1967’s “Toy of the Year” was the embodiment of controlled emotion in the face of that decade’s social unrest and conflict: John Bowers remembers The Spirograph.

The National Design Awards were announced today, and Michael Bierut is the recipient of the Design Mind award. We can think of no more suitable award for this writer, critic and working designer.

Contemporary posters published within the last two years are eligible for the Chicago International Poster Biennial and may be submitted by any poster designer in the world with no entry fee. Physical entries must be received in Chicago no later than May 27, 2008.

“Scrapbooks (like these) remind us that creating an album from saved matter does not necessarily provide an accurate self-portrait…” An essay by Jessica Helfand from her new book on the occasion of National Scrapbooking Day.

Where once the sky is falling scenarios would not, as Dr. Flicker said, “happen for billions of years yet,” the doomsday clock is steadily ticking away. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go back to the days when fiction was not fact.

A reminder to our many readers that Design Observer has a rich archive of slide shows for your enjoyment: Design Observer: Tables of Contents Tom Vanderbilt: Blast-Door Art Don Hamerman: Baseballs Tom Manning: Spam Cartoons Andrew Blauvelt: Peter Seitz Portfolio…

After seeing the Fella and McFetridge show, in its context — in California, in LA, in the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall — it occurs to me that this was also a show about the trajectories of modernism, specifically, the trajectories of American modernism…

Standard Operating Procedure is a gorgeous, pulsing stopwatch of a movie, and like all of Morris’s best work, its structure is based on a rhythmic series of revelations.