A *New* Program for Graphic Design is a DIY textbook that synthesizes the pragmatic with the experimental to convey advanced graphic design principles in an understandable form for students of all levels as well as general readers. Rooted in three courses (Typography, Gestalt, and Interface) originally developed for liberal arts students at Princeton University, the book provides a broad introduction to graphic design and visual literacy, from Benjamin Franklin to Bruno Munari, Moholy-Nagy to Muriel Cooper and the Macintosh computer. Through a series of in-depth historical case studies and assignments that progressively build in complexity, the book serves as a practical guide ...

The education project Pink Triangle is a long term project initiated by the Education Department of Museo Reina Sofía in 2019 as a space of reflection and action regarding LGTBIQ+ activisms in school spaces. Through their experiences, perspectives and reflections, students, teachers and families contribute to this complex and necessary discussion. The project entailed 3 workshops, a video dialogue and the set of materials presented here. These didactic materials make up the vertices of a triangle of reflection and action around experiences and tools related to sexual and gender diversities that coexist in schools, which are, by their very nature, ...

Aesthetic Programming explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. It takes a particular interest in power relations that are relatively under-acknowledged in technical subjects, concerning class and capitalism, gender and sexuality, as well as race and the legacies of colonialism. This is not only related to the politics of representation but also nonrepresentation: ...

The purpose of this workbook is not to tell you how to write alt- text. There are many existing resources that provide guidelines and how-tos (you can find a few listed in the Tools section). Our primary intent is to put alt-text on your radar (if it wasn’t already), to get you thinking about it creatively, and to explore a few of the key questions that come up when translating images into text. We hope these exercises make clear that, like all accessibility practices, writing alt-text requires ongoing practice, learning, and collaboration. The needs and wants of blind and low vision people ...

Atlas Survival Shelters in Montebello was started by a man who makes luxury metal doors for Beverly Hills homes. After having difficulty finding a proper bomb shelter, he decided to build his own. Visiting Atlas, you only get a whiff of the Right Wing Prepper tendencies that seem to inform the place, like a magazine they make about bunkers with a cover showing an armed man surveying the landscape behind a stack of sandbags. On their website, hundreds of photographs show their corrugated metal shelters furnished in a midwestern style, complete with decorative oar, a painting of dogs playing poker, ...

Beyond the Threshold: Women, Houses and Cities offers a revised account of the history of architecture and urban planning through the contributions of the women who have been silenced in our general histories. Its frame of reference is the built environment, from design to politics, from architecture to urban planning – thus, the house and the city, the private and the public. The first as a metaphor for architecture and the second as a synthesis of people’s actions. Taking a feminist approach entails a necessary deconstruction of dominant historiography, revealing the false neutrality and universality found in the transmission of ...

Camouflage of Large Installations by Charles Stankievech is a rare World War II handbook created by the British Government as a guide for factory owners to implement the then new theories of camouflage in order to protect industrial assets. The handbook is composed of three sections: instructional, advertising by corporations supplying camouflage services and full-page colour swatches. The full-page color swatches are particularly beautiful and when viewed aesthetically are interesting forerunners to the history of monochromes, specifically Yves Klein’s first artwork Peintures (1954): a small portfolio booklet that presents a series of monochromes. Interestingly, Klein had never made these paintings and the ...

Information and tips on grassroots, mixed-ability accessibility organizing. For anyone who already knows “why” and is interested in learning “how?” Casco Art Institute envisions more just ways of living together through practicing art and fostering the commons. Through co-exploration and study with collective art projects, as well as organizational experiments, our projects grow from posing critical questions and practicing radical imagination – forming community and generating art and knowledge as common resources. This is not an exhaustive list on access and disability, nor is it a comprehensive manual (there are many more thorough ones out there!), but a summation of tips learned ...

In Dead Precedents, Roy Christopher traces the story of how hip-hop invented the twenty-first century. Emerging alongside cyberpunk in the 1980s, the hallmarks of hip-hop — allusion, self-reference, the use of new technologies, sampling, the cutting and splicing of language and sound — would come to define the culture of the new millennium. Taking in the ground-breaking work of DJs and MCs, alongside writers like Dick and Gibson, as well as graffiti and DIY culture, Dead Precedents is a counter-cultural history of the twenty-first century, showcasing hip-hop’s role in the creation of the world in which we now live.

In Design by Accident, Alexandra Midal declares the autonomy of design, in and on its own terms. This meticulously researched work proposes not only a counterhistory but a new historiography of design, shedding light on overlooked historical landmarks and figures while reevaluating the legacies of design’s established luminaries from the nineteenth century to the present. Midal rejects both linear narratives of progress and the long-held perception of design as a footnote to the histories of fine art and architecture. By weaving critical analysis of the canon of design history and theory together, with special attention to the writings of designers ...

Design Struggles critically assesses the ways in which the design field is involved in creating, perpetuating, promoting and reinforcing injustice and inequality in social, political, economic, cultural and ecological systems. This book shows how this entanglement arose from Eurocentric and neoliberal thinking. The voices and practices represented here propose to question and disrupt the discipline of design from within, by problematizing the very notions of design. They aim to do so by generating new, anti-racist, post-capitalist, queer-feminist, environmentally conscious and community-based ideas on how to transform design. In this way, Design Struggles strives to forge sustainable, new practices within the ...

“Digital publications are on the rise. In our daily lives we read more material than ever on electronic devices, while paper books – once everyday objects – are becoming collectible design objects. For publishers, visual designers and artists it can be difficult to keep up with these developments; few possess the knowledge and resources to develop a digital publishing practice of their own. For arts and design-oriented books, going electronic can be an extra challenge because form and content are deeply intertwined, while electronic book formats were not engineered with visual publications in mind. The Digital Publishing Toolkit initiative – a ...