Karl Heiselman is the CEO of Wolff Olins and the driving force behind the company’s ambition for clients and optimism for the world. He leads the global business by shaping its strategy for growth and encouraging excellence in its creative work. With over 20 years of branding and design experience, Heiselman has helped create game-changing work for Wolff Olins’s clients including (RED), Skype, GE, PwC, Unicef, Current TV, New York City and Mercedes-Benz. He has expanded the company’s capabilities to include product development, brand-centric innovation and creatively led business strategy.

Trained as a designer, Heiselman firmly believes in the value of creativity to drive positive business and social impact. Prior to joining Wolff Olins, Heiselman founded the San Francisco–based design studio The Farm, where his clients included Apple, American Express, FedEx, Swatch and HP. He also spent two years as the executive creative director of the Swatch Lab in both New York and Milan. During his two-year tenure there, Heiselman directed four 60-piece collections which were credited with revitalizing the Swatch brand around the world. And earlier, Heiselman was a design director at Apple where he first learned the importance of design in business. Heiselman attended the Rhode Island School of Design and studied graphic and industrial design.

An audio interview with Debbie Millman in the Design Matters series, a thought-provoking internet podcast at Design Observer, which profiles industry-leading graphic designers, change agents, artists, writers and educators.

Typography has long been called the designer’s common currency, but there is nothing at all common about visual language, particularly when it requires cultural, visual and linguistic nuances in order to succeed across international borders. German typographer Dirk Wachowiak recently caught up with the Czech-born Peter Bilak and Indian designer Satya Rajpurohit to discuss both their recent collaboration — the Hindi version of Bilak’s Fedra — and their plans for the future. Interview with Design Observer.

It’s not often that graphs and numbers take center stage in a popular film, but in the brilliant hands of graphic designer Brian Oakes, information design is not a backdrop but a main character in the recently released documentary I.O.U.S.A.

Directed by Wordplay director Patrick Creadon, the film deftly weaves archival footage and economic data to convey an extraordinary sense of urgency having to do with America’s current economic crisis. The movie also features candid interviews with some of the country’s most powerful personalities in the financial universe, among them, Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul O’Neill, Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker. Another central character is David Walker, the former United States Comptroller General, who has spoken out loudly about the dire nature of the fiscal crisis facing America unless something drastic is done and done quickly.

With an eye toward appealing to all political segments in the country, Oakes has found an egalitarian aesthetic that gives vivid life to economic data, data that, in lesser hands, would surely have been yawn-inducing.

Brian speaks to Design Observer from his New York studio.

‘Massimo Vignelli was one of the few designers I had not personally met prior to our interview, and as a result, I approached the date of our meeting with a certain amount of nervousness. It didn’t help that this was also the only interview wherein I inadvertently stood my subject up. That’s right — I mistakenly scribbled down our mutually agreed upon meeting time in the wrong box of my crude, paper calendar and missed the meeting entirely. In fact, it wasn’t until many hours later that I even realized that I kept Massimo waiting for my arrival. Fortunately for me, he took it in stride, even going so far as graciously suggesting it was better that we didn’t meet that day, as something came up that he need take care of while he waited for me to show up.

This alone highlights Massimo’s incredible spirit, his joie de vivre, his humor and his generosity. Universally considered one of the great design practitioners of our time, Massimo is also kind. He is a true gentleman. Not content with anything less than elegant, Massimo is erudite, exceedingly well mannered, charming, cute even. Yes, I said it: Massimo Vignelli is cute. He is also remarkably forgiving. When he left a message alerting me of our missed meeting, he also reassured me it was quite all right, and requested we reschedule. Despite my nerves, our subsequent meeting was delightful and we spent many hours talking about love, his wife and partner Leila Vignelli, the staying power of the American Airlines logo, vulgarity, his penchant for the color black and the typeface Bodoni, his protégé Michael Bierut, the friendship he had with Alan Fletcher, the perfect sofa and over fifty years in the business of design.’ – Debbie Millman. A conversation with Design Observer.

‘I first met Daniel van der Velden in Brno, Czech Republic, in 2008. Among a group of outstanding designers presenting at an International Biennial of Graphic Design, I was struck by the content of Metahaven’s work — politics, borders, immigration, social networks and economic theory. Metahaven is a partnership of Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk (whom I recently met in Amsterdam). I have also written about a recent Metahaven project, proposals for a new graphic identity for WikiLeaks.

My fellow Design Observer OBlog critic, Rick Poynor, has described them thus: “Metahaven is one of the most theoretically informed, strategically adept and articulate groups of thinkers operating in graphic design…” — high praise from a writer who has challenged the current state of Dutch graphic design.

Daniel and I started this interview months ago when Uncorporate Identity was being published, and it dragged on as we attempted a sustained conversation by email, while we were both traveling over many months. While I share Rick Poynor’s respect for the larger Metahaven project, I went into the interview troubled by some of their actual design work, as well as by the language that defines and surrounds their practice. If this interview seemed awkward and testy at times, it is probably because of these biases — which I brought into this dialogue, despite our many mutual interests and shared concerns. I have let the conversation stand as it happened, edited by both parties only for sense and clarity.’ – William Drenttel. A conversation with Design Observer.

Described by the publisher Phaidon Press as “the most famous book author you have never heard of,” Tomi Ungerer is a continental treasure in his native Europe, an artist whose life and work embody the epic forces of the late 20th century. Born in 1931 in Alsace, a region that soon became dominated by wartime Germany, Ungerer was raised under Nazi rule. His young adulthood was a mirror of postwar liberation, as he took to wandering the world before immersing himself in the invigorating climate of 1950s and 1960s New York. It was there that Ungerer made his reputation as an editorial and advertising illustrator and children’s book author, and where he became caught in the tumult of the antiwar and civil rights movements. In the early 1970s, seized by a back-to-the-land impulse, he left the States to farm in Nova Scotia. Five years later, he relocated again, this time to Ireland, where he has lived ever since.

An indefatigable proponent of progressive causes, Ungerer was made an officer of the French Legion of Honor in 2000 for his efforts to improve Franco-German relations through culture. In 2003, he was named Ambassador for Childhood and Education by the European Council and drafted the Declaration of Children’s Rights. In 2007, the government-funded Tomi Ungerer Museum opened in Strasbourg with a permanent collection of 8,000 drawings and a rotating exhibition program. A conversation with Design Observer.

A Conversation at Design Observer about Reality TV with Marvin Heiferman and Jessica Helfand.

‘In 1991, I was low woman on the Print magazine masthead, which meant I was responsible for much of the editorial grunt work. It was my job to organize a debate between Massimo Vignelli and the type designer Ed Benguiat that took place in our offices that spring. Afterward, I transcribed the tape and edited the transcript for publication in Print’s September/October 1991 issue. Published under the rubric “Oppositions,” the debate was the second in a series. It followed “Tibor Kalman vs. Joe Duffy” — a 1990 dialogue about design ethics that was so notoriously cranky I didn’t feel the need to name names when I referred to its “antagonistic” participants in my introduction to its successor.

Print had brought Vignelli and Benguiat together because they looked like oil and water on paper. But rather than debate one another they surprised us by ganging up on Emigre magazine (1984–2009) as a symbol of the computer’s destructive influence on contemporary typography. What follows is an almost complete rerun of the 9,000-word original published version. Parts that have been skimmed away are indicated by ellipses (…).’ — Julie Lasky. A dialogue at Design Observer.

Yale University Press added a new title to graphic design history’s sparsely furnished bookshelf. The hefty 464-page hardback volume, Graphic Design: A New History (published in paperback in the UK by Laurence King Publishing), was written by Stephen J. Eskilson, an associate professor of art history at Eastern Illinois University. Alice Twemlow and Lorraine Wild can attest to its bulk: they each lugged a copy around with them for a couple of weeks in order to write this bicoastal, tag-team review. A dialogue at Design Observer.