I am fascinated by the objects of design that impact us every day in one way or another, and I have devoted the better part of my professional life to exploring, analyzing, documenting, and writing about the graphics that shape our lives or some part of them (see yesterday’s Nightly Daily Heller). Print magazine has invited me to talk about this for its June 27 streaming webinar, where I will address, among other topics, how I was influenced by pop culture—at least what was current in the 1960s—and how, as a kid, I collected things, lots of things. I still have, for instance, a few boxes of U.S. Astronaut ephemera from the Mercury and Apollo Space programs. I wrote letters every week, requesting photos, pamphlets, anything the press office would spare . . .
My Bat Cave, the epicenter of my design narrative.
But don’t worry, this webinar is not about my adolescent hoarding; rather, it’s about how I stumbled into being a chronicler of design history, and how these chronicles turned into magazine articles and books. For those of you who aspire to write history or criticism or observation about the design field, this talk might be of interest. For others, I guarantee there will be some great images, and a joke or two, too.
.Register now for Steven Heller’s DesignCast, “Researching Design History: From a Personal Perspective,” streaming live at 2 p.m. EST on Wednesday, June 27.