Typography

Are Those Shapes Letters or Patterns? Letterform Variations Experiments With Both

At the end of last year, Nigel Cottier, Principal Designer of London-based graphic design studio Accept & Proceed, released Letterform…

Typography

Are Those Shapes Letters or Patterns? Letterform Variations Experiments With Both

Nigel Cottier’s endlessly variable design system bridges the gap between mechanical and organic form

Words by
Angela Riechers

Published on
January 25th, 2022

Design History 101

What Made Bob Gill So Brilliant?

In the vast, ever-expanding canon of graphic design publishing, one title stands in a league of its own. Forget All…

Branding

The ’80s Are Back, Baby

What are you seeing? Layered, type-driven design inspired by 1980s advertising is on the rise, and along with it, a…

Design + Education

Meet the Useful School, a Pay-What-You-Want Design School Subverting Conventional Education

The first email I received from Ritesh Gupta was at 4:30AM. This could mean one of two things—he’s one of…

Type Tuesday

A Typeface Designed to Help Rectify Underrepresentation, One Glyph at a Time

Name: Pangea Afrikan Designer: Christoph Koeberlin Distributor: Fontwerk Release Date: December 20, 2021 Back Story: In 2016, designer Christoph Koeberlin…

Op-ed

What the Think Pieces About “Corporate Memphis” Tell Us About the State of Illustration

For the last few years, it seemed a new article, Twitter thread, or video essay would pop up on the…

Type Tuesday

Fernhout, a Typeface Recreation That Plays With Blocks

Name: Fernhout Designers: Wim Crouwel, David Quay, and Stuart de Rozario in collaboration with Amsterdam design agency Thonik Foundry: The…

Magazines

The Fence Brings a New Look to the Staid World of Current Affairs Magazines

I first encountered The Fence in a small store stuffed with magazines of every variety. The corner of the first…

Books

Gustavo Piqueira’s Book Covers Show the Creativity (and Cost) of Constraints

Gustavo Piqueira will make you wholly rethink book design—and, well, books at large. After all, the enigmatic proprietor of Casa…

Poster Picks

5 Blaxploitation Posters That Define a Redefining Movement

In 1971, a film called Shaft—a breakthrough for Black cinema—was released. It was what Junius Griffin, then president of the…

Type Tuesday

Will it Go Round in Circles? Radius, a New Typeface, Says “Yes!”

Name: Radius Designer: Radek Łukasiewicz Foundry: Three Dots Type Release Date: 10/2021 Back Story: Setting type on curves presents today’s…

What Designers, Educators, and Writers Want to See in 2022

As another tough year ends and a new year begins, we wanted to look to the future with an optimism…

Editors’ Picks

Illustration

The Beauty and Violence of Ernst Haeckel’s Illustrations

If you’re a designer and a lover of nature, then you might have on your shelf one of the many…

Graphic design

How Cranbrook’s Design Program Redefined How We Make and Talk About Graphic Design

There’s a quote, perhaps apocryphal, from Massimo Vignelli that you’ll sometimes hear from alumni of Cranbrook Academy of Art’s design…

Typography

Traditional Elegance Meets Psychedelic Futurism in This Type Trend

What are you seeing? The ’90s are back. The 1890s, that is. Turn of the century inspired typefaces (we’re calling…

Design + Money

How Sanctuary Computer Uses Transparency to Make a Better Workplace

Hugh Francis has just over two months of payroll in the bank, and he doesn’t care who knows it. That’s…

Profiles

Neville Brody on Navigating Graphic Design’s Shifting Identity

Neville Brody is a journalist’s dream. He has a well-honed knack for wryly provocative, headline-ready takes on the design industry…

Design History 101

The Hidden History of Magic Eye, the Optical Illusion That Briefly Took Over the World

For a flash in the 1990s, Magic Eye, the world’s most famous—and infamously frustrating—optical illusion, was everywhere. Posters bearing the…

Illustration

Welcome to the Fanatical and Lucrative World of Baseball Card Design

Toward the end of my call with New York artist Blake Jamieson, I could hear the unmistakable rattling of a…

Graphic design

What Containers Reveal (and Conceal) About Design and Life

With the year drawing to a close, the EoD editors were curious about what personal revelations different creatives have experienced…

Happy Hour

These Products Are Proof of 2021’s Weird and Wacky Packaging Trends

Over the past few years, what’s unusual has become the norm in packaging design for consumer goods. Custom fonts, characters,…

Type Tuesday

Prélettres, an All-Ages Typeface Hailing From a Preschool Classroom

Name: Prélettres Designer: Éloïsa Pérez Distributor: Poem Release Date: November 2021 Back Story: What relationship exists between graphic design and…

Branding

Design + Money

How a Band of Design Misfits Brought Anti-aesthetics to Bloomberg Businessweek

There was a time, around 2013–2016, when the most experimental magazine in the world wasn’t some Berlin fashion zine that…

Branding

Why Does Every Beer Look So Cool Now?

On a recent weekend afternoon, I found myself in my neighborhood grocery store contemplating a wall of beer. This section…

Branding

Not Junk Food, Yet Not Health Food—“Healthyish” Is the Latest Trend in Snack Branding

In 2017, Bon Appetit launched a spinoff website, Healthyish, centered around an ethos that, in its words, “sums up the…

Branding

Joe Biden’s Branding Was Both Traditional and Trippy, and It Looks Like the Future of Politics

When Democrat Jon Ossoff’s U.S. Senate race in Georgia was forced into a runoff, his campaign changed up its social…

Branding

As Social Media Reshapes Branding, Retail Stores Become More Like Sponsored Content

In 2001, students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, under the direction of architect Rem Koolhaas, published The Harvard…

Branding

Personal Branding Just Got a Lot More Branded

“Cae Sal” started with a video. It was 2018, and Molly Baz’s husband had gifted her a pair of Nike…

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