From magazines and newspapers to books and album covers, German art director Willy Fleckhaus (1925-1983) may have been the best editorial designer of all time. He's certainly been the source of admiration and inspiration throughout my career. Fleckhaus’s striking designs are energized by his expert use of the grid, his superb manipulation of white space, and his dynamic typographic compositions. To preserve and celebrate Fleckhaus' work, designer and author Carsten Wolff created the excellent online archive and forum "Fleckhaus Now," and I was honored to be asked to contribute the inaugural essay to the section called "Voices." Check it our here.

One of my all-time favorite design books, Dorfsman & CBS is a superlative education in typography and the handling of two-dimensional space. Lou Dorfsman worked at CBS for forty years in the mid-20th century, functioning as their creative director before the term even existed. He developed an entire visual language for the network, and used it to design everything from the cups in the CBS cafeteria to on-air motion graphics, signage systems for their Manhattan headquarters, and a dazzling book to commemorate the first moon landing.
(Pictured is Herb Lubalin with a portion of the spectacular typography mural he created for the CBS cafeteria.)

Fred Troller was a distinguished American graphic designer and educator who emigrated to the USA from Switzerland. He's well known for his book cover designs (among other triumphs) and this mathematics textbook cover was a concept he designed that was never produced.

After a decades-long career of highs and lows, Frank Lloyd Wright became America’s most famous architect in the 1950s. He was the first “starchitect” in American history – landing on the cover of Time Magazine and featured, somehow, on the TV game show “To Tell the Truth.”

In addition to creating dozens of iconic structures like the Price Tower in Oklahoma and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Wright found time to design a line of furniture for the Heritage Henredon company. One of those designs, a coffee table and six matching stools, is pictured here.

In late May of 2019, the US Postal Service is issuing a group of stamps honoring the work of the late American abstract painter Ellsworth Kelly.

The new stamps, elegantly designed by art director Derry Noyes, feature ten of Kelly’s artworks, including “Yellow White” (1961), “Colors for a Large Wall” (1951), and “Blue Red Rocker” (1963).

The Ellsworth Kelly stamps are being issued as Forever stamps and will always be equal in value to the current First-Class Mail 1-ounce price.

A few years ago, the government contractor SAIC asked me to develop some design concepts to help them celebrate and promote their 35th anniversary. SAIC is an engineering and technology firm that’s all about innovation: developing solutions to improve the future. So an unusual problem presented itself: how do you visualize yesterday and tomorrow in one image?

Hitchcock/Truffaut is a 1966 book based on a historic series of interviews between two cinematic legends: François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock. For this marathon interview, Truffaut flew from Paris to Los Angeles in 1962, where the two directors spent an entire week sequestered in a room at Universal Studios, talking extensively about Hitchcock’s movies and filmmaking in general.

The Jonas Salk Institute was on my must-see list for years, and I finally made it there! About 20 minutes north of San Diego, the Salk Institute is open for public architecture tours by appointment and a small admission fee is charged. And it’s well worth a trip to see this in person.

Perched on the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, California, Louis Kahn's architecture is a kind of spiritual minimalism that is unlike any other place.

Some of the 20th Century’s most beautiful electronics and household appliances were shaped by Dieter Rams’ belief in functionality and timelessness. This was a marked contrast with the more common “planned obsolescence” design strategy that applied fashionable trends to manufactured products that are then considered dated and out of style in a few years’ time.

One of Tom Carnase’s most elegant and refined typeface designs was ITC Didi, which was based on the Didone typefaces of the late 17th century. Carnase added elements of English Modern type designs, such as flared bracketing and exaggerated ball terminals, along with a higher x-height that made Didi excel in display sizes.  ITC Didi was released in the early 1970s and began appearing, among other places,  in noteworthy work from Lubalin’s studio and by Massimo Vignelli. 

How does one begin to describe the importance or the brilliance of the Vignelli Canon? Maybe by first establishing that it is the best instructional book about graphic design ever conceived — it is a perfectly reasoned and articulated manifesto on Modernist thinking.

The book’s minimalist design underscores its main theme: distilling information into its simplest form results in the most powerful communication.

Some of the most beautiful rooms in DC are libraries. This striking space in the National Gallery of Art houses an extensive collection of art and design research materials. But as impressive as this space is, most Washingtonians have never seen it in person, because it’s off the beaten path and requires an appointment for the first visit.If I.M. Pei's goal was to create a room of contemplative serenity, he definitely nailed it. The chairs are by Mies van der Rohe, the minimalist tables are custom Pei designs, and the sculpture in the room's center, more than 17 feet tall, is by Harry Bertoia.