To celebrate the opening of Nature by Design: Botanical Expressions (December 7, 2019-January 10, 2021), Object of the Day this week will feature objects from the exhibition. Sir Joseph Paxton’s name may sound familiar to architecture enthusiasts, as he was responsible for designing the famous Crystal Palace of 1851 in London. The construction, which housed...
Helen Hokinson, or “Hoky” as her friends called her, contributed nearly 1,800 cartoons and vignettes and 68 cover designs to The New Yorker in the first half of the 20th century. Her long-lasting association with the magazine began just a few months after it launched, when a drawing of a round, middle-aged woman standing on...
Elizabeth Broman discusses the 1920s trade catalogue The Master Silk Printer.
“The Battle of the Centuries” was a dish washing contest between Mrs. Drudge and Mrs. Modern, between hand washing vs. electric dishwashers at the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair. This contest promoted all the benefits of modern appliances and is part of the history of new and improved technology in the modern age. The Cooper Hewitt Library...
The cover of ReadyMade magazine’s 100 Project Manual, print-on-demand issue Readers of ReadyMade magazine were busy last fall submitting their DIY projects for the 100 contest in one of these categories: Home & Garden, Food & Entertaining, Design, Craft, Fashion & Style, Culture, Travel & Places, and Technology & Work. Judging started in mid-December, and...
This is the fifth in a series of posts about my new book, Designing Media Chris Anderson, November 2008 I interviewed Chris Anderson in the offices of Wired magazine in San Francisco. He had taken the job of Editor in Chief just before the crash in 2001, so he was faced with hard choices about...
This is the fourth in a series of posts about my new book, Designing Media James Truman, December 2008 I was lucky to be able to interview James Truman in Napa Valley, not so far away from my home base, where he was staying in a visitor’s cottage on the Francis Ford Coppola estate. He...
One of 31 video segments featured in 'Designing Media', the new book, DVD and website by Bill Moggridge. More info on 'Designing Medi'a available at http://www.designing-media.com Chris Anderson is confident that the magazine format is here to stay, as long as it makes the most of the unique attributes of magazine design, energetically pursuing luscious...
The magazine Make, featured in Design Life Now, bills itself as a “mook,” a hybrid between a book and a magazine. The smallish paperback size recalls Popular Mechanics from the 1950s. The publishers of Make are using the same format concept for their new magazine Craft:. Why the book format? Nostalgia aside, these bookish little...
Triennial honoree Natalie Jerimijenko is featured on the cover of the current issue of GOOD magazine, the hip new eco/business/culture journal. On GOOD’s web site, you can see a video of Jerimijenko at work in her new Environmental Health Clinic, a floating desk and research station built from recycled soda bottles. Jermijenko reports that you...
The makers of Make, the techie-geek D.I.Y. magazine featured in the Triennial, have a new publication out, now in its third issue, called Craft:. This hip and beautiful little zine got me thinking about the craft revolution, which has reinvigorated the lives of design professionals as well as the lives of a vast and passionate...
Viriginia Postrel has a piece on D.I.Y. design in the March/April issue of Print magazine. Postrel is a professional writer, not a designer, whose crossover book The Substance of Style helped convince people in business and cultural institutions that design has something to offer the economy. Her book was directed not at designers, but at...
Wow! Stephen Colbert just hosted Mark Frauenfelder, editor-in-chief of Make magazine. Check out the clip on designer David Albertson’s Web site. Congratulations to the team at Make (and thanks for keeping a sense of humor about design).
