Check out our Insights 2012 trailer, which is an inside look at a printing press and how a poster is produced. Many thanks to (executive producers) Joe Avery and Laura Nelson and the fine people at Shapco for producing our poster and letting us film them in action. And, if you’re wondering, the track is courtesy of our own design director, Emmet Byrne, a.k.a. The Franchise.

Above: The Replacement’s first official photo shoot, Walker Art Center, 1981   Photos by Greg Helgeson I moved to Minneapolis in 1998. For serious reasons like, “Home of Hüsker Dü and Charles Spencer Anderson.” That was enough for me. And being new to a town, you lurk around thinking about all the shit you missed. All those Twin Cities bands I was into, hell, they were long gone and dead. And the mere…

We thought we’d try to get inside the minds of some of our upcoming Insights design lecture speakers, you know, dig a little deeper. Invade their personal space. So here is Mr. Draplin answering some of life’s most—and possibly least—important questions: Describe a recent dream in 15 words or less. I usually don’t remember my dreams, and that sucks. That’s nine words. Damn. What a bummer. Sometimes I…

See below for this year’s lineup. In the coming weeks we’ll be posting interviews with the speakers. Although he makes his home in Portland, Oregon, Aaron Draplin is more a product of being born, raised, and educated in the Midwest. A native of Detroit, he studied graphic design at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design before heading west to work as art director of Snowboarder magazine. He…

Using the exhibitionGraphic Design: Now in Production as its subject, the Walker Art Center created a seminar course for graphic design majors from the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the University of Minnesota’s College of Design to investigate the themes and ideas of the show. The installation explores the ways that graphic design is being…

Above: image research for the catalogue From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America (2010) From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America is the first exhibition catalogue to feature the full spectrum of the work of Alec Soth, one of the most interesting voices in contemporary photography, whose compelling images of everyday America form powerful narrative vignettes. Featuring more than 100 of the artist’s…

This is part 6 of an ongoing survey. See part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here and part 5 here. As a design candidate in the MCAD MFA program I was asked to write an “artist statement” which, as a designer, I found inherently problematic. In response I contacted designers whose work inspired and influenced me in some way, asking: Is there such a thing as a “designer statement,” and if so…

“Back when Paul Rand wrote, “There is no such thing as bad content, only bad form,” I remember being intensely annoyed. I took it as an abdication of a designer’s responsibility to meaning. Over time, I have come to read it differently: he was not defending hate speech or schlock or banality; he meant that the designer’s purview is to shape, not to write. But that shaping itself was a profoundly…

Before there was Design Within Reach — or Room & Board or Crate and Barrel or West Elm or CB2 or Hive or Unica Home or our own Walker Shop, for that matter — there was Useful Gifts. From 1946 to 1960, these annual exhibitions in the Walker’s Everyday Art Gallery showcased the fruits of midcentury modern design: “simple, well designed objects for everyday use that some day may counteract the present…