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. [...]
The Chronographic Survey #1: How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer
How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Allworth Press, 2007
How acquired: Purchased at Debbie Millman lecture
This collection of interviews presents 20 noted graphic design-related figures ruminating about their activity. In her introduction, Debbie Millman disclaims the book’s title but it’s fairly descriptive, being instructive by example rather than [...]
Do Not Read Me I Am Boring
On Stefan Sagmeister’s Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far
The arguments these artists mount to the detraction of beauty come down to a single gripe: Beauty sells, and although their complaints usually are couched in the language of academic radicalism, they do not differ greatly from my grandmother’s haut bourgeois prejudices against people [...]
