Obituaries
The Editors
Remembering Hugh
 It is with great sorrow that we share the news that Hugh Weber—network theorist, design advocate, and one of our industry’s most evangelical believers in the power of design and community—has died.
Steven Heller
Peter Bradford, American Modern
 Steven Heller remembers Peter Bradford, American Modern.
Jessica Helfand
Remembering Ralph Caplan
 "If it were a religious denomination", Caplan once wrote, "design would be Unitarianism"
Lana Rigsby
Remembering Jack Summerford
 Lana Rigsby shares fond memories of the legendary Texas designer Jack Summerford.
Steven Heller
Robert Massin
 Steven Heller remembers Robert Massin.



Steven Heller
Dave King (RIP)
 Last January I thought I had received an email from a ghost.
Michael Bierut
Remembering Gordon
 Michael Bierut remembers the best teacher he ever had, Gordon Salchow.



Steven Heller
Thanks, Robert Grossman
 Bob’s death was unexpected. I felt kicked in the stomach when, on Friday morning, I read an email from his companion, Elaine Louie, announcing the tragic news.
Brian LaRossa
The Shape of a Design Mentorship
 Before the advent of writing, everything was taught through mentorship. How to chip a stone into an axe. How to build a shelter. How to love. How to lead. Mentorship is hardwired into our DNA.
Steven Heller
Memory of an Eclectic Modernist: Ivan Chermayeff
 Remembering Ivan Chermayeff, who died this past Saturday, December 2. He was 85.
Steven Heller
Nuclear Fear
 Remembering the late Robert Blakeley, designer of the fallout shelter symbol, and the nuclear fear of the 50’s.
Chris Pullman
Jack Stauffacher: Typographer, Scholar, Teacher, and Polymath
 Chris Pullman remembers AIGA Medalist and revered typographer Jack Stauffacher, who passed away a few days before his 97th birthday.
Sean Adams
Remembering Clive Piercy
 Without Clive the world will be a little less colorful.
Sean Adams
Margo Chase
 The design profession and all of us lost a treasure last weekend when Margo Chase died.
Sean Adams
Harris Lewine
 In the age of the art director Harris Lewine was without equal.
Steven Heller
Elaine Lustig Cohen, Pioneer
 Steven Heller remembers Elaine Lustig Cohen, passionate historian, avid collector, and design practitioner.
DJ Stout
Remembering Mike Hicks
 The embodiment of everything a great designer should be



DJ Stout
Jack Unruh
 The House on Fairmont
Jessica Helfand
Remembering Ruth Sackner
 An inveterate collector



Marvin Heiferman
Mary Ellen Mark, 1940–2015
 Remembering the noted photojournalist



Jessica Helfand
Howard Paine: 1929–2014
 Remembering Howard Paine, National Geographic art director and stamp designer extraordinaire



Steven Heller
A Memory of Mickey
 Steven Heller remembers Mildred Friedman, who passed away late Wednesday.
Elizabeth Guffey
Deborah Sussman: Los Angeles Design Pioneer
 Remebering her rise and influence as a woman working in the male-dominated world of postwar design.
Michael Bierut
Massimo Vignelli, 1931-2014
 A personal memory of the late designer Massimo Vignelli.
Alexandra Lange
Lucia Eames, 1930-2014
 An appreciation of Lucia Eames (1930-2014).
Alexandra Lange
Year of the Women
 A year-end wrap-up of my favorite stories. The common theme? Women and the making of design.
Rick Poynor
The Writings of William Drenttel
 Essays from the Design Observer archive show the wide scope of William Drenttel's interests and concerns.
The Editors
In Memory of William Drenttel


Rick Poynor
Martin Sharp: From Satire to Psychedelia
 The late Martin Sharp was a visual innovator whose work erased artificial distinctions between applied image-making and fine art.



Chris Pullman
Remembering Alvin Eisenman
 Alvin Eisenman received the AIGA Medal in October, 1991. Chris Pullman, a student in Eisenman's class of 1966 — and a member of the faculty ever since — gave these remarks at the event.
Phil Patton
Niels Diffrient: The Human Factor
 Phil Patton remembers Niels Diffrient. Photographs by Dorothy Kresz.
Alexandra Lange
Kicked A Building Lately?
 That question, the title of the 1976 collection of Ada Louise Huxtable’s work for the New York Times, embodies her approach to criticism.
Michael Bierut
Positively Michael Patrick Cronan
 Michael Bierut remembers the late Michael Cronan.
Jessica Helfand
Bill Moggridge 1943-2012
 Jessica Helfand remebers Bill Moggridge.



Observed
Hillman Curtis Celebration Benefit
 A Hillman Curtis celebration benefit has been organized by his friends and colleagues.
Debbie Millman
Hillman Curtis, 1961-2012
 “I met Hillman Curtis for the first time in February 2006 when I interviewed him for my radio show Design Matters.” Debbie Millman remembers her friend, Hillman Curtis.
Rick Poynor
Richard Hamilton, the Great Decipherer
 The artist Richard Hamilton, who died this week, was an acute observer of design and the contemporary world.
Rick Poynor
Paul Stiff, the Reader’s Champion
 For the late Paul Stiff, design educator, writer, editor and skeptic, typography must never neglect to serve the reader.



Gerry Shamray
Harvey and Me
 A remembrance of comic artist and graphic novelist Harvey Pekar by an illustrator who worked with him throughout his career, fellow Clevelander Gerry Shamray.



Julie Lasky
Protect Me from What I Want
 Photo in memory of Tobias Wong.



Owen Edwards
Irving Penn, 1917-2009
 Irving Penn, who died on October 7th at the age of 92, marks the end of the great age of glamour in magazines, a remarkable period when brilliant photographers who happened to make their livings in fashion and advertising were finally recognized for the artistry of their eyes.



Michael Bierut
Spoiler Alert! Or, Happy Father's Day
 Dad couldn't help it. He was a natural born spoiler.



Michael Bierut
The Four Lessons of Lou Dorfsman
 For over 40 years, Lou Dorfsman designed everything at CBS from its advertising to the paper cups in its cafeteria. Getting great work done in giant institution is supposed to be hard. How did he make it look easy?



Adam Harrison Levy
The Inventor of the Cowboy Shirt
A few years ago, I found myself lost inside a shopping mall with Jack A. Weil, better known as Jack A, the man who, in 1946, invented the snap-buttoned cowboy shirt.



Gong Szeto
Lehman's Bankruptcy Statement
 I'm just a designer, but it doesn't take a genius to read a bankruptcy statement. Take a look at the Lehman Brothers statement dated Sunday, September 14, 2008. Read the whole thing down to exhibit A and the list of creditors — this is an historical document.



Michael Bierut
David Foster Wallace, Branding Theorist, 1962-2008



Glen Cummings
Athos Bulcão, The Artist of Brasilia
 Athos Bulcão was a public artist, interior designer, muralist, furniture and graphic designer who collaborated with Oscar Niemeyer and others to define Brasilia — one of the 20th century’s most radical and controversially received urban experiments. Bulcão died on July 31 at the age of 90, and left behind an astonishing body of work.



Jessica Helfand
Reflections on The Ephemeral World, Part One: Ink
 An elegy to the makeready — those sheets of paper, re-fed into a press to get the ink balances up to speed, leaving a series of often random, palimpsest-like, multiple impressions on a single surface — in the digital age.



Michael Bierut
Rest in Peace, Herbert Muschamp
 Officially published for the first time as a posthumous tribute: a loving parody of the writing of the late, great architectural critic Herbert Muschamp.



Michael Bierut
Flat, Simple and Funny: The World of Charley Harper
 A tribute to the late designer Charley Harper, "the only wildlife artist who has never been compared to Audubon and never will be."



Peter Good
Remembering Sol Lewitt (1928-2007)
 I first met Sol Lewitt in 1986, when he and Carol and their young daughters moved to Chester, Connecticut, a small town on the Connecticut River where I have a graphic design studio. We met at an opening at the Chester Gallery...



Steven Heller
Silas H. Rhodes, Founder of SVA
 Silas H. Rhodes, chairman of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, died last Thursday at 91. He was a progressive educator who established a uniquely collaborative learning environment that delicately balanced creative independence with academic rigor.



John Corbett
Sun Ra, Street Priest and Father of D.I.Y. Jazz
 Before the 1950s, artist-owned record companies were unheard of, but Sun Ra pioneered the idea along with a couple of other musicians and composers. Sun Ra and Alton Abraham helped define the do-it-yourself ethic that came to be a central part of the American independent music industry, designing and in some cases manufacturing the covers themselves. In the process, they maintained a previously unimaginable degree of control over the look and content of their jazz releases.



Steven Heller
Martin Weber in the Third Dimension
 You may not have heard of Martin J. Weber, but he was a graphic artist, typographer, art director, and most important, inventor of various photographic techniques that gave two-dimensional surfaces the illusion of being reproduced in three dimensions.



Alissa Walker
War Is Over! If You Want It
 When the star of the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon is asked by a reporter what he thinks Nixon should do to end the Vietnam War, Lennon stares incredulously into the camera. "He should declare peace." As if this was the most obvious solution in the world.



Willis Regier
In Remembrance of Richard Eckersley
 Richard Eckersley died on April 16, having given the best years of his life to establishing the importance of high-quality book design for university presses. Here, a remembrance by Willis Regier, director of the University of Illinois Press.



Michael Bierut
Wilson Pickett, Design Theorist, 1942 - 2006
 Wilson Pickett's advice on hitmaking, "Harmonize, then customize," would make good advice for any designer.



Paula Scher
Remembering Henryk Tomaszewski



Jessica Helfand
Greer Allen: In Memoriam
 Designer, critic, pundit and historian, Greer Allen was Senior Critic in Graphic Design at Yale School of Art. He designed publications for The Houghton Library at Harvard, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and a number of other distinguished cultural institutions around the country. Greer Allen died last week after a short illness. He was 83.



Rick Poynor
Eduardo Paolozzi, 20th Century Image-Maker
 If a visual artist created more concentrated, exhilarating images of science, technology and the media realm during the mid-20th century than British artist Eduardo Paolozzi, then I would like to see them. Paolozzi, who died on 22 April aged 81, was first of all a sculptor, but the screenprints he produced in the 1960s rank as masterpieces of the medium.



Michael Bierut
The Best Artist in the World
 Alton Tobey, a little-known commercial illustrator, created a body of work in the early sixties that continues to inspire.



William Drenttel
In Remembrance of Susan Sontag
 In Remembrance of Susan Sontag: a designer's twenty-five years of interaction with the legandary writer.



Jessica Helfand
An Instrument of Sufficiently Lucid Cogitation
 The legendary French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died on Tuesday at his home in the South of France, always carried a sketchbook with him. Today's obituary in The New York Times alleges that he described drawing as meditative, while photography was intuitive: though certainly both activities might have been informed by a relentless need to observe and in a sense, preserve the world around him.



Michael Bierut
Rob Roy Kelly’s Old, Weird America
 The late educator and designer Rob Roy Kelly has had a lasting influence on the profession of graphic design, particularly through his landmark book "American Wood Type."



William Drenttel
Paul Rand: Bibliography as Biography
 This is bibliography as biography, and a posthumous testament to the considerable scope — and ongoing life — of one designer's mind. A Selected Bibliography of Books from the Collection of Paul Rand



Observed


At The Design Museum in London, a more "rainbow-hued version of the Barbie universe". 

Right-leaning public interest groups have filed a barrage of federal lawsuits intended to dismantle long-standing corporate and government programs that consider race in job placement. With an alleged goal of “complete race neutrality” (a view of radical equality that, for example, lawyers for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty think is “in line with the Declaration of Independence”) litigants are chippping away at the use of affirmative action across America.  

As we wind down Pride Month 2024, a look at how queer theory apples to urban design: as theory and practice grows more empathetic towards the needs of its diverse stakeholders, queer urban design brings a broad and holistic shift to understanding identity and community in publicly inhabited spaces, challenging traditional (and often rigid) methods of city planning by applying more inclusive criteria to reflect fluidity and interconnectedness. 

Longevity, by Design: Apple has published a 24-page document outlining its key principles for designing hardware that endures.

Manchester City released a brand-new club font to use on the player’s shirts. But instead of tapping the skills of renowned typeface firms who routinely work with sports teams and brands, the Premier League champions asked former Oasis rocker Noel Gallagher to submit a brief. So he did! And the crowd went wild.

Designer Vivienne Westwood’s personal wardrobe goes to auction.

The UK's Design Council has announced a plan to upskill one million designers for the green transition by 2030. Their report, A Blueprint for Renewal: Design and Technology Education, was published with a group of 20 design and education organizations. 

The Peabody-award nominated audio documentarians at Scene on Radio have just dropped CAPITALISM. A full season, a dozen or so episodes, exploring the world's dominant economic system -- how people shaped it over time and what to do about it now that more and more people see capitalism as the problem, not the solution. Produced by host/producer John Biewen with co-host Design Observer’s Ellen McGirt and story editor Loretta Williams, among other amazing collaborators.  The trailer is here; find it wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaking of AI, Kevin Bethune would like a word with Adobe. 

#Config2024: Figma announced a significant redesign, including new features and AI tools designed to help simplify the user experience. And, in case you were wondering, “All of the generative features we’re launching today are powered by third-party, out-of-the-box AI models and were not trained on private Figma files or customer data,” writes Kris Rasmussen, Figma’s CTO. 

Designed by PearsonLloyd for Teknion (a family-owned business with an environmental conscience and an international reach) Aarea is a chair that unites the concept of circularity and the simple reality of human needs: intuitive and ergonomic in use, it is made with a minimum of components and materials.

Old news: Apple rejected — “spurned,” actually —a proposal to integrate Meta’s AI chatbot with iOS “months ago,” says Bloomberg. Get a room already, gah.

It only touches the ground in six places: how to build a house that sits lightly on the land.

Graphic designer and artist Ming Hsun Yu is on a quest. “I explore human experience, metaphors and questions through graphic methods,” they say, “seeking possibilities within structures, fluidity between dualities, and constant joy.”

Forbes has accused Perplexity, an AI-powered search/chatbot startup, of stealing their content. The service describes itself as being able to provide “concise, real-time answers to user queries by pulling information from recent articles and indexing the web daily.” A new Wired investigation shows that it does that, in part, by surreptitiously scraping parts of the web that are deemed off-limits by operators. Wired also observed this: “[While Perplexity] is capable of accurately summarizing journalistic work with appropriate credit, it is also prone to bullshitting, in the technical sense of the word.”

Civil rights attorney and jazz pianist (!!) Bryan Stevenson has teamed up with jazz legend Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to release Freedom, Justice, and Hope, a live performance album of historic jazz records created to protest racial injustice. It’s streaming now.

The Vatican was forced to apologize “to those who were offended” after Pope Francis used a homophobic slur in a closed-door meeting. Then, two weeks later, he allegedly used the term again. While it deeply disappointed LGBTQ Catholics and their supporters who had been encouraged by his inclusive signals, attendees of this year’s Pride parade in Rome pointedly reclaimed the term and made the Pontiff the unexpected star.

Happy Pride: the new Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center is set to open. 

The annual design confab that is Config goes live June 26 and 27! Tune in online as acclaimed filmmaker, actor, and photographer Spike Jonze joins Ellen McGirt, editor-in-chief of Design Observer, as they explore the art of taking creative risks, facilitating unconventional collaboration, and navigating the future with AI. June 27th at 5:10pm Pacific Time; find the full agenda here.

De.fault is a recommendation engine built to reduce bias and broaden horizons. intentionally providing de-personalized information to enlarge our perspectives and counteract filter bubbles, ideological rigidity, social anxiety, and increasingly addictive and toxic content. Designed by Yoonbee Baek, De.fault is also the recipient of the 2024 Core77 Design Award for Best Speculative Design in the student category.

In stripping objects of all but their essential elements, the Shakers not only exposed the elegance inherent in even the most humble of items but also reinvented the concept of beauty itself. With its emphasis on durability, functionality, and timeless minimalism, Shaker design has had a profound effect on generations of artists, architects, and designers. (“Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live,” urged Shaker leader Ann Lee, “and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow. ) Now, they have their very own postage stamp.

At MIT on June 27—Designing With, Not For: a conversation between Richard Perez, founding director of the Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking at the University of Cape Town; Amy Smith, founding director of the MIT D-Lab; Surbhi Agrawal, 2022 MAD Design Fellow, urban planner, and data scientist at Sasaki; and Aditya Mehrotra, instructor of Mobiles for Development at MIT. This event is part of this year's Design Research Society (DRS) conference, on the theme of recovery, reflection, and reimagination.

Multi-Species Worlding is an experiment, for no more than twenty people, into the felt perspective of another species, in which participants will practice speaking as that species, and build shared worlds that serve all of life.  This workshop brings together multi-species artists, architects, researchers, storytellers, communicators, educators, entrepreneurs, designers, and anyone curious about co-creating worlds where all species thrive. 

Coming this fall, join a pivotal gathering of minds from Italy, Netherlands, Ireland, UK, China, Kenya, Germany, Denmark, Turkey, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Finland, Hong Kong, and the United States for Designing Nature and Humanity-Centered Future,  at ISMAT Portimão (in Portugal's Algarve) from 8 to 11 of October. Interested? You have until the end of July to submit an abstract.

“Must be buff, charged with the emblem of the State, a pine tree proper, in the center, and the North Star, a mullet of 5 points, in blue in the upper corner; the star to be equidistant from the hoist and the upper border of the flag, the distance from the 2 borders to the center of the star being equal to about 1/4 of the hoist, this distance and the size of the star being proportionate to the size of the flag .”  The State of Maine is seeking design ideas before voters in November determine whether to adopt a new, more distinctive flag.

Picture this: A photographer wins an AI Image competition with a real photo. "I wanted to show that nature can still beat the machine and that there is still merit in real work from real creatives," said Digital Artist Miles Astray before he was disqualified. 

The American artist Kehinde Wiley—whose work he describes as “shedding light on the inequities Black and Brown people face in our society,”—has been accused of sexual misconduct. Wiley has denied the charges, but two museums have canceled upcoming exhibitions of his work.

In tandem with this exhibition (on view through the end of January 2025),  a new, five-episode podcast—hosted by British design critic and author Alice Rawsthorn—traces the evolution of Gae Aulenti through the voices of friends, curators, and a range of international architects.

The Los Angeles Design Festival is looking for new board members.

The Obama Foundation is looking for a new VP of Communications.



Jobs | June 30