One of the below-the-fold front page stories of the July 22 Wall Street Journal told the tale of the increasing popularity of the Booty Pop. For some reason, this information was passed along to my two kids before departing on a drive from Brooklyn to Massachusetts. Along the way, the game became creating rhyming variations [...]
I Proclaim You Cultish
For Eye magazine’s summer 2009 “Agenda” section, Steven Heller produced another cult alert. By titling the piece “Cult of the Squiggly,” he obviously meant to invoke his earlier, infamous “Cult of the Ugly” essay. It’s a fair reference: both articles decry and advocate suppression of anti-Modern graphic design phenomena Heller deems disadvantageous to the field. [...]
Authenticity is a Groove
Years ago, I worked at a national historic site on Boston’s Freedom Trail. A frequent question of visitors was “How much of the building is original?” I knew what they meant by the question but sometimes I felt waggish (or was a smarmy asshole, depending upon your point of view) and would answer that it [...]
The Chronographical Survey #3: Four Minutes to Midnight, Issue 10
Projects like the visual/literary journal Four Minutes to Midnight (23:56 from now on) evoke Steve Baker’s “A Poetics of Graphic Design?” The 1994 article—which appeared in the Andrew Blauvelt-edited New Perspectives: Critical Histories of Graphic Design—is one of the most intriguing essays written about graphic design criticism. It proposed a unique method of representing design [...]
