About

Image of the Studio is an exhibition of over 75 current New York graphic design studios. Original work and portraits have been submitted by each studio, as well as a range of data designed to document the structure, history and culture of each.

Image of the City, Image of the Studio

In his groundbreaking 1960 study, The Image of the City, urban planner Kevin Lynch remarked that, “Giving visual form to the city is a special kind of design problem.” In investigating the “imageability” of urban space, Lynch raised the question of the relation of lived experience to visual form, setting forth key terms — paths, edges, nodes, districts and landmarks¹ — to describe how we formulate “cognitive maps” of the cities in which we live and move.

For Lynch, these are not simply mental images or subjective impressions, but graphic forms that can be described, altered and most importantly designed. Beyond its immediate relevance to architects and city planners, The Image of the City is also a study of graphic design and how we translate the visible world into tangible form in order to grasp “a sense of the whole.”

Image of the Studio, an exhibition at The Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at the Cooper Union, uses Lynch's ideas in an attempt to answer the following questions: How does living and working in New York shape contemporary studio practice on the level of scale, geography, and day-to-day organization? What does graphic design in New York look like?

The Exhibition

Image of the Studio features over 75 current graphic design firms in New York, from large and medium-sized firms to collectives and one-person studios. Original work and portraits have been submitted by each studio, as well as a range of data designed to document the structure, history and culture of each. Data visualizations and information graphics have been created to explore the relationships between studios, showing how New York connects our diverse studio practices.

Bringing these elements together, Image of the Studio documents the contemporary moment in New York graphic design, a dynamic discipline in an ever-evolving city.

The exhibition is co-curated² and organized by the Herb Lubalin Study Center at The Cooper Union and the creative studio Athletics. It is on view October 1–28, 2013³ at the 41 Cooper Gallery at The Cooper Union.

In addition, the exhibition includes a panel discussion and archive of video interviews. Upon completion, all materials will be archived at the Herb Lubalin Study Center and online at this site.