My latest article, “Entertainment Interrobang,” has been posted on Jarrett Fuller’s Scratching the Surface web site of podcast and publishing. The essay proposes that graphic design belongs in the genre of entertainment.
Tag: Design Criticism
Writing for the Design Mind
I receive a shout-out in the introduction to and have an essay serve as an example in Natalia Ilyin’s Writing for the Design Mind (Bloomsbury Visual Arts). The new book “offers clear, concise, and humorous writing tips, techniques and strategies to people who have spent their lives mastering design rather than learning to write.”
In her introduction, Ilyin writes, “I shall never understand why people assume that they should be able to write like Michael Bierut or Gail Anderson or Kenneth FitzGerald the first time they write anything. These well-known writers have practiced their writing for a long, long time. Their first efforts were probably stiff, wordy, and dull. But they kept practicing, kept going, and became wonderful writers.”
In the book’s seventh chapter, “Writing Is Argument,” my 2004 essay from Emigre #66, “I Come to Bury Graphic Design, Not To Praise It,” (published in Volume under its original title, “Professional Suicide,”) is used to demonstrate a “house diagram” that illustrates an article’s argument.
My thanks to Natalia for the mentions!
Total Armageddon
My essay “Singing the Surface” (which originally appeared in Print magazine and presented as a lecture in different venues) is included in the collection Total Armageddon: A Slanted Reader on Design, edited by Ian Lynam, and published by Slanted Publishers out of Germany.
In the Design Observer collection
My article “I Believe in Design,” originally published on the Design Observer blog, has been included in the new compendium of writings from the site Culture Is Not Always Popular: Fifteen Years of Design Observer. The book was edited by site co-founders Michael Bierut and Jessica Helfand and published by the MIT Press.