Graphic design

A Snapshot of the Design Industry in Five Graphs

The design industry can feel like a black box, especially when it comes to finding a job and getting paid.…

Graphic design

A Snapshot of the Design Industry in Five Graphs

Answers to the money questions you don't want to ask

Words by
Liz Stinson

Published on
August 5th, 2021

Profiles

Michael Gericke on Maintaining Pentagram’s Rep, His Biggest Regrets + How He Nearly Became a “Ski Bum” Instead of a Designer

Michael Gericke’s storied career could be seen as the result of a combination of skill, enthusiasm, and a series of…

Type Tuesday

KyotoTW is a “Freak” of a Typeface Inspired by Typewriters + Retro Video Games

Name: KyotoTW Designer: Martin Aleith Foundry: PFA Typefaces Release Date: May 2021 Back Story: Berlin-based PFA Studios collective (former known as Pfadfinderei) recently…

AIGA Medalists

The Pioneering Career of Thomas Miller, Whose Work Shaped the Design Profession

Thomas H. E. Miller was among the pioneers of African American designers celebrated at the DuSable Museum of African American…

Happy Hour

Botanic Illustrations, Wine Byproducts, and a Normcore Canned Cocktail

Depending on the day, the past year and a half feels like it’s been either a long summer or a…

Type Tuesday

NaN Jaune, a Typeface Pairing Cheese with Antique Olive

Name: NaN Jaune Designer: Jérémy Landes Foundry: NaN.xyz Release Date: May 2021 Back Story: Back in 2016, NaN Jaune began as custom lettering for…

Graphic design

Many of the Design Community’s Gathering Places Shuttered During the Pandemic. What Did We Lose?

In April 2020, A/D/O—the design incubator-meets-community center-meets-café-meets-design shop—announced its impending closure ostensibly due to the pandemic. Since opening in 2017,…

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…

Typography

Cem Eskinazi on “Aggressive Serifs,” Psychedelic Shapes + Bringing Some Softness Back Into the Visual Landscape

On first sight, Mantar is a jovial typeface family. High-contrast, serif-forward, wide-faced, with details that seem to jump from letter…

“Where Are All The Black Designers?” A Roundtable Discussion

The day before Juneteenth was commemorated as a national holiday, recognizing for the first time, as a country, the day…

Digital

A New Generation of Designers Grapples With Social Media

Social media has changed the way creators and visual artists think about representing their work. For many, Instagram, Behance, and…

Editors’ Picks

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…

Graphic design

The People’s Graphic Design Archive Is Rethinking How We Talk About Design History

In July 2020, Briar Levit, a professor of graphic design at Portland State University, uploaded an early 20th century sign…

Design History 101

Revisiting Enzo Mari, the Design Maverick Who Left a Clear Message to Today’s Designers

Six years ago, back in 2014, I had the chance to sit down with Enzo Mari at his Milanese home.…

Profiles

Designer Rush Jackson on Making Work that Expands and Shapes the Black Cultural Lexicon

For Rush Jackson, the young artist and designer behind graphic design studio Onyx Self-Imaging, design’s value lies in its usefulness.…

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…

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…

Digital

How Do You Get Into Tech? Recent Graduates Talk About The Portfolios That Got Them Jobs

In August 2014, a month before I became chair of the graphic design program at California College of the Arts,…

Graphic design

There’s More Than One Way to Share Your Design Work

In an ocean of Squarespace sites and Behance portfolios, it can be easy to forget that there are limitless ways…

Community

Ask An Art Director: How Do I Land a Killer Assignment?

The first step to getting work is building an impressive portfolio. The second step is less obvious: pitching your portfolio,…

Ask a Design Educator

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…

Design + Education

Offshore Studio’s Isabel Seiffert on Her Teaching Practice + Merging Concept and Form

Isabel Seiffert is one-half of Offshore Studio, along with Christoph Miler, a design studio based in Zurich, Switzerland. Seiffert engages…

Design + Education

Designer + Educator J. Dakota Brown Is Untangling the Relationship Between Design and Labor

J. Dakota Brown studied graphic design at North Carolina State University and critical theory at the School of the Art…

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…

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 + Music

Tracing Afrofuturism Pioneer Sun Ra’s Record Designs, from Shoestring-budget Magic Marker to Gold Foil

In the latest of our Under the Covers series looking at records and their design, we looked at how how French…

Graphic design

Small Budgets, Tight Deadlines, Important Work

Throughout the last decade, the nonprofit and branding universes have intersected to the point where it’s no longer surprising to…

Typography

How Type Designers are Digitizing and Preserving Cyrillic Typefaces in Serbia

Air raid sirens echoed through the streets of Belgrade. Olivera Stojadinović was designing fonts. It was 1999, and the NATO-initiated…

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