Today it was rainy in New York, the Saturday before Mother’s Day, and the @metmuseum was as crowded as I’ve ever seen it, especially at their once-in-a-lifetime Raphael exhibit. But, miraculously, in the midst of all the bumping and jostling for position, a moment comes, you see something like this, and suddenly the entire world drops away.
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino
The Virgin and Child with Infant Saint John the Baptist in a Landscape (The Alba Madonna)
c. 1509-11
The acts at New Orleans’s @jazzfest change every year, but one unsung artist has appeared on every stage going back four decades: Nan Parati. Since 1985, @nanparati has hand lettered every sign at the New Orleans Fair Grounds — and that means every sign. The name of each performer, from Buckwheat Zydeco to the Rolling Stones. The bathroom signs, the parking signs, the signs distinguishing the booths for shrimp po-boys from soft shell crab po-poys. Over 3,000 each year, all in an unmistakable and exuberant aesthetic she calls “Nanostyl.” It is as joyful and monumental example of visual identity as you’ll find anywhere.
Michael Tilson Thomas was one of my favorite clients. He conceived of Miami’s @nwsymphony as a place where young musicians could combine study and performance. He asked Frank Gehry (improbably, his childhood babysitter) to design it. We got the assignment to create the brand. I was so excited about the opportunity that I nearly blew it, with ideas that aped Gehry’s curved surfaces, bold acronyms that looked like logos for industrial fertilizer, and sedate typographic exercises that lacked all energy. Michael was patient and encouraging. He kept asking for something with “flow,” and my responses got more and more desperate.
Finally, Michael took pity and decided to give me a hint — in the form of six Post-Its with halting sketches in his own hand. When I recovered from my shock and humiliation, I took a closer look and realized he had given us an extraordinary gift. It was all there. We quickly responded with what he had been asking for all along: a NWS monogram made from a single gesture that evoked the motion of an architect’s pencil or a conductor’s baton. In other words, flow.
Michael Tilson Thomas died Wednesday, after a long and valiant battle with cancer, at the age of 81. How lucky we all were to receive his gifts.
One of my favorite discoveries from our recent trip to Ireland was the story of Father Francis Browne. Born in County Cork in 1880, Browne was a Jesuit priest and, thanks to a gift of a camera from an uncle, a prolific photographer. He died in 1960 largely unknown; a fellow priest discovered a trove of tens of thousands of negatives 25 years later.
Once made public, Father Browne’s black and white images of street life won widespread acclaim, including comparisons to Henri Cartier-Bresson. The most extraordinary photographs in his collection were a series he took on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. The same uncle who bought him his camera bought Browne a ticket on the first leg of the ship’s voyage from Southampton, England, to Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland. The pictures he took of passengers and crew on board were some of the very few to depict the Titanic at sea. An unidentified wealthy American couple (I like to think it was the Astors) offered to buy him passage to New York, but his Bishop forbade it and summoned him home. Browne disembarked on 11 April 1912 and the ship sank three days later.
We stayed in a lovely hotel in County Donegal called Lough Eske Castle. Downstairs is a bar named after Father Browne featuring dozens of his photographs. The ones shown here are from the two days he spent on the doomed ship: eerie and remarkable.
Pentagram’s @mbierut has collaborated with designer Yoshi Torralva, of @studio.torralva , on the poster and accompanying program for @yalearchitecture ’s upcoming symposium “Domestic Revolutions and Feminist Cities.” The symposium showcases models of feminist urbanism that propose new approaches to public space, housing, and infrastructures of care. Organized by Tatiana Bilbao (@tabilbaoestudio ) and Annie Barrett (@takealoadoffannie ), the symposium is dedicated to @doloreshayden .
This poster is the latest in the long-running collaboration between the Yale School of Architecture and Pentagram that began nearly thirty years ago. Constructed with overlapping CMYK forms, the poster is meant to evoke a city seen from above: dense, alive, and always adapting. Up close, shapes and text intersect, cradle, and contain each other in deliberate dialogue, reflecting the symposium’s call to reimagine infrastructure at every scale.
In contrast to the poster, the program was designed to be sketched in and written on throughout the event, becoming a personal keepsake afterward.
The symposium runs April 9–10 and is free and open to the public. Attendance is welcome in person or via livestream. Register at architecture.yale.edu/DomesticRevolutions and learn more about the speakers at @domesticrevolutions
These are the final days of Crosley Tower, an astonishing brutalist icon designed by A.M. Kinney built at the @uofcincy in 1969. Unloved for much of its life (it was named the nation’s ugliest academic building in 2017), it has long been an object of fascination, particularly by the @uc_daap students across the street.
I was one of those students in 1975. We first years were asked to create something on the theme of “sequence” for our Intro to Photography class by our professor, @agg_photos . I think we were meant to seek inspiration in Muybridge; perversely I selected the most inert subject i could find, good old Crosley, and shot it with a stationary camera from dawn until dark.
When I showed the test results to Professor Ghory-Goodman, she was disappointed that none of the windows were lit after dark. So I created a fake memo from a fake University Energy Task Force, complete with fake logo, asking the inhabitants to leave their lights on all night for a “special study.” It worked! I have seldom had the same thrill as seeing Crosley ablaze that night. I lost two of the dawn images in the intervening half-century, but the rest have been rotting away in my attic since.
And now Crosley is coming down. The USA’s second largest continuous pour concrete structure (after the Hoover Dam!), it has proved impossible to maintain. Unsurprisingly, its imminent demise has provoked an outpouring of sentiment, led as you’d expect by alums like me (and the amazing @juju.dsgn ) who have come to take a kind of perverse comfort in its looming presence. RIP Crosley Tower. I’ll miss it.
Pentagram’s @mbierut and @giorgialupi collaborated with designer @yoshi.torralva on the poster and social media for @yalearchitecture ’s Spring 2026 lecture series and symposia. This spring’s programming includes lectures by @studiojennyjones and @davidgissen , and a discussion between @tabilbaoestudio , @doloreshayden , and Eva Kail.
This semester’s poster maintains the logic of the fall campaign’s design while expressing an interconnected system of visual elements. As in last semester’s work, typography functions as both form and structure, but here the letters are rendered as a series of rigid lines that transform in shape to reveal “Yale.” From line to line, slight variations emerge as gradual shifts from the designer’s initial stroke, culminating in a complete transformation. The result is dimensional and alive, able to move with and around the graphic text that grounds it.
This approach draws on an architectural methodology that prioritizes spatial continuity and ligature, where interconnection dictates composition. As this spring’s lecture series invites architects and designers to reexamine the interdependent nature of human existence in cities, the poster offers a visual interpretation of what it means to prioritize relationships over exchange.
Project team: @yoshi.torralva@mbierut@giorgialupi Ruby Powers @tamara.mckenna
I bet most people who follow this account are also listeners of the @99percentinvisible podcast. It’s been one of my favorites as long as I can remember. A few months ago, 99pi’s brilliant host @theromanmars heard about my semi/quasi/sorta retirement and suggested he conduct an “exit interview” with me. Consider yourself warned: the latest episode, out this week, is the result.
I just love talking to Roman. He has the magical ability to make you forget you’re being interviewed; it’s like you’re catching up with an old friend. (That’s what makes his podcast so good.) I can only hope you’ll enjoy the conversation half as much as we did. Thanks especially to @ceeberube for his expert production. Link in bio!
