Even if the Hungarian born Stefan Lorant (1001-1097) did not, as he claims, invent the modern photo-journalistic essay, he was certainly in the vanguard when during the late 1920s, as editor of the German publications Bilder Courier and Munchner Illustrierte Presse, he produced more picture stories than any other newspaper. A self-taught photographer, writer and [...]

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This advertisement speaks for itself. Indeed a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

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Over thirty years ago, as an art director at the New York Times, I ran a two part comic strip by Art Spiegelman on the OpEd page. The only way to get comics - ostensibly taboo at that time - onto the page was not to have any words. So Spiegelman's strip was a wordless [...]

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The park in the title of this post is Gramercy. And I'm not actually "in" the park, since it is restricted to residents who have keys. But I am right outside the park. Also, it is not exactly Saturday, but rather Tuesday and Wednesday (but today is Saturday and the play on "Sunday in the [...]

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I am a closet paper clip collector. I keep my desk (and closet) stocked with a smorgasbord of all kinds (except plastic) from England, Germany, France, Italy, the USA and Japan (where the best are made). But I don't go advertising my "hobby." Some things, like paper clip collecting, are best kept to oneself (especially [...]

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150 years ago, on April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter, a Federal fort in Charleston Harbor, Charleston, SC. The garrison surrendered 34 hours later, marking the first Union defeat in what would become a bloody four year Civil War. Back in 1961 Bradbury Thompson (1911?1995), designer of the storied paper promotion [...]

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EXIT-Deutschland has caused a stir among the extreme right with a Trojan shirt. The organization had T-shirts distributed at the right-wing ‘Rock for Germany’ festival in Gera on August 6th. The subversive intelligence of the shirts was only revealed in the privacy of the owners’ homes. This in from Deutsche Welle (the German news service): [...]

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I was rummaging through old files prior to donating them to the School of Visual Arts' The Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives, when I stumbled upon a folder called "eccentrics." The sole contents was a sheath of correspondence to me from Ray Johnson (1927?1995). He was a collagist and leading correspondence artist involved [...]

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Boston's new bike sharing service New Balance Hubway is handsomely but not efficiently designed. Can you tell how much the daily rate is? The typographic hierarchy forces the reader to conclude that $5 is the day rate for "casual" use. The plus (+) is not obvious enough to connect the left to right pricing box. [...]

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*I'm being ironic, sardonic and acerbic. There are no reasons to love tobacco, but there are reasons to study the ephemera of tobacco marketing. Understanding how an industry that caters to and perpetuates ill health on so many levels can be so successful for so many years demands attention. Before the cigarette package and the [...]

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