Why the Best Designers Don’t Follow Design Trends
A fashionable design can look brilliant on Monday and strangely tired by Friday. That is the danger of building creative work around whatever happens to be popular at the moment. Colors change.…
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Inspiration: “Louis XIV” by Hyacinthe Rigaud
Few royal portraits announce themselves with quite the confidence of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s Louis XIV (1638–1715), King of France. The king stands beneath a vast red curtain, wrapped in blue velvet and ermine,…
The Hoxne Hoard: Mystery of Britain’s Roman Treasure
A farmer loses a hammer in an English field. A friend arrives with a metal detector to find it. Instead, the soil begins giving up Roman coins, silver spoons, gold jewellery, and…
Berlin’s Lost Art Caches and the Soviet Trophy Hunt
Berlin was collapsing in the spring of 1945, but beneath its bombed streets another city existed. Museum treasures had been packed into concrete bunkers, bank vaults, cellars, mines, and emergency depots. Paintings…
Jeanne Wenz: The Mysterious Muse of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
A young woman sits at a small round table with a glass beneath her hand. She wears a dark dress, a pale bow at her throat, and a white apron across her…
You’re Not a Real Designer If You Use These Fonts
You can sometimes spot inexperienced design before reading a single word. The typography gives the game away. A restaurant reaches for Papyrus to announce “authentic tradition.” A café discovers Lobster and suddenly…
Why Video Games Are the Last True Art Form Today
Imagine entering a ruined kingdom at sunset. Mountains turn purple on the horizon. Grass moves in the wind while a distant melody rises almost too quietly to notice. Beyond the valley stands…
Inspiration: “Medieval City on a River,” by Karl Friedrich Schinkel
A Gothic cathedral catches the light while a storm retreats across a darkened sky. Below it, a ruler and his entourage approach a castle, a river winds through the countryside, and a…
The Art of the Picts: Scotland’s Lost Masters
Stand before a Pictish stone in the Scottish landscape and something curious happens. You recognize animals, weapons, riders, crosses and familiar geometric shapes, yet the stone refuses to give up its whole…
The Secret Life of the Sphinx: Mysteries of Giza
The Great Sphinx of Giza has spent part of its extraordinary life disappearing. Desert sand repeatedly swallowed its paws and climbed its enormous limestone body, leaving later generations to uncover a monument…
Biography: Master Theodoric
Master Theodoric presents us with one of the great puzzles of medieval art. We can still stand before the extraordinary paintings associated with his workshop and study the heavy faces, brilliant colors,…
9 Secrets Artists Use to Create Drama
Drama in art doesn’t require a battle, a storm, or someone collapsing onto a velvet chaise. Often it comes from much smaller decisions: where the light falls, what gets hidden, how much…
