Category: Design
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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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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…
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Unseen Images
Some years ago, I was on a jury in a book design competition. I remember a beautiful photobook full of images, north sea landscapes, interspersed by indoor scenes, documents, crumpled letters, the texture of aerial photos. In the whole book, there were almost no words, no text, no typography. One of my colleagues complained, “Is…
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‘Trendy’ – a critical anatomy of the role of trends in graphic design
With some variations, it always goes like this: A designer notices a trend. Many of their colleagues use the same font, or align text a certain way, or employ similar illustrations or images. They get angry. The next step is to declare it a ‘trend’. They complain that nobody thinks about design anymore, “it’s all…