Many designs that appear in today’s society will circulate and encounter audiences of many different cultures and languages. With communication comes responsibility; are designers aware of the meaning and impact of their work? An image or symbol that is acceptable in one culture can be offensive or even harmful in the next. A typeface or colour in a design might appear to be neutral, but its meaning is always culturally dependent. If designers learn to be aware of global cultural contexts, we can avoid stereotyping and help improve mutual understanding between people. Politics of Design is a collection of visual examples from around the world. Using ideas from anthropology and sociology, it creates surprising and educational insight in contemporary visual communication. The examples relate to the daily practice of both online and offline visual communication: typography, images, colour, symbols, and information. Politics of Design shows the importance of visual literacy when communicating beyond borders and cultures. It explores the cultural meaning behind the symbols, maps, photography, typography, and colours that are used every day. It is a practical guide for design and communication professionals and students to create more effective and responsible visual communication.
Thinking with Type
The essential and bestselling guide to typography from beloved design educator Ellen Lupton—revised and expanded to include new and additional voices, examples, and principles, and a wider array of typefaces. "Thinking with Type is to typography what Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is to physics."—I Love TypographyThe bestselling Thinking with Type in a revised and expanded third edition: This is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication. Covering the essentials of typography, this book explores everything from typefaces and type families to kerning and tracking to grids and layout principles.Ellen Lupton provides clear and focused guidance on how letters, words, and paragraphs should be aligned, spaced, ordered, and shaped. Historical and contemporary examples of graphic design show how to learn the rules and how to break them. Critical essays, eye-opening diagrams, helpful exercises, and dozens of examples and illustrations show readers how to be inventive within systems that inform and communicate.Featuring 32 pages of new content, the third edition is revised and refined from cover to cover: More fonts: old fonts, new fonts, weird fonts, libre fonts, Google fonts, Adobe fonts, fonts from independent foundries, and fonts and lettering by women and BIPOC designersIntroductions to diverse writing systems, contributed by expert typographers from around the worldDemonstrations of basic design principles, such as visual balance, Gestalt grouping, and responsive layoutCurrent approaches to typeface design, including variable fonts and optical sizes; tips for readability, legibility, and accessibility; and stunning reproductions from the Letterform Archive Thinking with Type is the typography book for everyone: designers, writers, editors, students, anyone who works with words on page or screen, and enthusiasts of type and lettering. Readers will also love Ellen Lupton's book Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. Ellen Lupton is a designer, writer, and educator. She has written numerous books about graphic design, including Thinking with Type, Graphic Design Thinking, and Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. She teaches in the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA), where she proudly serves as the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair. She is Curator Emerita at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, where her exhibitions included Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus Master and The Senses: Design Beyond Vision. Lupton loves reading, writing, teaching, and learning new things about design.
Singapore Graphic Archives
A collection of graphic design and document visual cultures from Singapore.
Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form
Until now, digital arts have largely been understood to belong in traditional genres or forms of art: we are said to have electronic literature, net.art, or electronic, techno music. Sometimes interesting discussions have arisen concerning the very ontology of digital art, and questions such as whether net.art should be seen within the tradition of the visual arts or as a form of literature connecting it to the different traditions and questions regulating these arts.[1] While it is not my intent to disconnect digital art from traditional art, or to argue for the irrelevance of the traditional forms of art, I will in the following establish the interface as an aesthetic and critical framework for digital art.
Tipographia
Visual archive of graphic design, typography and things printed in Portugal. A collection by...
Cognitive Debt and ChatGPT
Maggie's digital garden filled with visual essays on programming, design, and anthropology
From cultures to aesthetics between Asian and Western UX design
Since I moved to Europe from Asia and used to work for European company from Asia. I feel like I have to discuss the topic of design aesthetics, cultural influences and user behaviours.
Art or tool?
The Internet spaces I tend to inhabit have more polarisation than at many other recent times, and little explication of the worldviews that lead to different premises for discussion, that in turn...
Read the Principles — Design Justice Network
Design mediates so much of our realities and has tremendous impact on our lives, yet very few of us participate in design processes. In particular, the people who are most adversely affected by design decisions — about visual culture, new technologies, the planning of our communities, or the structure of our political and economic systems — tend to have the least influence on those decisions and how they are made.
Static! Designing for energy Awareness
From the boost of the first cup of coffee in the morning to the glow of a nightlight that keeps a child company after dark, much of our contemporary lifestyles is powered by electricity. Today, however, the economic and environmental costs of energy require us to think again. While recognizing the complex social functions and cultural forms of electricity in everyday life, the current challenge for design is to change practices and patterns of (over)consumption. Static! explores design as a basis for increasing awareness of energy. Familiar furnishings and products have been reinterpreted to materialize electricity, to make it more visible and tangible for people. The resulting series of conceptual design examples express the poetics – and politics – of everyday electricity consumption. A design research project at the Interactive Institute funded by the Swedish Energy Agency, Static! has proved to be a pioneer in opening a current and critical research area at the intersection of design, energy and information technology. This book presents the Static! design examples and perspectives on issues in (sustainable) design today. Grounded in passion and humor, as well as rigor and research, the book asks designers and consumers – that is, all of us – to rethink the form, and future, of electricity in the world around us. Editor: Ramia Mazé. Authors: Christina Öhman, Sara Backlund, Johan Redström, Ramia Mazé, Sara Ilstedt Hjelm, Sara Routarinne.
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Knowledge Unlatched and the MIT Press Frank Urbanowski Memorial Fund.
The Future of Text
We are a community dedicated to working on how we can better develop text to augment our capabilities and we invite you to join us. We believe that the potential of richly interactive text to truly augment how we think & communicate is massive. Text after all, is externalized symbols we can interact with to extend our mind’s reach. Therefore text is not just a medium, it is also a tool for thought, and we are looking Beyond Visual Range.
Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds
"Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory by arguing for the creation of what he calls 'autonomous design'--a design practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth"--Publisher description
Inside Design Tokens: Modeling & Communication
Design system architecture with focus on design tokens, that form the vocabulary of your visual design language, helping to streamline the communication amongst stakeholders. Modeling the system with boundaries to ensure clear purpose and predictability for design tokens and stability guarantees wit
DeepSeek
Maggie's digital garden filled with visual essays on programming, design, and anthropology
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.