paul bowman works as a graphic designer, illustrator, and content wrangler in digital and print media.
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These are ‘notes’ posts in the ‘undesign’ series.
A tweet thread seeing some decent circulation in the past week has recalled to view the minor spectacle surrounding a couple of high-profile re-branding projects done for PepsiCo by the Arnell Group a decade and change ago. Peter Arnell’s public image, at that time rising a long while in the …
In the last (the second) in this series of ‘design suspicion’ notes, I refer briefly to the range of professions adopting designer as title, hinting at one of the themes I expect to emerge as I explore here: design culture’s expansiveness. The question of that expansiveness has something to do …
What I mean to explore by way of ‘design suspicion’ undoubtedly owes a good deal to the ideals of the 19th-century medieval revivalists, guild socialists, and assorted companions. Those theorists and critics of culture, economy, and social order famously saw the world that liberal industrialism was bringing into being as …
An element of what I do is graphic design, of course. I’ve been interested in the general subject — can’t help wanting to capitalize it, Design — for a long time; have had some limited occasion to study it formally. But with time, too, oddly maybe, I’ve come to a …