Author: Monumentanea
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Beyond Vision: graphic design and the shapeshifting vine
Boquila trifoliata is a climbing vine that mimics the appearance of plants around it. Scientists are trying to figure out the process behind this mimicry. Can this vine be sensitive to chemicals or even DNA collected from nearby plants? Surprisingly, experiments showed that the vine could also replicate plastic plants. Somehow, it can “see” its…
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Paragraphica
Paragraphica is a device developed by Bjørn Karmann. Resembling a photographic camera, it doesn’t have a lens. It’s a context-to-image camera: it gathers online data about its location and feeds it to an AI to create pictures. The most invisible lesson of this lens-less camera is not about artificial intelligence but about photography. We still…
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The designer as Crystal Goblet
In her most famous text, Beatrice Warde (1900 – 1969) wrote that typography should be like a crystal goblet: in order to enjoy the wine, the glass must be neutral and transparent. Warde published The Crystal Goblet in 1930. It is perhaps the most influential text written by a woman within the field of graphic…
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Alda Rosa, Designer
Alda Rosa was one of the great typographic designers of the heroic era of Portuguese design. Perhaps Sebastião Rodrigues is her only peer. By this, I mean that they made a design where typography was part of the whole—no more, no less than that. In other practitioners, like Vitor Palla, there was a strong sense…
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George Lois (1931 – 2022)
George Lois died two days ago. He was one of the most iconic art directors of the 20th century. His trademark was the elaborate photographic stagings he designed for the covers of Esquire. They looked like montages or collages, but, for the most part, they were scenes where the celebrities willingly participated. Mohammad Ali, a…
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Mr. Daciano’s new design
I am no longer the only design writer published by Orfeu Negro. Here, and only here, I came before Daciano Da Costa. I resisted the old Daciano da Costa books because I didn’t appreciate their design. It wasn’t just the fonts and composition that I disliked but the design of the object itself. So often,…
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Forget design?
«Forget Photography» has a clever cover for a book that is a great read.1 Andrew Dewdney believes that the paradigm of photography can no longer explain what he calls the networked image. Photography can’t account for its central role in constructing capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Dewdney proposes, in short, to forget photography. He does…
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The missing centennial.
W.A. Dwiggins first used the term graphic design in the text “New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design,” published in August 1922 in a special section of the Boston Evening Transcript devoted to the graphic arts. It was a hundred years ago this August. I waited in vain for the fireworks. As a discipline,…
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What about Ukraine?
It has been challenging for me to think about the implications of Ukraine’s war on graphic design. I haven’t read any texts or interventions on the subject. Before writing this post, I took a look at Aiga Eye on Design and Design Observer and found nothing. The same at Futuress. I don’t know if I…
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War pastimes
When the war in Ukraine began, I was playing Wordle every day. The violence of Russia’s unprovoked invasion threw me off that daily pastime. It was impossible to carry on as usual. I regularly argued with people who denied Russian war crimes or blamed them on Ukraine or Nato. My sister went twice to Ukraine…
Unseen by Design 