Anne Quito

Uber has a whole new look, CEO Travis Kalanick announced today.

After 12 years of deliberation, the US government finally took action on a controversial subject: Fonts.

It’s impossible not to fiddle with a binder clip, once it comes within range of idle hands. Simple and elegant, the little metal object invites curiosity and invention—which may be one reason this video demonstrating more than 15 unexpected uses in under four minutes is so engrossing:

Matthew Butterick knows how to present a case. A Harvard-trained designer turned civil litigation lawyer, Butterick is on a one-man mission to bring better design and typography to the legal profession.

For five days, superheroes converged at Autodesk’s sprawling maker space in San Francisco.

Jan 23. marks National Handwriting Day in the US. It’s a day to remember 18th-century US statesman John Hancock, best remembered for his large and flamboyant signature on the Declaration of Independence. And in the age of keyboards, touchpads, and Siri-assisted dictation, it’s also a time to consider the lost art of penmanship and cursive writing.

Legendary radio host Louis “Studs” Terkel recorded more than 9,000 hours of conversation with luminaries like Martin Luther King Jr., Tennessee Williams and Simone de Beauvoir, over the course of a 45-year career. But sadly for the age of the podcast, many of these audio gems remain trapped in reels and reels of tape.

The world of design can be an intimidating place for outsiders, never mind kids. Many designers and architects—often wearing the de rigueur all-black costume of artistes—are notorious for embracing a wordy, over-intellectualized approach to design that makes the industry feel quite inaccessible.

Since the first generation iPad in 2010, artists, designers, doodlers and dabblers have all used Apple devices as creative tools. Perhaps the best-known iPad artist today is contemporary British painter David Hockney, whose thumb and forefinger creations you may have spotted on the cover of the New Yorker.

Preparing for his inaugural space walk on the International Space Station tomorrow, Jan. 15, British astronaut Tim Peake captured a spectacular lightning storm over the African continent today:

In the heart of Tokyo, an unusual store opened last July: An “art supplies laboratory” called Pigment that sells esoteric tools and paints used in traditional Japanese art. Think handmade washi paper used in the Meiji period, antique ink stones for sumi painting, glues made from ox skin or fine powder pigments from crushed malachite.

Socially-minded architect Alejandro Aravena has become the first Chilean to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize.

In this digital age, it’s worth remembering that the Latin root of “digital” refers to our fingers, perhaps the only part of our bodies now working harder and faster than ever. And in the English-speaking world, our fingers are slaves to QWERTY.

With your finger or a few taps with the mouse, you can generate a wild, towering head of hair.

When most of our garments bear “Made in…” labels from distant countries, it’s easy to forget that the US still has its own huge textile industry, generating $18.3 billion in exports, according to the US Department of Commerce. In luminous testimony to the mills that were once a pillar of the American economy, New York-based photographer Christopher Payne has spent the last five years capturing their colorful inner workings.

The Library of Congress has appointed comic book author and graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang as the US National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. The announcement, made Jan. 4, marks the first time the honor has been conferred on a comic book author since the program started in 2008.

Compared to other industry events, expectations are sky-high at design conferences. “Dentists, physicists, sociologists, taxidermists all meet to find out what’s new in their specialties. So do designers, but they are not happy about it,” Ralph Caplan former director of the Aspen International Design Conference once said to Eye Magazine, explaining the great challenge of creating extraordinary experiences with surprising and innovative details to satisfy design-savvy audiences.

Louis Vuitton’s rise as today’s top luxury brand began at place much like a contemporary pack-and-ship facility. As the new exhibition Volez, Voguez, Voyagez in Paris demonstrates, the brand’s fame started with handmade traveler’s boxes and cases.

American artist Ellsworth Kelly died at his home in Spencertown, New York on Dec. 27. He was 92.

Greeting cards have strange powers. Many get thrown away within weeks of opening, but the ones that remain can end up being treasured for years, stowed away in shoeboxes and drawers as part of the family archive. This year, web-based genealogy service MyHeritage asked subscribers to send in their oldest Christmas cards, and the creative ingenuity and personalization that made those cards keepers is evident. Teeming with graphic design motifs of a bygone era, here are some of the best:

“We don’t like people in this room. Period,” joked Apple chief design officer Jony Ive about the grey blankets covering the tables in Apple’s mythic and highly secretive design studio.

The holiday season is the one time in the year when classical music interrupts the regularly scheduled Adele-Bieber-Drake program. Classical music’s popularity has been on a continuous decline in the mainstream for several decades, despite various scientific studies extolling its neurological benefits. In 2014, one incendiary Slate article declared the whole genre dead.

Has automation killed the Christmas card? From print-on-demand services like Shutterfly, Minted, and Postable to premium card-company Bond’s penmanship robot (it can even sign your name with a real fountain pen), today’s proliferation of instant greeting card services makes sending a personal note seem as laborious as engineering a turducken.

For the first time in its history, Canada has created a new “unified typeface” to represent not only its two official languages (French and English) but also its aboriginal languages.