Nostalgia Politics and the Fear of the New
A recent draft executive order by the Trump administration called “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” favors neoclassical designs for future federally-funded buildings, setting the style inspired by Greek and Roman architecture as the established ideal, discouraging modern design. This isn’t the first time a government has sought to impose an architectural style for new buildings […]
Creativity Lost
Where did all the typographers go? Not graphic designers with typographic skills, but people who made their living as pure typographers who were responsible for setting cold metal, hot metal, and eventually phototype using machines and techniques that, mostly, are lost to the dustbin of time. Before the rise of the personal computer and the […]
Views of 2011 from 1931
1931 was a long time ago, and few who live today can claim to remember it all too well. Just two years after the stock market crash of 1929, 1931 claimed Herbert Hoover as the President of the United States (which that year had 48 states). Movie monsters were the rage; Bela Lugosi starred in […]