Feature
The work must be read
Lawrence Weiner’s art is a kind of sculpture made of language, free from excess or embellishment and strangely familiar from its far-reaching influence on graphic designers
What is this thing called graphic design criticism?
In the last ten years a substantial body of critical writing on graphic design has amassed. In this transatlantic dialogue, Rick Poynor and American design critic Michael Rock explore the state of design criticism now and put the arguments for different approaches
Reputations: Neville Garrick
‘I won’t compromise my concept. If entertainment doesn’t contain information, then I don’t want anything to do with it.’
Out of town shopping
Though its public lettering reassures customers with poetry and fiction this shimmering mall is, at heart, a three dimensional shopping catalogue
Reputations: Piet Schreuders
‘I don’t want to know the canon, because it is completely irrelevant and transient. If you fight the canon you become a product of its system’
Visual journalism: magazines and technology
New technology has transformed the medium of magazines, and social diversity and fragmentation mean that a magazine’s appeal rarely crosses taste and lifestyle boundaries. So what is actually being sold in the stuff that surrounds the advertisements?
The modernist body
Images of the human form receive little analysis. An exhibition at London’s Victoria & Albert museum explores approaches to the body in early German design.
A terrible beauty
The atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud has become the logo of annihilation