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 are not only remapping our relationship with social media, but also changing our perception of identity and beauty. Their fantastical experiments hint at their radically different ideas about the scope of AR filters — while shifting the focus to notions of identity and self-expression, they’re simultaneously redefining beauty in both the digital and the physical realm. …

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. …

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 of human rights concerns. …

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. …

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.

Sanders’ branding attempts to introduce a new kind of visual vocabulary for democratic socialism, one that deviates from the popular image of what socialism is supposed to look like. It imbues his candidacy with a sense of familiarity and accessibility, and suggests his ideas are as American as it gets, despite detractors who say otherwise. “It’s important to remember Bernie Sanders at the time, first of all, was not as widely known a figure as he is now,” said Ben Ostrower, founder of the creative agency Wide Eye, who designed Sanders logo in 2014, before the senator announced he was running for president. Plus, Ostrower adds, “The label ‘democratic socialist’ wasn’t in the public vocabulary.” …

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 same way all text-based computer games started: a bare-bones setup and an invitation to venture forth, uncover the clues, and win the game. But it wasn’t just the text, flashing on the screen of an 8-bit Apple II that shot out like a siren call from the wild — it was the graphics. …

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.

As a graduate student at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in the early years of New York’s new media renaissance, she figured magazines would go electronic soon enough; in 1990, she started publishing her own interactive floppy disks, point-and-click magazines full of sound collages, rants, gig reviews, and games. The zines Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood made her famous in the emerging cyberculture, and when the web finally caught up, she adapted her DIY interaction design to online publishing, becoming creative director of Word.com, one of the first magazines to properly make use of the new medium’s affordances. Word was scene-altering: The first time the New York Times ran a feature on web browsers, it used Word as its example site, and even the Netscape browser had a button pointing straight to it (the button was labeled “What’s Cool?”). The site’s icon-rich design, heavy with streaming audio, experimental layouts, and interactive experiences, was so ahead of its time that it had a tendency to crash browsers. …

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, that she rerouted her career. …