The Origin of Tux The concept of the Linux mascot being a penguin came from Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. Tux was created by Larry Ewing in 1996 after an initial suggestion made by Alan Cox and further refined by Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel mailing list. Torvalds took his inspiration from a photograph he found on an FTP site, showing a penguin figurine looking strangely like the…

On the Self-Reflexive Page Louis Lüthi’s exquisitely authored and designed book On the Self-Reflexive Page (2010) documents the history of the page as a material arena to be foregrounded and exploited. This discourse of the page began with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth century…

In the week since logo designer Christophe Szpajdel arrived for last Friday’s opening of the exhibition Graphic Design: Now In Production, the Belgium-born, UK-based artist has completed nearly 50 new logos. Among marks for bands like Jucifer, Human Remains and Powerlord was a hand-drawn black-metal…

We’ve been trying to get Riley and His Story(which is featured in our current exhibition) on the design blog for a while now, so it was great to find this article posted yesterday on Twin Cities Metro. The designer of the book, Matthew Rezac, is a former Walker design fellow and a force to be reckoned with in the Minneapolis design scene. Here is Matthew’s description of the book: Riley and his story…

Another fantastic piece in the show is Konstantin Grcic´s 360°. As one of only two seating apparatuses featured in Graphic Design: Now in Production, this non-chair found its way into the gallery as part of a larger installation, Jürg Lehni’s Empty Words (separate post to come soon) and therefore does…

Symbology: Trevor Paglen Trevor Paglen is an artist who employs the investigative tools of journalism and social science. To create his 2006 project Symbology (Volume I), Paglen collected embroidered patches from the “black world” of classified military and intelligence units. Although the activities and even the existence of such programs are closely guarded secrets, members of this covert world…

The show opened on Friday night! We’ll post some real installation shots soon, and maybe some party shots, and soon a video of the opening day talk.

Our exhibition is opening tonight, so what better way to kick it off than with our first exhibition case study: three new posters designed by Experimental Jetset for the show. The title of the series is Statement and Counter-Statementand represents something of a “psychological portrait” of the design trio, albeit fragmented. Read Experimental Jetset’s description of the work below. (Installation shot…

Getting down to the wire now … only 35 hours until the opening party. Needless to say, there is a lot to do. All these designers in the galleries aren’t helping matters either … 3. Andrew Blauvelt (curator) taking a last look at the book section. We hope. 4. Michele Tobin (director of the Walker Shop) setting up product for the exhibition pop-up shop