Observed

The number 23 has a long history of being considered a special or significant number. It has been the subject of numerous books, movies, and other works of popular culture, and has been [...]

Colors play a significant role in our daily lives and can evoke strong emotions and associations. These associations are often culturally ingrained, and certain colors are often closely [...]

One of the advantages of being a professional designer for many years is that I’ve seen a lot of changes to the field over time. Some good—I haven’t had to wax a galley of phototype for a layout [...]

A recent draft executive order by the Trump administration called “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” favors neoclassical designs for future federally-funded buildings, setting [...]

Is that font you’re about to use conservative? Is it liberal? What does it tell others about you, your business, your political affiliation? It’s a lot to consider. True, fonts are [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately extolling the virtues of storytelling in marketing. Generally, these articles tend to revolve around a brand using stories as a motivational tool [...]

The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, aside from being trusted news sources, share a common design element—the mastheads use a similar type style. Why?A [...]

Studio 23 has taken a turn inward and created a set of watch faces for ourselves to test our design skills at a minimalist format. We chose the Amazfit Bip as a platform which is an inexpensive [...]

The Cleveland Indians announced that they were retiring their mascot, Chief Wahoo, after the 2018 season. The mascot had come under increasing criticism for being a racist depiction of Native [...]

The map–territory relation describes the relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Polish-American [...]

The fiscal year 2019 budget proposal was recently released by the Trump administration and I was surprised by how much the cover reveals about the contents and its focus. The overall design of [...]

 A beautiful infographic dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code. This was produced for Australian TV program HungryBeast on [...]

‘I’m very jealous of young designers starting out now—on the one hand,’ explains the graphic designer Wim Crouwel. ‘On the other hand, it’s becoming more difficult [...]

A fantastic video about the first 100 years of IBM. This really gave me a new appreciation for the work they have done, are doing, and will do. I can’t wait to see what they accomplish in the [...]

I always wanted to visit a pencil factory and watch the process unfold. But until that happens, I can watch this video that demonstrates the process from start to finish. The best part is the [...]

On April 13, 2011, AIGA brought designers and design enthusiasts together for One Day for Design—an open, global dialogue on the meaning and future of design, and on the meaning and future of [...]

I’ve recently been spending way too much time over on the History of the Book Flickr set, a collection of some 20,000 photos of initials, ornaments, and type from Royal Library, The Hague, [...]

What if an advertising company had to throw a birthday party for an 8 year old girl? John St. shows us. After working in an ad firm, I can attest that the ridiculousness is incredibly on point. [...]

Very cool time-lapse short in New York City by Josh Owens with the soundtrack “down to the cellar” by Dredg. [via Vimeo]

We here at Disfluency.com love a good Web app and we love the simplicity of this weather app at wthr.in. Aside from the obvious step of visiting the web page, Wthr.in is a very simple tool that [...]

Some fun winners of Core77.com’s cardboard Christmas competition. Submitters were asked to created Christmas decorations using only cardboard and visitors to the Core77 site were asked to vote on [...]

Woah, these are seriously awesome. Jeff Nishinaka is a Los Angeles native paper sculptor who cuts, folds and shapes paper in the least intrusive way to maintain the feel and integrity of paper in [...]

Subaru has a cool advertising campaign called Mediocrity. They’ve created a fake car called the 2011 Mediocrity, complete with faux ad campaign and complete website. The video above is the [...]

I don’t know what possessed Henry O. Studley to build  this case to hold 300 mostly piano-making tools but I have to hand it to the man for his ingenuity and craftsmanship. Had he lived 150 years [...]

Everyone knows that the census takes in an extraordinary amount of information about the U.S. population but, once collected, how do you display it usefully? The New York Times created a series [...]

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 [...]

Australia-based designer John Leung has collaborated with Melbourne’s Clarke Hopkins Clarke Architects to create the Magic Carp-Pet rug and coffee table set. Look through the slatted coffee [...]

With the success of Helvetica: The Movie, and the forthcoming Herbert Matter movie, it would seem natural that someone would create a film about the rise and fall of Linotype. For those who [...]

The blogosphere is buzzing about Facebook’s proposed messaging system. But is it DOA or the future of online communications? History is littered with solutions to problems we never knew we [...]

Speech disfluencies are any of various breaks, irregularities, or utterances that are often not consistent with any specific grammatical construction and occur within the flow of otherwise fluent [...]