This essay challenges a formalist definition of ‘systems’ in graphic design—often through fiction—and many dimensions of the discipline, from Instagram to competition.
In 2025, designers are data managers. Design bots work for and with marketing bots. Automation was looming in 2015 but designers were too busy funding nostalgia on kickstarter. Essay published on Eye Magazine.
Essay by Ahmed Ansari providing a critical survey of two terms that have been present in numerous conferences, books and toolkits related to social design: design methods and design thinking.
Article by Anne Bush investigating the current state of graphic design criticism, distorted conceptions of what it means to be critical, proposing alternative approaches.
Critical Everything was originally published on Grafik (2015), proposing critical challenges for designers and work operating under the terms critical and speculative graphic design and design fiction.
In this essay, Kenneth FitzGerald debates the seminal article Fuck Content (2005) by Michael Rock, challenging the fallacious idea that the history of graphic design is a history of form, not content.
In this essay, Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira argue that speculative and critical design are going through a troubled adolescence, alerting to their recurrent shortfalls but also highlighting their potential.
Brave New Alps introduce the research project Precarity Pilot, which seeks ways to organise a financially-sustainable, socially and politically-engaged design practice.
In this essay, Randy Nakamura debates the shift from genealogy to catalog in curating graphic design using the exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production (2011) as case-study.
This essay explores the concept of instant nostalgia in relation to graphic design by drawing parallels between popular culture and western and eastern design.
This essay, which serves as the editorial for Modes of Criticism 1, traces the heritage of the term ‘post-critical’ in graphic design discourse by connecting it to other related ‘posts’. Avoiding the Post-critical is preceded by the visual essay The Architecture of Gambling.
Review of the exhibition Freedom of Image – Visual Communication in Portugal (1974–86), held in several spaces in Porto, Portugal (2014). Originally published in Eye Magazine 89.
Review of the exhibition Staging the Message: The Open Work of Jan van Toorn (2014) at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Originally published on the Eye Magazine blog.
This article investigates the heritage of the term ‘critical graphic design’ by highlighting its precedents and manifestations in contemporary graphic design practice and education. Originally published on Design Obsever. Republished in The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury, 2015).
Review of the exhibition Almanac – An History of Portuguese Graphic Design in Magazines (2013) at the gallery Espaço Quadra in Matosinhos, Portugal. Originally published in Pli 5 (ESAD, 2014).
Review of the visual identity of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, titled Close, Closer. (2013), designed by the studio Zak Group, and curated by Beatrice Galilee.
This is the third iteration of an essay that first appeared in the German typography magazine Slanted 19. It is a contextual analysis and introduction to the issues at hand when considering cross-cultural discussions of graphic design between Asia and the Western World at present.
Review of the visual identity of the Whitney Museum of American Art designed by the Dutch design studio Experimental Jetset. Originally published on Design Observer.
This essay was originally published in a Spanish booklet about the work of the Dutch design studio Experimental Jetset, in 2010. It was written in response to the awkwardly-posed question “What to you is Experimental Jetset?”. I’ve been listening to shittier music lately.
Review of the main exhibition of the ‘Anti-design Festival’ (2010), curated by the designer Neville Brody. Originally published on the London Design Festival blog.
