Design Theory

Daft Punk’s robot costumes were a deliberate blend of artistic vision, sci-fi aesthetics, and a rejection of celebrity culture. Early in their career, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo avoided the spotlight, preferring to let their music speak for itself. By the time they released Discovery in 2001, they fully embraced the robot personas, inventing a fictional backstory about a studio explosion that “turned” them into machines. To bring this vision to life, they worked with artist Martin Logan and special effects designer Tony Gardner of Alterian Inc., who built their custom helmets. These helmets—Guy-Manuel’s gold, Thomas’s silver—grew more advanced...

  Syd Mead, often hailed as a “visual futurist,” is a towering influence in the world of science fiction design and concept art, with a career spanning over five decades. His visionary designs have shaped some of the most iconic representations of the future in film, television, and industrial design. Mead’s work is perhaps most widely recognized through his contributions to films like Blade Runner, Tron, Aliens, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, where his intricate and hyper-detailed creations brought entire worlds to life. Through his meticulous approach to design, he set a new standard for what the future could...

Futurism is an avant-garde movement founded in Milan in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.[1] Marinetti launched the movement in his Manifesto of Futurism,[3] which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia, an article then reproduced in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro on Saturday 20 February 1909.[4][5][6] He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo. Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past," he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane...