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 [...]
The Chronographical Survey #2: The Atlantic
My longest-running magazine subscription is for the Atlantic (Monthly), going back some 20+ years. I can’t recall exactly where I first encountered it, likely someone I was staying with or visiting frequently had a subscription. Though I was just out of art school, I ponied up for my own subscription when my borrowed access ended. [...]
