Bruce Mau

GRAPHIC DESIGN IS A RUNAWAY bull market Bruce Mau traces to the burgeoning power of the image in our technology-driven new economy, a power facilitated, he argues, by two software innovations: The first, exemplified by Photoshop, merges inseparably the real and surreal; the second, Adobe's page description language, weds previously estranged bedfellows, type and image, into a unified graphic instrument. Since the inception of PDL in the early '80s, virtuosi have wielded that instrument to dazzling effect: David Carson, Droog, Rebecca Méndez, and others deserving of admiration, if less known.

Yet

print Summer 2001

“Workspheres”

OUR HABITAT IS BEING RESTRUCTURED on an order of magnitude beyond ken. What began as a technological revolution is already re-forming our every implement and reorganizing our every social arrangement. The new economy, the super-bull market, global connectivity, cyberlife, and our galaxy of digi-gadgets are just the pretty sparks before the firestorm. And by now, the flux of product extinctions and emergences is so brisk that we no longer even notice the turnovers. Remember life before the computer, the remote, even before the cell? (Cell phone, that is.) How long until we can no longer remember