Design Observer Twenty Years 2003-2023




Books
Hannah Carlson
Schiaparelli’s Pockets
 Sensible aspects of clothing are “no sooner put into use than put into play,” dress historian Ann Hollander observed.

On Fighting the Typatriarchy
 "My intent was to make a typeface that stands for the strength of a woman at different times in her life. In Indian culture, a woman is expected to be the powerhouse of responsibilities." An excerpt from Feminist Designer.
Stuart Walker
Design Criticism
 An excerpt from Stuart Walker’s new book Design for Resilience.

William Kentridge: Prints and Posters
 A taste of the first installment in an epic catalogue of William Kentridge’s linocuts, etchings, monotypes, posters, and more.
Adrian Shaughnessy
Hello Human
 A review of Michael Horsham’s Hello Human: A History of Visual Communication, out now from Thames & Hudson.
Jessica Helfand
Henry Leutwyler: International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum
 An interview with photographer Henry Leutwyler that explores his photographic record of some of the nearly 30,000 objects in the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva.
Manuel Lima
The New Designer: Design is Local
 An excerpt from Manuel Lima’s latest book, The New Designer.



Susan Magsamen, Ivy Ross
Your Brain on Art: Creating Community
 An excerpt from the book Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross.
Don Norman
Design for a Better World
 An excerpt from Don Norman’s new book, Design for a Better World.
Dana Arnett, Kevin Bethune
S10E12: Decolonizing Design
 Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook is a guidebook to the institutional transformation of design theory and practice by restoring the long-excluded cultures of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities.
Daniella Zalcman
What We See
 The inaugural book from Women Photograph, What We See, is a broad survey that represents the equally broad careers of our members.
Pamela Hovland
Ecological by Design: A History From Scandinavia
 Dr. Kjetil Fallan’s "Ecological by Design: A History From Scandinavia" is a book I will be thinking about for a long time.

A Story Made of Pictures
 An excerpt from A History of the World (in Dingbats) by David Byrne.




Snails & Monkey Tails
 There are countless books that can teach you the alphabet, but almost none that focus on the tiny designs that run interference among the letterforms: those easily overlooked punctuation and typographic symbols.
Sloan Leo
The Infrastructure of Care: Community Design, Healing & Organizational Post-Traumatic Growth
 This essay interrogates the relationship between power, decision-making, and organizational healing. It asserts that community design as a practice offers a theoretical framework for organizational dynamic healing that structurally enables those harmed to set the pace and nature of resolution and repair.
Maurice Cherry
Make the Path by Talking
 The Birth of Revision Path: The year is 2006.
adrienne maree brown + Lesley-Ann Noel
This Is Our Time!
 adrienne maree brown on design, liberation and transformation as told to Lesley-Ann Noel.

Health Design Thinking



Our Will to Live
 An excerpt from Our Will to Live, a new book out from Steidl featuring 250 rarely seen concert posters, programs, portraits and scenes rendered by imprisoned artists of the Terezín prison camp.

Jens Risom: A Seat at the Table
 An excerpt from Vicky Lowry’s new book "Jens Risom: A Seat at the Table", out this week from Phaidon.



Debbie Millman
Ai Weiwei
 Ai Weiwei joins Debbie Millman to discuss his new memoir 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, depicting a century-long epic tale of China told through a story of his family.
The Editors
Woman Made
 A new story of women product designers is told in Woman Made.



Tucker Viemeister
Drama
 A review of Drama, a new opus from David Rockwell, by Tucker Viemeister.

A Photographer at a Wedding
 Midwife. Funeral director. Wedding photographer. You meet them once on a delicate day. They quickly slip into the inner circle of a family to perform their role during this rite of passage, and then they are gone.

Clara Istlerová, Her Work and Life



äntrepō: Volume 1
 äntrepō is a studio project by the DC-based design practice Spaeth Hill.
Robert Finkel + Shea Tillman
The IBM Poster Program
 IBM’s mid-century corporate creative direction usually brings to mind Paul Rand, but it’s staff graphic designers and photographers developed posters as a platform for elevating internal communications and initiatives within the company.
Jessica Helfand + Ellen McGirt
S9E4: Na Kim
 Na Kim is an associate creative director at the book publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Susan Yelavich
Beings: Unruly Things, Golems, Cyborgs
 Stories of the supranatural would seem to be among those childish things it is long time we put away. But somehow we never do.
Kaleena Sales
Teaching Black Designers
 The vibrant complexities of the urban landscape create visual impressions in the mind, eventually serving as a mental library of stored images to use or reference when necessary.
Ellen Lupton
Confidence Equity
 Are we born with confidence, or do we earn it? If we don’t have it, how can we get it?

Origins of Design Patents
 Although the story of design patents is closely intertwined with that of industrial design, in fact design patents predate the emergence of industrial design as an organized professional discipline by nearly a century.

Sign Painting
 In the last ten years or so we have truly witnessed a resurgence of the sign painter’s craft.
The Editors
Self-Reliance
 To think through making, to know yourself better through the process of producing something.

The New Art of Making Books
 Founded in Philadelphia in 2016, Ulises is a collectively run art bookstore and exhibition space, who edited the recently published Publishing As Practice.
Jason Hill
Artist as Reporter
 In the 1940s the New York daily newspaper PM’s experimented with the then already "lost art" of sketch reporting.
Sean Adams
How Design Makes Us Think
 An excerpt from Sean Adams’ new book "How Design Makes Us Think".
Augusta Pownall
Rational Simplicity: Rudolph de Harak, Graphic Designer
 An interview with Richard Poulin, the long-overdue first comprehensive monograph of Rudolph de Harak’s work.
Adrian Shaughnessy
Impact
 Today, we use the internet and social media feeds to stay abreast of developments, but we used to rely on the design press. Already, most of the major players have left the stage. Will the few remaining stalwarts be around in 10 years’ time?

Covering Black America
 Decades ago, the great artist, poet, musician, and author Gil Scott-Heron famously proclaimed, “The revolution will not be televised.” He was right...It was, however, delivered monthly to newsstands and Black homes within the pages of Ebony.
Steven Heller
A Month With President Obama
 I spent last month, approximately three hours-a-night, seven-days-a-week, with President Barack H. Obama.
Steven Heller
Imagine, Observe, Remember
 The poetically enigmatic title says it all: Imagine, Observe, Remember; it is a book about process, memory, remembrance and interpretation.
Jessica Helfand
On Learning
 What resonates most unequivocally here is Emerson ’s plea for individuality—that iron string—the sovereignty of selfhood.



Steven Heller
Milton Glaser’s First Last Hurrah
Sketch & Finish illustrates Glaser’s teaching agenda, which is to say, one makes sketches to explore the unknown.
Patrick Fry
Magic Papers
 Magic is largely a solitary endeavour, but the channels of its tips and tricks had a little-known heyday around a hundred years ago.
Jessica Helfand + Claire Weisz
On Architecture
 Herewith, the first in a series of conversations with artists, architects, photographers, cinematographers, designers and makers of all kinds, from all over the world.

Word Rain
 In fall of 1969, a strange and brilliant book came into the world.



Steven Heller
The Influence of Nightlife on Design
 Cabarets, cafes, and nightclubs are as essential to the development of Modern avant garde art and design movements as are galleries, salons, and museums.
Steven Heller
Let’s Give Thanks for Books About Magazines
 If you love print magazines and bemoan their demise Steven Heller has seasonal gift suggestions for you.
Steven Heller
The Novel That Took Me Down Jojo’s Rabbit Hole
 Steven Heller interviews the author of "Caging Skies", the novel the new film Jojo Rabbit is based on.



Steven Heller
Dave King (RIP)
 Last January I thought I had received an email from a ghost.



Steven Heller
Booklover’s Guide to Le-Tan
 Steven Heller on illustrator Pierre Le-Tan and his daughter Cleo Le-Tan’s A Booklover’s Guide to New York.



Steven Heller
The Motivational Industrial Complex
 This publishing season I’ve found three motivational books, each on the benefits of creative activity that, despite the biases noted above, I would suggest you read, if only to be entertained.
Jonas Banker + Ida Wessel
Process
 The purpose pf this book is to reveal how physical sketching intertwines with critical thinking in the creative process, well beyond theoretical design jargon.
Steven Heller
The Bauhaus is Forever
 You can never have too much Bauhaus.
Debbie Millman
Austin Kleon
 Debbie talks with Austin Kleon, who describes himself as ’a writer who draws’.
Alex Cameron
On The Graphic Design Reader
Teal Triggs’ and Leslie Atzmon’s The Graphic Design Reader is as challenging as it is necessary.
Steven Heller
Don Wall: Brave New Book Design
Steven Heller talks to architect Don Wall about his radical book from 1971: Visionary Cities: the Arcology of Paolo Soleri.
Brian LaRossa
Why it Matters to Me if Designers Read and Write
 Literacy means being an engaged and responsible citizen. It means building sympathy and empathy. It means being radically curious and pursuing meaning with a sense of purpose.
Ken Gordon
Designers Like You Should Read Machines Like Me
 People, you might have noticed, are wracking their brains to understand artificial intelligence.
Debbie Millman
Elizabeth Gilbert
 Debbie talks with Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love about the love of her life and her latest book City of Girls.
The Editors
Whose Book and Cover Designs are the Best of 2018?
 Announcing the 2018 50 Books | 50 Covers selections.
Brian LaRossa
Should Book Publishing Leave New York City?
 America’s publishing trade took root and flourished in New York because the city’s cultural and geographic conditions created an optimal environment for that to happen.
Steven Heller
Seymour Chwast: Few Words, Many Letters
 Seymour Chwast, a man of few words, wishes there were more than 26 letters in the alphabet.
Ken Gordon
In the Future, Life Online Could Be “The Trial”—Unless We Design Something Better
The Trial is seen as prophetic by many.
Steven Heller
Photographing Science
 The role that image makers have in the fields of science and engineering is more vital, especially now.
Steven Heller
Born to be Posthumous
 Your book on Edward Gorey has been a long term journey for you. I know why I want to spend time reading it, but why did you want to invest so much of your life in Gorey’s head?
Jon Contino
Branding Baseball By Hand
 Baseball, survivial, tradition, make-believe: the most exciting way to spend an afternoon.


The Design Observer Twenty: Our Partners


Observed


At 10 AM today,  Wednesday, October 4, show your support for libraries and the freedom to read on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and more. Use the hashtag #FreedomToRead to share why open access to books, information, and knowledge is important to you or your community. More here.

On nurturing creativity in children—and for the rest of us.

The future of design education—a compendium of writings by a powerhouse roster of seasoned educators and practitioners—and downloadable here.

Architect Beverly Willis, who got her start as a designer in Hawaii, where she studied fresco painting under the painter and muralist Jean Charlot, has died. She was 95.

Horace Ové, considered the first Black director to make a feature-length film in Britain (and knighted for his services to media) has died. The Trinidadian photographer and filmmaker was 86.

Did you know the iconic Mini Cooper owes its design inspiration to a Greek designer? You do now!

“Doesn’t it just scream “lived-in”? Probably because I was screaming so maniacally while bludgeoning it with my spoon.” A three year old takes on interior design, via McSweeneys. 

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month? Dial it back, says the design columnist at the Los Angeles Times. “What I’m not celebrating is the related graphic design, which is often a pastiche of brightly-colored patterns and stylized decorative fonts with awful names like ‘Taco Modern.’”

Rami Al-Ali becomes the first Syrian designer to be recognized by the Business of Fashion list.

Want to fully embrace the circular economy? “The design industry needs to let go of its obsession with the new and start venerating the patina of age,” says Katie Treggiden.

The world’s oldest shoes — sandals, actually — have been found in a cave in Spain. Estimated to be 6,200 years old, the elegant weave and classical details took the wearer from day to night in comfort and style.

AI and regulating the use of actor likenesses move front and center as contract talks continue in Hollywood. (Here is SAG-AFTRA’s dental plan information.)

No, Tom Hanks is not trying to sell you an affordable dental plan. (It’s an AI deep fake video.)

Trauma-informed design “realizes how the physical environment affects individuals, recognizes that it can have a physiological and emotional impact,” In Pittsburgh, thinking about housing, dignity, and more.

“Instead of rooms or units, each resident gets a “home” on a quiet little indoor street reminiscent of the neighborhoods many of them grew up in.” Rethinking nursing home design, and its impact on memory care.

From tiny, moss-enshrouded plantation plots to sprawling urban sites, tens of thousands of Black burial grounds lie in ruins, their history fading or lost. Three Black women, shocked by the condition of cemeteries in Washington, Georgia, and Texas, have turned their anger into action. None have prior experience in historic preservation, landscape architecture, or design. But like many others working to save Black cemeteries, they view the work as a sacred trust and payment of a debt to ancestors who led the way.

What does it mean to say games have objective truth in them? Game enthusiasts, look no further. (And you should subscribe to this wonderful newsletter, too.)

Helen Cammock’s I WIll Keep My Soul is a new “prismatic” artist’s book, just out from our friends at Siglio Press. The book also corresponds to a city-wide, multi-site exhibition of film, performance, music, archival documents and books opening in New Orleans in October.

Legendary editor George Gendron interviews legendary everything, Gloria Steinem.

A Native American man was shot at a New Mexico rally acknowledging the removal of a controversial statue of conquistador Juan de Oñate. The rally was organized by Native American group The Red Nation, the attacker was wearing a red MAGA hat. The victim is in stable condition.



Jobs | October 04