In ‘Poundtastic bombastic’ Eye’s latest Web-only Critique, Rick Poynor wonders whether it’s time for Poundland to ditch its ‘proletarian design’. More »

A few months ago, writes Rick Poynor, I was asked by the Design Museum to write a chapter on graphic design for a book entitled Design in Britain (Conran Octopus, October 2009). Wish I’d had the chance, while I was working on it, to see the posters commissioned by the London Design Festival’s founder, John Sorrell, and Pentagram’s Domenic Lippa for the festival in September 2009. More »

Go to the Eye website for Rick Poynor’s Critique about Mono-Kultur, More »

Ed Ruscha is the designer’s painter, bar none, writes Rick Poynor. He studied graphic design and typography alongside fine art, winning More »

If a book like The Photographer already exists (cover pictured above), I have certainly never seen it, writes Rick Poynor. This three-way collaboration between the late French photographer Didier Lefèvre, graphic novelist Emmanuel Guibert and graphic designer Frédéric Lemercier is a breathtakingly More »

In Australia, Rick Poynor plays ‘hotel inspector’ to explore a bookshop that understands its books and readers: Sydney’s Published Art.

After a morning chatting to two colleagues More »

Critique, written exclusively for eyemagazine.com and blog.eyemagazine.com

This column has never addressed the subject of T-shirts, but we make an exception with the arrival of the Graphic Design Heroes series designed by GenPrag, alias graphic design professor Paul Nini of Ohio State University. Graphic design heroes? Is it really still permissible to use such an unreconstructed phrase in graphic design education? The approved line of thinking – for about twenty years now – has been to question the lamentable influence of the idea of the ‘design genius’ on impressionable students, More »

This American blog-mag reminds us that obituaries are about lives lived.

At a certain point in your life, you find yourself drawn to obituaries, writes Rick Poynor. Your own departure, once so far away and impossible seeming, is now a racing certainty. You are more than half way through and people who were middle-aged when you were young – actors, politicians, TV personalities – are showing up in the obituary pages with sobering regularity. More »

A book of Swiss competition winners makes a virtue of its cold and awkward design. Yet if the jury seeks debate, as it claims, it must be prepared to explain its decisions.

As if embarrassed by its anachronistic title, the cover of The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2007, a record of the annual design competition, is anything but beautiful, writes Rick Poynor. Everything about it grates: More »

I always liked the idea of The Independent and there have been a couple of periods, especially after it launched in 1986, when I defected to it from The Guardian. Even so, it has been a long time since I read it regularly, although the campaigning front pages produced since its 2005 redesign by Cases i Associats were eye-catching and occasionally led me to buy it. My main stumbling block is the tabloid page (and that goes for The Times, too). No matter how these two papers might rationalise the switch from broadsheet, the smaller size – also used by the Daily Mail – remains inherently down-market. The Guardian’s brilliantly managed move into new territory with the Berliner format underlined how dowdy, unimaginative and old-fashioned its rivals had become.  More »