Author: Mário Moura
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Those crazy Victorian kids
I’m getting heaps of valuable perspective from Walter Crane’s autobiography. People complain about kids nowadays walking on the street not paying attention to anything but their phones. In the 1850s, teenage Crane walked to his apprenticeship while reading a laptop-size book.
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The Gutter and non-typographical design
This is my favorite spread from Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here comes the new photographer!), Werner Graff’s inventory of modernist photographic composition. The spread is a masterful example of using the book’s architecture — in this case, the gutter — to build the meaning of an image. It’s a prime example of non-typographic design,…
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The Violent Childhood of the Pioneers of Modern Design
While reading the childhood parts of Walter Crane’s autobiography, it’s impossible not to notice how much gunpowder was involved in an upper-class child’s upbringing during Victorian England. They were constantly blowing stuff up, playing with functioning toy cannons and rifles. William Morris’s biography tells of a student rebellion at Marlborough school in 1851 involving boys…
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Children’s photobooks
I found Amadou Alpiniste at a used bookshop half a decade ago. It’s such an uncanny object, a story about a little boy that climbs a mountain alone carrying a metal cross to honor his truck driver friend who died struck by a thunderbolt while mountain-climbing. It’s part of a series by photographer Suzi Pilet…
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Walter Crane
Illustration for Louise Michel’s International School by Walter Crane. At the time, he was one of the foremost graphic artists, wrote books about design, directed two of the oldest design courses at the Manchester Municipal School and Royal College of Art. He collaborated with William Morris, who converted him to socialism. I’m reading his biography…
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The end of The Believer
Like a bar that you used to love but haven’t been to in ages, Believer Magazine is going to close. A decade and a half ago, when I started writing in blogs, it was one of my favorite magazines. It was the early 2000s. Perhaps out of a need to contrast with the bright colors…
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Image in Spite of It All
This image haunts me since I learnt about its existence. It’s one of four images taken inside of a functioning nazi-camp by a Sonderkommando using a camera smuggled by the Polish resistance. It looks almost abstract but is nothing of the sort. It looks absent of all human and inhuman evidence except for the traces…
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In the beginning…
Four years ago, I was finishing the 8,000-word essay that would become the titular piece of my book “O Design Que o Design Não Vê.” It was my first systematic foray into the deep connection between design, race, class, and gender. I’ve meant to translate this essay for a long time. For now, I’m writing…
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A Brief Formalist History of Formalism in Design
A Brief Formalist History of Formalism in Design I started my studies in design by the time the first private TV channels began broadcasting in Portugal. Because of this, I got an overdose of designers bad-mouthing the logo of the new SIC TV channel, created in 1992 by Brazilian designer Hans Donner. If you happened to…
Unseen by Design 