Archinect - News

CannonDesign is pitching in to help acclimate migrants to NYC

2023-05-15T14:52:00-04:00

A new project from CannonDesign aimed at helping migrants who were relocated to Brooklyn’s Red Hook Cruise Terminal in the past year is providing hope to advocates for inclusive design as the city grapples with a vexing crisis that’s only expected to grow with the end of Title 42.

The project was initiated by Blue Cottage of CannonDesign team member Kimberly Silver, a resident of Red Hook, who, in reaction to Councilwoman Gale Brewer’s charge to do more, worked with fellow CannonDesign staffers Steffany Brady, Dylan Coonrad, and Abbey Furlow to strategize a set of wayfinding design solutions that can help better orient them to the neighborhood and city. Together, they say three core “functions” can be achieved as a result of the project.

Using Silver’s observations of the area, TRANSIT activates street surfaces and other barriers surrounding the terminal with clear trail marker-like visual wayfinding directions to the subway and nearby bus stations.

Image courtesy CannonDesign

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Environmental graphic design and its history with architecture highlights the value of cross-disciplinary expertise

2022-03-16T10:05:00-04:00

Architecture as a practice lends itself to fruitful collaborations with adjacent disciplines such as graphic design. When married in a project, the results often exude an exciting blend of color, style, scale, and unique aesthetics. There are plenty of examples to reference from if we look back at architecture's history with graphic design and its sub-disciplines like wayfinding, signage design, and environmental graphic design.

Take the iconic works of graphic designer Deborah Sussman and her collaborations with many architects like Frank Gehry or Barabara Stauffer Solomon and her work at Sea Ranch in the 1960s. While these are merely two of my favorite examples of the relationship between architecture and graphic design, we can see this marriage of disciplines used by architecture firms around the globe. So why discuss such a topic that has become commonplace within design industries?

Design consultancies like Pentagram and other independently run design practices like Isometric S...

Do architects make better video games? Cue Shedwork's Sable, 2019's beautifully anticipated video game

2019-01-11T19:20:00-05:00

Captivating audiences with their brief presentation at last year's 2018 E3 Expo, the game's development team Shedworks featured a strikingly captivating trailer that showed a world filled with beautiful desert landscapes, eye-catching color palettes, and of course beautiful renditions of towering architecture. Taking much inspiration from classic graphic artists like Jean “Moebius” Giraud and games such as 80 Days and Sunless Sea, the overall plot of the game revolves around a young character named Sable and her exploration of a world whose history is unknown. Sable's lead designer uses his architectural education to create a world that expressed a way for gamers and enthusiasts to understand architecture through exploration.

When developing the game's overall concept lead designer Greg Kythreotis explains it was important to build something artistically evocative. Much of the game c...

Los Angeles has Created the Perfect Parking Sign

2015-04-06T15:11:00-04:00

In the quest to make parking suck less, there are apps that help you find a space, and meters where you can pay with a swipe of your credit card. But LA has launched a simple, low-tech solution to make parking better: Well-designed signage that offers no ambiguity whatsoever when it comes to where you can park, when you can park there, and how much it will cost.

Seeking identity through city fonts

2015-01-20T13:53:00-05:00

Decimated by manufacturing losses, some smaller cities are turning for help to an unlikely group of people: typeface designers. Can new fonts really breathe life into the postindustrial city? [...] Type has a lot of effect on the atmosphere of a place, he says, calling it “the voice of the city”: “I think cities that don’t have this very dynamic energy, they don’t feel the need to change their identity.”