Last June, Pentagram partner Natasha Jen gave a main-stage presentation to a rapt audience of 1,000 at Adobe’s 99U conference in New York City. Her talk was engaging, funny, and brought forth some heady thoughts on the design thinking process. If you haven’t seen the video, it’s definitely worth a watch. An engaging speaker, Jen heads up the teams at Pentagram responsible for clients ranging from the Guggenheim Museum/Foundation to Chanel. As just of example of her work, she

Last fall, the renowned design team of Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh published their treatise “Beauty” from Phaidon Books. Their premise is that beauty as a concept has been replaced by practicality. According to the authors, Bauhaus, the modernist creed of the grid, functionality, and analytical theory celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, has replaced aesthetics. As noted within, the term today is rarely mentioned in contemporary books on architecture and desig

John Gall has been creating award winning designs for over 25 years, first as art director at Grove/Atlantic, followed by a 14 year stint at Vintage/Anchor, imprints of Random House, where he was also a Vice President. He has designed covers for such authors as Dave Eggers, Haruki Murakami, and Vladimir Nabokov and his freelance clients have included Farrar, Straus and Giroux, The Criterion Collection, and Nonesuch Records. Today he is the Creative Director at Abrams Books. 1

By: Skot Carruth Everyone wants to be innovative, but few willingly work toward a culture of raw, risk-taking creativity. Slowly but surely, that’s changing at companies like GE, Turner, and Capital One. Capital One Labs is the self-professed “rogue” branch of the financial institution. Within its walls, employees led by design teachers and strategists construct user personas, conduct feedback sessions, and develop novel ways to service their customers. One of the toughest le

By: Steven Brower | March 6, 2018 The best of the best is what they are known for. Those groundbreaking designs indelibly linked with the designers themselves. But what happens when those designers step out of their comfort zone? Case in point, Alvin Lustig. Best known for his seminal book covers in the 1940s and 1950s for New Directions, he was also the creator of the opening credits for the classic cartoon “Mr. Magoo.” Having designed the UPA (United Productions of America)

HOW Design Live 2018 is happening in Boston. Will you be there? Register by Feb. 1 for the best price. Boss Baby, Captain Underpants, and Guillermo del Toro’s Trollhunters have the most immediate name recognition among six original animated series that DreamWorks and Netflix are producing this year. But also lined up is a show that’ll star three girls from 1950s-era Harvey Comics: Little Audrey, Little Lotta, and Little Dot. And of those three, the one to watch with the most

Designer/illustrator Mirko Ilić is a man with a mission. Currently he has curated two touring poster shows on the subjects of political dissent and social tolerance, featuring work from the international design community. He has been traveling extensively in support of both. The first is “The Design of Dissent,” created with Milton Glaser. Originally displayed in 2005 at School of Visual Arts in NYC, it was accompanied by coffee table book published by Rockport Publishers. Ea

Frank Miller is most known as the bold, masterfully skilled and innovative artist on DC and Marvel titles such as Batman and Daredevil, honing his considerable skills within the tight restrictions of these corporate cash-cow characters. In the 1986 release of The Dark Knight Returns—the first and most revolutionary and accomplished of his famed trilogy—is a major milestone in the history of the medium. (My personal fave within Miller’s oeuvre is the 1987 Electra Assassin, exq

Recently Seymour Chwast launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund his illustrated book, War on War: An Illustrated Timeline of 5000 Years of Conquests, Invasions, and Terrorist Attacks, a publication showcasing the culmination of his six-decades-long obsession with man’s 5,000 year history of self-destruction. Examples of Chwast’s conflict-related work go back as far as 1958, to the Push Pin Graphic no. 16, entitled “Peace and War.” Other items in the Push Pin Graphi

Humbly labeling his upbringing and early adult years as average, Brian Singer’s accomplishments as a designer are anything but. His transition from a shiftless teenager to an bold design leader started during his college years. Let’s dig into his transformative journey from average kid to a design brand manager at Pinterest: A Student with a Meandering, Brilliant Idea Singer enrolled in college rather unambitiously because it was always expected that he attend. Without a conc

What began as a routine graphic design exercise turned into metaphysical book cover designs that reflect on prevalent social issues. The six-person team at CINCO, a multidisciplinary design group in Buenos Aires, spent five months creating an abstract, thought-provoking multimedia project focusing on today’s social environment — including violence, domination, patriarchy and the role of women. The studio’s motivation for this creative thinking exercise stems from their desire

The 1920s were, by far, the most rip-roaring decade for graphic design. Art Deco was jazzing up the whole world. The folk in Russia turned Constructive, geometrically speaking. Western Europe dallied with the Surreal thing. And of course, Germany rocked the Bauhaus, but that’s not all it did: this country also had book jackets extremely well covered, as amply evidenced within the contents of The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic, just published. Sacco und Vanzetti. Berlin: Mo

Each year, AIGA selects a series of designers and visual artists to present with the AIGA Medal. A truly distinguished honor, the medal is awarded to individuals in recognition of their exceptional achievements, services or other contributions to the field of design and visual communication. “I think I’m very, very lucky. Without planning too much, I landed exactly on the job that I had to because of some design from above.” Paola Antonelli’s love for design is infectious. Sh

Maria Fabrizio’s book Cultivating Creativity is an enjoyable read that compares gardening with design. This book is more of a field guide to creative self-discovery that helps you consider when your best ideas are flowing, when you produce the best work and what routine will help you accomplish your goals. This guide is divided into three sections. The first, “Ritual,” explores the idea that a daily routine leads to efficiency and satisfaction. Part II, “Intentional Irrigatio

Robbie Conal, infamous street graphics rabble-rouser, was recently broadsided on his home turf by a sneak-attack art exhibition. It was meant to honor—and ridicule—him. And so it did, quite cleverly and often quite hilariously. The show was titled “Poster Roast.” It was curated by a couple of his students and held at the art gallery of West L.A. College on the occasion of his imminent departure from Los Angeles. The range of media and approaches was wide, wild and often irrev

True design leadership can be hard to come by, and as a creative professional, it can be even harder to rise to the level of a design leader yourself. Doing good work is not enough. You have to be influential, unafraid, ahead of the curve. You know who these real-life design leaders are. They’re the Paul Rands of the world, the Paula Schers. They’re the ones with the catchy aphorisms and the hard-hitting advice. When you hear them speak at conferences or AIGA events or TED Ta

Aaron Sowd and Trevor Goring have a lot to say about the art of narrative storytelling. Aaron’s worked on movie storyboarding and concepting for Steven Soderbergh and Michael Bay, comics for Marvel and DC, art for Apple and Netflix, designs for theme parks and video games, and illustrations for the New York Times and People Magazine. Trevor’s been doing film and TV concepts and boards for decades with directors such as Steven Spielberg, Bryan Singer, and Michel Gondry and on

By: Jinnie Compton | January 14, 2014 The Sex & Design Issue: This month, we take a tasteful look at everything from sex itself to sexuality. Plus, we draw attention to the artists and projects, such as the racy Secret Behavior magazine, that explore sex. We even sneak behind the black bars of censorship to understand why certain comics are so controversial. PURCHASE COPY or PDF | DOWNLOAD SINGLES | SUBSCRIBE (In Print or iPad Version) Cover by Rodrigo Corral. FEATURES Peepin

By: Jeshurun Webb | September 17, 2013 I have been fascinated with how designers self-identify and describe what they do both to clients and to the design community. There is something brave about stating “I am…” and brazenly filling in the rest, planting a flag, carving out a specific niche in our visual field with a new noun or adjective. So what is the graphic designer job description? The terms creatives are introducing into our lexicon to describe what they do are someti

Ed Fella’s AIGA Medalist profile sums him up succinctly: He’s “one of the most influential designers of the last quarter century.” And now he’s retiring. But having been friends since I first interviewed him for Emigre back in 1993, I figure that “retire” will be more like a change of treads, appropriate for a man who started up in Detroit with decades of auto industry servicing and other such commercial maintenance work. And after getting an overhaul and tune-up at the Cranb