Archived Posts by Dan Zedek
Type designer Matthew Carter receives MacArthur ‘genius’ fellowship
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
Type designer Matthew Carter has been named a MacArthur fellow for 2010. The $500,000 no-strings-attached grant, often referred to as the “genius award,” is given to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”
Name that logo, a quiz for design obsessives
Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Here are 26 distinctive letterforms and four well-known symbols from newspapers and magazines around the world. How many can you name? First correct answer receives a prize from the SND vault.
The envelope, please…
Friday, March 5th, 2010
Movie fronts are all about voice. Your challenge is to capture the tone of the movie, using color, scale, typography, and the same handout images that every other designer in the world is staring at. How do you use a flat page and your wits to capture a motion picture? Here’s how some newspapers played the Best Picture nominees when they first appeared.
iStock, therefore I am
Monday, March 1st, 2010
Stock art, once a synonym for lazy design and designers, seems to be everywhere, often used in smart and surprising ways. What explains the recent resurgence?
Haiti’s disaster: Regarding the pain of others
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Tell the truth. Bear witness. Explain. Connect. As visual journalists, these abstract ideas never seem more real than when we’re confronted with the unreality of a disaster on the scale of the earthquake in Haiti and its aftermath.
Finding some heroes of the “Zeros” coverage
Sunday, January 10th, 2010
End-of-the-year issues are a beloved institution in our business. Small wonder: they bring together two of our favorite things – lists and sweeping generalizations. So it’s a bit surprising that the end of the decade called variously the aughts and the uh-ohs has produced so few really special special issues. Let’s take a look.
