Branded London
London is the youngest city I have ever visited. São Paulo or Lagos may well have a younger population, but I haven’t been there for a while and those cities certainly couldn’t compete with London in a livability test. It certainly isn’t the birth rate that puts all those young people on the streets, into [...]
Building a Page
Judging a page by its layout is like judging a building by its facade. A lack of knowledge about architecture, construction or engineering will not prevent a user from feeling bad about a building. In both cases the user will notice if there is a discrepancy between inside and outside and feel cheated. Promises not [...]
Design With No Name
Las Vegas is a cartoon of itself, a standing joke, but without the slightest hint of irony, or self-distance. It is perhaps the most American of US cities, built evidence to the fact that bigger is better and that better is bigger. Nothing in Las Vegas started as an original idea, and nothing seems older [...]
Unlimited by Technology
When I ‘inherited’ my first small printing press (as I learnt much later, my father actually liberated the machine – as he called it – from a cellar where it had stood unused for decades) at the innocent age of 12, I knew nothing about design, let alone its specialist domain, typography. I took the press [...]
A Way Out of the Bauhaus
For more than 40 years my letterhead has consisted of a red bar at the top of the page, with my name reversed out of it. Some of my educated friends still feel they have to make remarks about that device, especially now that the Bauhaus celebrates its 90th birthday and Berlin is covered in [...]
Designers as Hunter-Gatherers
Retro-design, by definition, has always been around as one of many ‘styles’ of graphic and even product design. Yet I still don’t know what retro-design is, except for things that look as though they could have been designed a long time ago; in the last decade; during a specific period, or simply earlier. Times of [...]
Erik Spiekermann: Design and Education
Are designers coming out of school these days fit for the future? How good are our design schools? Do we train too many designers? Do we actually need to train them or should we educate them? These are the questions that come up at every round-table discussion about the state of design education – in [...]
Achtung! Erik Spiekermann
In prehistoric times, works of art were representations of things essential to survival: animals, weapons, fire and nature. Art started as cult; it was magic. Images of architecture have gone through a similar process: the more we look at buildings, the more their ‘exhibition value’, as Walter Benjamin called it, comes to the foreground and [...]
Achtung! Erik Spiekermann
We all know that a quick sketch can be both the beginning of a process or the end of it. It all depends on what you call ‘designing’. Does it only happen while actually working on paper or screen, or does a problem, a brief, or a project leach itself to the inside of your [...]
Achtung! Erik Spiekermann
In the Chinese calendar, 2009 is the Year of the Ox. Apparently, the ox is ‘a revered animal who symbolizes diligence, reliability, sincerity, strength, and sound judgement.’ They seem just the sort of traits we could have done with in 2008 which was, incidentally, the Year of the Rat. 2008 was also the International Year [...]
