Can design bring peace on Earth? Our nation’s design museum would like to know
Plus: Meet the Russian designer behind the Comic Sans-Helvetica mash-up font
Hello, in this week’s issue we’ll look at…
Can design bring peace on Earth? Our nation’s design museum would like to know
Meet the Russian designer behind the Comic Sans-Helvetica mash-up font
This photographer shot KBJ’s first portrait after being confirmed to the Supreme Court
A gold $10 coin made while Teddy Roosevelt was president just sold for $1.14 million
Can design bring peace on Earth? Our nation’s design museum would like to know
Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s design museum in New York City, announced a new exhibition last week that will explore the role design can play in pursuing peace with work from around the world.
Designing Peace opens June 10 and runs through Sept. 4, 2023, and will feature 40 proposals and initiatives from 25 countries in the form of models, full-size installations, maps, images, and film, according to the museum.
Among the work already announced for the exhibition is a new world peace symbol by Uruguayan graphic designer Amijai Benderski (above), Harlem’s Black Lives Matter mural, and Conflict Kitchen, a Pittsburgh temporary takeout restaurant with a menu based on foods from countries the U.S. was in conflict with.
“Teeter-Totter Wall” (2019), a set of pink seesaws on the U.S.-Mexico border wall by UC Berkeley architecture professor Ronald Rael and San José State design department chair Virginia San Fratello, will be included in a section about designing safe, healthy, and respectful environments.
Set to open nearly four months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the exhibition has actually been in the works for years, with Cooper Hewitt’s curator of socially responsible design Cynthia E. Smith beginning field research in 2017.
“Peace building and design are dynamic processes which involve engagement, understanding context, trust-building, communication and iteration,” Smith said in a statement. “This exhibition will explore the role of design in building peace and resilience — and proposes that peace is not abstract and remote, but can be local, tangible and even possible.”
Meet the Russian designer behind the Comic Sans-Helvetica mash-up font
Russian designer Alexander Pravdin combined two of the most famous fonts in the world, and the results may delight, upset, or confuse you.
Designed as an experimental project over the course of four months and released in 2019, Comic Helvetic tempers the casualness of Comic Sans with the structure of Helvetica.
“It could have been done faster, but I wanted it to be more than just a joke, I wanted it to be a well-made typeface,” Pravdin told me in a DM on Behance. “Maybe I have some perfectionism problems, cause I always take a very long time to draw simple graphics.”
The free mash-up font found new life in the U.S. on April Fool’s Day after it was selected for Print’s Type Tuesday.
Pravdin has a Ukrainian flag emoji in his Behance bio, and he said it’s hard to support Ukraine living in Russia, but many people oppose the war.
“[T]here are many people around who are not influenced by government propaganda and are against this war,” he said. “We will continue to try to stop it as soon as possible.”
As of last month, nearly 15,000 people have been detained in Russia for demonstrating against the war, and protests have been held in more than 100 cities, according to the Washington Post.
You can read my full story about Pravdin and Comic Helvetic here.
This photographer shot KBJ’s first portrait after being confirmed to the Supreme Court
For her first portrait after being confirmed the first Black female Justice in U.S. history on a bipartisan 53-47 vote last Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson posed for New York photographer Lelanie Foster.
Foster’s resume includes shooting Nike’s 2018 “The Strongest” campaign and Serena Williams for the March 2021 cover of Architectural Digest.
She told Vogue the “pressure was on to get an iconic shot” of Jackson and that they listened to Sade during the shoot.
“My vision was to portray regal-ness and composure and poise and dignity, all words that are completely representative of Jackson, and that’s what I wanted to be taken from this image,” Foster told Vogue.
The White House photo made its social media debut on @Oprah and it was also on the front page of beyonce.com.
Jackson still has to take her official Supreme Court portrait. She’ll be sworn in this summer after Justice Stephen Breyer retires at the end of the court’s term.
A gold $10 coin made while Teddy Roosevelt was president just sold for $1.14 million
After just more than 30,000 “Indian Eagle” coins were mistakenly produced by the U.S. Mint in 1907, nearly all of them were destroyed, making it among the rarest U.S. coins from the 20th century.
Made by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (“Standing Lincoln,” “The Puritan”), the original design didn’t allow the coins to stack properly, and although an altered version was made, it wasn’t the version sent to be produced initially.
Just 40 of the $10 coins survive, and one sold at a recent Stack’s Bowers auction for $1.14 million.
Then-President Teddy Roosevelt personally asked Saint-Gaudens to design this and other coins and to depict Liberty in a headdress, according to Artnet News, which first reported the sale.
Also at auction was a 1909 penny that was discontinued following controversy over the artist including his initials in the design. It sold for $4,320.
George Bush has entered his cold wax phase and I wrote about it in the previous issue. Read it here. — Hunter