alex J. Todd recalls a visit to the Stedelijk Museum exhibition ‘Mr. Gridnik’
On 19 September 2019, nine days before the opening of ‘Wim Crouwel: Mr. Gridnik’ at…