Innovation

In the 60s two foreign design magazines were passed around America as though they were underground or samizdat publications. One was Graphis from Switzerland, the other was Projekt from Poland. Let's focus on the latter. It was a revelation to learn about the artistic intelligence of the Polish poster artists, illustrators and designers. They led [...]

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Before Punk and later Steampunk there was Erector punk. Well, it wasn't called that. Yet there were punk kids who loved toying with Erector sets. The kid above is the personification of joyful madness that many Erectorphiles experienced. Erector, invented by A.C. Gilbert and director of the eponymous Hall of Science on 5th Avenue and [...]

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Lavish graphic design histories are emerging all over the world. The latest to crop up is Linha do tempo do design gráfico no Brasil, written by Chico Homem de Melo and edited and designed by Elaine Ramos, the art director of Editora Cosacnaify, (with a preface by me). This is an ambitious in depth history [...]

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Designers are looking for ways in which to incorporate meaningful social impact work into their practices. Colleges are responding to student demand that social issues be taught in the design curriculum and recent graduates are attempting to find jobs that balance social change with earning a living. SVA's Impact / Design for Social Change (the [...]

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Steam Punk is the retro fitting of retro fits. It is ironic nostalgia for the Victorian past - the complexity of old steam-run machinery. The great turbines that ran the early technologies are now mere chips. But one thing remains the same: Steam furnaces. They may look a bit more sleek - more like refrigerators [...]

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The BBC made a hilarious two-part Downton Abbey parody -- Uptown Downstairs Abbey -- for the annual Red Nose Day charity.  Narrated by Michael Gambon, the two-parts feature Absolutely Fabulous’ Jennifer Saunders as a marvelously nasty Dowager Countess, her AbFab co-star Joanna Lumley as a housekeeper who knows that she is meant for a posher [...]

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The Electric Information Age Book, by Jeffrey Schnapp (the faculty director of Harvard's MetaLAB) and Adam Michaels (a cofounder of Project Projects), is the third installment in the “Inventory Books” series, which seeks “to advance the role of design as an integrated force in book editing and production . . . as a means of revitalizing the space [...]

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This is the second half of my interview with Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon, curators of Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, 1961 – 1976, a Pacific Standard Time exhibition currently at the Armory Center for the Arts. In part one we discussed Berman and Heinecken as designers, jokesters, and rear-guard revolutionaries. . [...]

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(This piece is a much expanded version of an article co-written with photographer/writer John Gruber for Print Magazine and the British trade mag Ads International in 1998.) The thought of Chicago in the 1920’s usually conjures up images of gangsters, Prohibition, and other Roaring 20’s clichés, but there was another movement in the Chicago area [...]

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Several decades before AdBusters, there was Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken. Hardly anyone knew that these two media-manipulating L.A. hipster artists were intimates, beginning in the early 1960s. But now their relationship has been exposed to the public for the very first time. Naked women are also involved. A lot of naked women. And drugs [...]

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