DesignObserver
@DesignObserver
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Find us on Bluesky. The best conversations in design — expert-led, multidisciplinary, and for the curious mind.
New York, USA
Joined November 2008
When bad design isn’t a mistake, it’s the strategy. The “America by Design” initiative isn’t just a messy website. It redefines design itself, away from accessibility and toward exclusion, erasure, and control.
designobserver.com
The "America by Design" initiative, issued by the Trump administration, pushes a harmful narrative with questionable visuals
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"The Chinese New Year mandate is to clean house: not because guests are coming, but because you are supposed to enter the New Year unburdened by unresolved problems, unpaid bills, and unnecessary belongings..."
designobserver.com
I am a member of a typical Los Angeles turn-of-the-century multi-cultural family, so the concept of the New Year as we practice it stretches from its mere Gregorian beginning on January 1st through...
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“My studio table is piled high with cut paper, and I work with images as I find them. I am not one of those organized artists who can go to a file."
designobserver.com
The collages of Lou Beach
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Who doesn’t love a well-designed poster?
designobserver.com
Who doesn’t love a well-designed poster?
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An early American type monopoly, modern kerning wars, and a lingering cultural divide: a look at the long, intimate tension between graphic and type design—and why these bound disciplines still struggle to understand each other.
designobserver.com
A historical and cultural examination of the enduring tension between graphic and type design, tracing conflicts from early American publishing to today’s design industry.
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Design Observer reflects on a year of growth, creativity, and design’s expanding relevance. We also share a holiday gift guide of inspiring books.
designobserver.com
A year-end reflection on design’s evolving role—plus a thoughtful holiday gift guide featuring books to inspire curiosity, craft, and creative leadership.
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A photograph of a Tokyo dancehall in 1935 opens onto a forgotten moment of global modernism: Art Deco in Japan, shaped by women, consumer culture, and cross-cultural exchange. On the “modern girl” and the design ideas that traveled far.
designobserver.com
A review of Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920–1945, exploring global modernism, Art Deco, and the role of women in Japanese design.
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A designer reflects on family photo cards, faux modernity, and the quiet pressure to perform joy through templates, type, and seasonal taste.
designobserver.com
A personal essay on the evolution of Christmas cards, examining family photo traditions, design trends, and the uneasy meaning of “modern” holiday aesthetics.
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New on Design Observer: a look at the long, strange history of coloring our food for beauty, even when the dyes were toxic. From arsenic-green desserts to coal-tar butter, it’s a story about appetite, design, and risk.
designobserver.com
A history of prettifying food with poisonous dyes, and the science behind how powerfully the eye governs the tongue.
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Designers shaped the modern web. Now they have the chance to shape the foundation of AI. Openness is becoming the new creative advantage. New essay on Design Observer.
designobserver.com
What designers can learn from WordPress's open-source approach, and their role in shaping the next generation of AI
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What happens when a nation responds to school shootings not with policy, but with products? In an exclusive interview, the filmmakers behind HBO’s Thoughts & Prayers discuss the strange, chilling world of America’s active-shooter preparedness industry.
designobserver.com
HBO’s new documentary, helmed by two lauded photographers-turned-parents, excavates the $3B market born from America’s school shooting problem.
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What happens when a nation responds to school shootings not with policy, but with products? In an exclusive interview, the filmmakers behind HBO’s Thoughts & Prayers discuss the strange, chilling world of America’s active-shooter preparedness industry.
designobserver.com
HBO’s new documentary, helmed by two lauded photographers-turned-parents, excavates the $3B market born from America’s school shooting problem.
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Looking for inspiration? Give the gift of insight. Discover the best books for designing a better life. Explore our bookshop today!
bookshop.org
From vision to voice.
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In her first essay for Design Observer, Kim Devall argues that as the industry leans into automation, our real advantage is the human touch, craft, struggle, and the years it takes to build true taste.
designobserver.com
Creative director Kim Devall argues that in an era of automation, human craft, taste, and imperfection remain a brand’s most disruptive advantage.
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Behind the $90 billion souvenir industry are artisans whose work carries lineage, labor, and economic survival. Design Observer examines how so-called kitsch objects function as cultural endurance across shifting markets.
designobserver.com
From carved masks to clay birds, the global souvenir trade tells a deeper story of adaptation, resilience, and cultural survival.
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Souvenirs are a $90 billion industry, but for millions of artisans they are also livelihood and cultural continuity. A new essay on Design Observer explores how objects often dismissed as kitsch become acts of survival, adaptation, and global exchange.
designobserver.com
From carved masks to clay birds, the global souvenir trade tells a deeper story of adaptation, resilience, and cultural survival.
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In his latest essay for Design Observer, Lee Moreau draws a parallel between The Wizard of Oz and today’s AI era, exploring how power, isolation, and illusion shape our creative and moral choices as designers.
designobserver.com
Lee Moreau on AI, the loneliness of power, the danger of wizards, and the designer’s role in keeping hope alive.
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“Design is a practice of reckoning with the past as much as it is of designing for the future.” In the DB|BD season finale, Lee Moreau joins Ellen McGirt for a moving conversation about navigating uncertainty, rebuilding what’s been broken, and staying hopeful about what comes
designobserver.com
Designer and educator Lee Moreau joins Ellen McGirt on the season finale of The Design of Business to reflect on the past, present, and future of design — and how uncertainty can be a catalyst for...
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A nurse brings cake… and people die. Then things get really weird. Inside District Nurse, the lo-fi indie horror you need to see. Full conversation with the filmmakers.
designobserver.com
“It started as a simple idea — this nurse brings cake to weird people, and they die — and then it became something else entirely, this kind of dark, psychological, surreal journey.” I’m speaking via...
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Production designer Grace Yun on building fear, memory, and longing: from the unsettling domestic spaces of Hereditary to the quiet hauntings of Past Lives. Read the full conversation on Design Observer.
designobserver.com
Production designer Grace Yun discusses her work on Hereditary and Past Lives, revealing how she transforms everyday spaces into emotional landscapes that embody grief, memory, and the unseen forces...
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While we work to expand access to design for the next generation, we’re also helping today’s designers find their next role. Explore the Design Observer Job Board
designobserver.com
All roles on this page are posted by external companies. Applications are not processed by Design Observer.
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