Advice for filing taxes, plus planning for them year round
By Margaret Rhodes
With tax deadlines on the horizon, we’re shifting our attention — albeit, just slightly — away from type design and smart graphics, and towards money and the IRS. It’s been said that taxes are certain. What’s less certain is how to do them, especially if you’re a freelancer, small studio owner, or just so extremely right-brained you can’t tell a pay stub from a 1099.
Because of the Covid-19 outbreak, the IRS shifted this year’s tax deadline from April 15 to July 15. If you’re all set, you can still proceed with your return as if the…
Reality-bending AR lenses imagined by a new generation of designers are redefining our relationships with our digital selves
By Ritupriya Basu
In Ines Alpha’s world, everyday faces turn into futuristic landscapes. Through a mere swipe, the face filters imagined by the self-styled ‘3D makeup artist’ zaps us into a fantastical future, one where quivering, translucent fins sprout out of cheekbones, and curling lines of liquid metal sketch looping patterns on bare skin. “I’ve always been drawn to making reality seem more fantastic than it is,” says Alpha.
Moving past the earlier wave of dog faces and exaggerated physical features — doe eyes, plump lips — Alpha is part of a new generation of digital designers whose surreal creations…
A look back at the positive impact communication design can have in matters of life and death
By Lucienne Roberts
Whether employed to warn or impart information about symptoms, prevention, and infection, graphic design plays a significant role in the front-line response to infectious disease, making life-saving messages accessible to all. Examples of this can be seen in the bold graphics used to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and in the NGO campaigns during the 2014 and 2015 Ebola outbreak. …
Designers need a methodology that helps them weigh the benefits of using a new technology against its potential harm
By Caroline Sinders
AI is going to radically change society. It will do so in exciting and even life-saving ways, as we’ve seen in early projects that translate languages (in your own voice!), create assistant chat bots, make new works of art, and more accurately detect and analyze cancer.
But AI will also alter society in ways that are harmful, as evidenced by experiments in predictive policing technology that reinforce bias and disproportionately affect poor communities, as well as AI’s inability to recognize different skin tones. The potential of these biases to harm vulnerable populations creates an entirely new category…
The first generation of voice assistants are feminized and domestic — can designers help to make the next generation any different?
By Madeleine Morley
In an episode of the beloved animated 1960s sci-fi sitcom The Jetsons, Mrs. Jetson decides that housework is becoming too much for her to handle on her own. She doesn’t have time to run errands while balancing caretaking with frequent trips to the beauty salon, so she heads to “U Rent-a-Maid” and brings home a Rosie. Rosie is a metal tin on wheels donning a maid’s apron and feather duster that helps cook, organize, and entertain the kids. This robot maid is kind of helpful, but mostly it makes lovable and hilarious mistakes. …
Sanders’ logo is distinctly Americana, but is that enough to convince Americans to buy in?
By Hunter Schwarz
Bernie Sanders’ campaign logo is one of the defining visual representations of socialism for many Americans, but look a little closer, and it rejects some of the most well-known tropes of socialist design. The standout color of socialist images is red, while the Bernie wordmark is most often set in blue. The wavy lines in Sanders’ logo are reminiscent of a toothpaste brand, and they stand in stark contrast to the sharp angles and shapes seen often in socialist posters. While socialism is sometimes described by critics as un-American, Sanders’ logo is pure Americana.
‘Video game history doesn’t know how to make sense of her except to single her out’
By Perrin Drumm
YOU ARE IN THE FRONT YARD OF A LARGE ABANDONED VICTORIAN HOUSE. STONE STEPS LEAD UP TO A WIDE PORCH.
— — — — — ENTER COMMAND?
If you’re a computer programmer or digital designer over the age of 40, this is probably how the future began for you. Two simple sentences and a cursor, blinking like a heartbeat, waiting for your command. To anyone else, it might read more like the beginning of an odd and boring story, but the format will be familiar to all those who have ever dabbled in microcomputing. It was the…
With her interactive floppy disks and zines, the Silicon Alley star was ‘basically making websites offline’
By Claire Evans
Jaime Levy’s real name is not Jaime. She won’t tell me what her real name is, only that her parents named her after a Beatles song, and that she hates the Beatles — wishes they’d never existed — and so she’s Jaime, a nod to Van Halen, of all things, and the bionic woman, Jaime Sommers, her “idol” when she was just a punk kid growing up in the haze of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. Jaime Levy is, in all things, self-made. And when what she wants doesn’t exist, she makes that, too.
8 lessons from graphic props master, Annie Atkins
By Perrin Drumm
Just say her name and most graphic designers will inwardly ooh and ahh: Annie Atkins, that art department star of some of the most visually rich films and series made today (Joker, Bridge of Spies, Isle of Dogs, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, West Side Story). But she didn’t start there. Her film world roots stretch back to her school days, when she studied to be a director. It wasn’t until she discovered that she had more of an affinity for finessing a film’s minute details than say, working with actors and running a set…
Gráfica Ilustrada del Uruguay showcases rare work from the ’60s through the ’80s that mixed expressive illustration styles with polished design
By Emily Gosling
Put the word “design” in front of the name of some countries, and it becomes shorthand for a certain aesthetic. Scandinavian design evokes calm, sensible minimalism; Dutch design, a bold, often conceptual approach. Swiss design generally connotes tight grids and typographic rigor.
Uruguayan design may not have such a direct connotation, but as evidenced by the platform Gráfica Ilustrada del Uruguay (GIU), the country’s graphic design history is fascinating, and one worthy of study. The groundbreaking design and designers that have emerged from the South American country are less familiar than their U.S. and European counterparts, for…
AIGA Eye on Design
The best new work by the world's most exciting designers - and the issues they care about, from @AIGAdesign's Eye on Design.
