Design + Art

Tufting Has Become the “Designer’s Coloring Book”

Welcome back to Spotted, Eye on Design’s column that turns an eye on the styles and graphic trends you’re seeing…

Design + Art

Tufting Has Become the “Designer’s Coloring Book”

Why are designers so obsessed with making fluffy rugs?

Words by
Fletcher Rowe

Published on
April 12th, 2021

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…

Design History 101

Porto’s São João National Theater Offers a Lesson in Design as Public Service

The design process is always the result of a negotiation. Design for and from a theater is no exception, reaching…

Typography

Why Chromeo’s Juliet Records Commissioned Their Own Corporate Typeface

Dave 1 and P-Thugg of Chromeo, the guys behind Juliet Records, love typefaces so much they commissioned their own. Juliet…

Branding

Go Ahead and Judge Natural Wine by Its Label

You can spot a natural wine before you taste it: a hazy, jewel-toned color fills a clear bottle with a…

Graphic design

Graphic Designers Have Always Loved Minimalism. But At What Cost?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Company X announces a new logo with a buzzword-filled press release. We’ve…

Digital

A Design Archive That Gets Back to the Basics

A year into the pandemic, many of us are longing to do what once might have seemed mundane: leaf through…

Typography

Outward, A Dense Black Maze of Type Built to Document Adventures

Name: Outward Designer: Raoul Audouin Foundry: Velvetyne Release Date: March 2021 Back Story: When Amsterdam-raised graphic designer Raoul Audouin moved…

Graphic design

A Growing Resource List in Support of the AAPI Community

In the week following the tragic shootings in Atlanta, and in the months beforehand amid a wave of violent attacks…

Branding

Fast Food Franchises Repackage Indulgence With Fresh Branding

There’s a Burger King near my parent’s house in Newark, New Jersey with an oddly shaped drive-thru that positions cars…

Design + Education

Educator David Jon Walker on Transitioning Between Communities Without Losing a Sense of Self

David Jon Walker is an assistant professor of graphic design at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, as well…

Typography

Is It Art, or Is It Type? What We Learn When Language is Built, Not Written

One of my favorite pieces by the artist Shannon Ebner is ASTER/SK R/SK R/SK, a work that comprises four flickering…

Editors’ Picks

Design + Politics

The CIA Has Always Understood the Power of Graphic Design

To see the CIA launch a contemporary rebrand that has been likened to electronic music fliers or a generic tech…

Design History 101

The Life of Huang Hua Cheng, the Idiosyncratic Designer Who “Led Taiwan into the First Design Revolution”

In 1996 while on his hospital sickbed, Huang Hua Cheng was eagerly completing two final projects. The first was his…

Graphic design

What Leading Designers, Educators, and Writers Want to See in 2021

2020 was tough. Between a global pandemic, a divisive election, and rising racial tensions, it sometimes felt like the year…

Profiles

Prem Krishnamurthy on Design as a “Generous Discipline”

When I arrived to Berlin at the start of this year, Prem Krishnamurthy’s collaborative residency had just come to a…

Design + Education

What Does “Posthuman Design” Actually Mean?

Here’s my message for those of you who think the robot revolution isn’t going to change the design industry: think…

Design + Music

Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave

This story was originally published in the “Utopias” issue of Eye on Design magazine. Vaporwave is a thoroughly internet-birthed…

Happy Hour

Colorful Cans of Kombucha, Beer, and Hard (or Soft) Seltzers For Springtime Sipping

The days are getting longer, the ground drier. Picnic season is upon us, and perhaps more than any other spring,…

Graphic design

Designer, Educator + Publisher Kathleen Sleboda on Online Archives and Plural Narratives

Kathleen Sleboda’s work traverses disciplines, often involving acts of making, curating, collaborating, and documenting. Sleboda has been teaching at the…

Design + Money

In a Changing World, Design Studios Find Stability and Social Equity in the Co-op Model

This piece was originally published in 2019 in Eye on Design magazine’s “Worth” issue. It has been updated to reflect…

Typography

A Contemporary Ming-style Typeface That Shares an Aura of Ancient Chinese Letterforms

At the beginning of 2021, type designer and typographer Julius Hui launched a crowdfunding campaign for Ku Mincho, a Ming-style…

Digital

Is It Time to Move on From Big Tech’s Colorful Corporate Mascots?

In 2018, the musician and writer Claire L. Evans began cataloguing examples of an increasingly ubiquitous style of editorial illustration…

Graphic design

Publishing Will Not Be Another Victim of the Pandemic

Spurred by the economic crisis of the coronavirus pandemic and social upheaval of the Black Lives Matter movement, independent publishers…

Decolonizing Design

Design + Diversity

Collaboration, Cultural Nuance + Localism—A Conversation on Reshaping the Design Monolith

We’re republishing some of our favorite stories from the year that best encapsulate 2020. Happy reading! Sometimes the design scene…

Design + Education

Nontsikelelo Mutiti on Interrogating the Euro-centric Design Canon

Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a Zimbabwe-born interdisciplinary artist and educator who works across fine art, design, and social practice. Mutiti co-founded…

Op-ed

Why Can’t the U.S. Decolonize Its Design Education?

While diversity and inclusion might be ubiquitous terms in the mission statement of any progressive university, these words alone do…

Design + Diversity

Typography as a Radical Act in an Industry Ever-dominated by White Men

Letterforms are loaded cultural objects—they often reflect the people who made them and the story they want to tell. In…

Design + Diversity

Why Self-publishing is a “Decolonizing” Act in the Philippines

While its name suggests a grandiose collective occupying its own impressive brownstone office, in fact the Office of Culture and…

Design + Politics

What Does It Mean to Decolonize Design?

“Decolonization” is a word we’re increasingly hearing at design events, often being used interchangeably with “diversity.” It’s important to emphasize…

Design + Politics

“Decolonizing Means Many Things to Many People”—Four Practitioners Discuss Decolonizing Design

Last year, I wrote an article for Eye on Design that asked what decolonization means in the context of design.…

Design + Education

Creative Director and Teacher Forest Young on Designing a More Inclusive Future

Forest Young’s career has spanned an impressive range of disciplines and contexts. He was recently named Wolff Olins’s first Global…

Type Tuesday

Frere-Jones Type’s Magnet is a Typeface With Some Very Attractive Quirks

Name: Magnet Designer: Inga Plönnigs Foundry: Frere-Jones Type Release Date: January 2021 Back Story: Inga Plönnigs first showed her typeface-in-progress to Tobias…

Graphic design

How Can Designers Address Power Inequity? Start Small and Focus on the Local

For many designers, the past year’s near-constant social unrest has made the idea of addressing power inequity through design feel…

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Editors’ Picks

Decolonizing Design