When editor and consultant Casey Lewis started her newsletter digest on youth culture, After School, she instinctively gravitated towards pastel and iridescent-like backgrounds for her graphics. “To be honest, and I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this, I didn’t think about it too deeply!” she told me over email. “For me, holographics evoke a sort of tech-y nostalgia that takes me back to the early days of my interneting. Because After School is about youth culture, and because so much of youth culture today feels like a throwback to the ’90s and early-aughts, it just felt right.” The era, also ..read more

One afternoon last spring, I collected a bag of small stones from the dried out river in my local park. The next day, I took them with me to a lecture I was giving to graphic design second year students about my research. I began by introducing the following quote from artist Johanna Hedva’s talk ‘My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want it to Matter Politically’:  “I ask those of you who do not suffer from chronic illness, pain, injury, disability, or past trauma to take a rock and put it in your shoe. Please keep it there for the dura ..read more

Run by Richard Embray and Elinor Jansz, Four Corners Books is a London-based publishing house that seeks to bring art history to life. They explore unfamiliar histories of visual culture, sharing the stories that capture their own attention in order to grab ours. We caught up with the pair to find out what they think we should all be reading. “We both studied Art History at university and met there, but Four Corners started quite a few years later. It came out of a desire that we both had for a much broader, engaging approach to art history than we had experienced when we were being educated ..read more

Artwork. Advertisement. Encapsulation. Billboard. Brand.  A book cover is many things — and the best ones tend to be all things. In other words, no small feat for the designers tasked with creating covers that are at once alluring and effective. And yet as the winners of this year’s 50 Books | 50 Covers showcase and competition prove, 2021 was an utterly rich year for the medium.  Here, five winners from the competition break down their designs that broke through the noise of the bookshelf and beyond ..read more

Recently, the Illinois Department of National Resources asked branding studio Span to “rebrand” a fish.  The new miracle species that Span concocted (in collaboration with design consultancy Daylight) is called “Copi,” named for the “copious,” or abundance, that it promises Americans. Among Copi’s other defining traits, it is “environmentally-friendly,” locally-sourced, wild and responsibly caught. Plus, it’s fresh and mildly flavored, marrying “well with a range of seasonings.” Copi is a “clean, top-feeding” product that is “healthy,” high in Omega 3’s, 6’s, and protein. Copi is also sus ..read more

Joey Donatelli slides their glasses off and proudly holds them in front of the camera, as though bestowing an all-powerful gift. Donatelli is wearing a stone-washed Space Jam T-Shirt (the original 1996 version) and three metal chain necklaces, one of which looks like a dog collar. Their hair has faded teal tips and is slicked into a tapered faux hawk. And the finishing touch? Their everyday prescription glasses: thin, gold, and heart-shaped. Donatelli, who is 26 and identifies as queer and non-binary, is a graphic designer, make-up store associate, and owner of a popular TikTok account. The ac ..read more

I recently invented a skin-care oil that is guaranteed to make you look 20 years younger.  It is a revolutionary product but unfortunately, I have to test this skin oil on rabbits in order to make sure my experimental oils won’t burn people’s skin off or poison them. However, I am really hoping to sell this rabbit-tested oil as “ethical” — how could it not be in this day and age? I want it to be sold in tiny bottles at austerely-furnished boutique stores and I have hired an award-winning design agency to work on sustainable packaging but the product won’t be complete if I don’t get the ri ..read more

Long before higher education in art and design was within reach for me, and before my imagination stretched to even considering book design as something one could do for a living, I accidentally found a publication in the school library that absorbed me and still sits in my heart as one of the “magic” books of my life.  It was an artist book depicting a character called “Miss Universum” (Miss Universe), the alterego of Swedish pop and performance artist Catti Brandelius. With a name alluding to beauty contests where women are objectified and judged by their looks, Miss Universum is a prin ..read more

What do you do when you’ve secured your legacy as one of the great creative minds of the 20th century? You make children’s books, apparently. From Milton Glaser’s If Apples Had Teeth, Saul Bass’s Henri’s Walk to Paris and Paul Rand’s I Know a Lot of Things, to Bruno Munari’s Zoo, Dick Bruna’s Miffy and Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a number of prominent mid-century designers and illustrators turned their hand to books for kids as they sank into their own old age. Milton Glaser — creator of the iconic I Heart New York logo, the DC Comics logo and that 1966 Bob Dylan poster for CBS R ..read more

Name: Felfel Designer: Abdo Mohamed Foundry: Boharat Release Date: Initially 2021, but the font is still in progress Back Story: Independent type foundry Boharat Cairo was founded last year with the aim of introducing “new flavors to the Arabic design scene.” Its founder, type designer Abdo Mohamed, is currently based in Dubai, and releases a new typeface every quarter. This standout font, Felfel, takes inspiration from the “visual identity of the streets of Egypt,” according to its creator, who began work on the font in 2020 but continues to work on it from time to time, viewing the ..read more