For its year-end issue, Graphic asked 22 designers—including Anthony Burrill, Experimental Jetset, Metahaven, and Minneapolis’ Alex DeArmond—to create posters expressing their own social “agenda.”

Aiming to resensitize citizens to the plight of the poor, the Homeless Signs Project has been giving large laminated placards to panhandlers. They’re set in Helvetica: “Such a pronounced disparity makes the signs—and the people holding them—impossible to ignore.”

Designed in 1935 by Edward Young—who went to the zoo to sketch various poses—Penguin Books’ iconic logo was modified in 1946 by typographer Jan Tschichold, who retained some of the “dignified but flippant” feel of the original.

A rundown of architecture-inspired desserts, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in gingerbread and a Buckmister Fuller-esque geodesic cookie house to a poured sugar and fondant Noguchi table.

Architect and writer Witold Rybczynski recounts how for Christmas in 1964 he built a “modern” nativity scene—inspired by Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Nôtre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France.

If the Walker’s black-metal logo designed by Christophe Szpajdel, whose work is on view in Graphic Design: Now In Production, isn’t incongruous enough, check out Mark Hall-Patch’s metal remakes of pop star names like Bieber, Gaga and Hanson.

“The future is problematic and uncertain for us all,” says famed architect Oscar Niemeyer, who turns 104 today. “What may still provide some comfort is to have a woman, a good companion, by one’s side.”

“Questioning authority never looked more corporate and conventional.” Shepard Fairey’s design for TIME’s cover “oozes cozy, collectible nostalgia. It trivializes the portentous power and authentic potential of the ‘Arab spring’ [and] Occupy Wall Street.”

Postmodernist architects are the new classicists, Alan Brake argues, offering as evidence Michael Graves’s selection as this year’s winner of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation’s $200,000 Driehaus Prize.