Ellen Lupton
Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, curator, writer and educator known for her love of typography, who directs the Graphic Design MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Education
What a society decides the next lot needs to know.
- 14
- in design
- 9:08
- average
- 128 min
- in total
- 92
- across the network
All briefs
Bret Victor
Bret Victor didn’t build the iPad—he built the argument against it.
Ineke Hans
A designer abandons the object to build a platform — and delivers twelve mottos instead of a chair.
Inge Druckrey
She didn’t invent Swiss design — she installed it in America like wiring.
John Maeda
Maeda didn’t build software — he built the conditions for others to code meaningfully.
Makoko Floating School
A prototype that floated, functioned, then failed — not a model for replication, but a record of what happens when design answers urgency without infrastructure.
Rolex Learning Center
A library that refuses to separate learning from lingering — and pays for it in budget, not clarity.
Tord Boontje
Boontje proved ornament could scale — not as decoration, but as a design strategy for retail and research.
Amale Andraos
Andraos did not design a building — she designed a practice that treats ecology, education, and urbanism as inseparable.
Cedric Price
Unbuilt architecture that built the future — by refusing to fix form before function, or authority before participation.
Comic Sans
Vincent Connare · 1994
Comic Sans is a 1994 Microsoft typeface designed by Vincent Connare to replace Times New Roman in Microsoft Bob’s cartoon interface. It was drawn manually with a mouse, inspired by The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, and intended to be informal and child-friendly. Though it missed Bob, it shipped with Windows 95 and gained broad use in education and dyslexia support. A 2010 Princeton study found Comic Sans Italic improved information retention versus Helvetica. It demonstrates how narrow constraints — aesthetic, technical, and audience-specific — can yield unexpectedly robust functional outcomes.
Emil Ruder
Emil Ruder didn’t design posters—he designed the rules for how to teach typography as communication.
Johannes Itten
Itten didn’t teach colour—he taught how to see it, then how to unlearn what you thought you knew.
Wolfgang Weingart
He didn’t break Swiss typography—he weaponised its discipline to make disobedience legible.