• Ruin Lust at Tate Britain

    Tate Britain, London
    Until 8 May
    Interview by Shumi Bose

  • Do designers really need millions of colours, asks Erik Spiekermann

    We’ve come a long way from Henry Ford and his any colour ‘so long as it’s black’ line. Pantone’s system, now half a century old, offers more than 10,000 colours and is bigging up an ‘enigmatic purple’ for 2014 (18-3224), while digital screen colours now run into the millions. Maybe it’s all gone too far, say Erik Spiekermann. Erik Spiekermann set up MetaDesign and FontShop, and is a teacher, author, designer and partner at Edenspiekermann

  • Public art reaches out beyond the gallery

    Public art is a hot topic right now, inspiring new directives, new public debates and greater breadth and imagination deployed in its commissioning and execution than ever before

  • Hashima revisited: photographing Japan's ghost island

    Photographer Andrew Meredith was one of the first people allowed on to the tiny Japanese island of Hashima. It took him three years of negotiations with the authorities to gain access to this unusual place — once a densely populated mining community that was abandoned practically overnight in 1974 and left to rot. He documented his visit in photographs and records for us his feelings of being on the island

  • Michael Sodeau chooses his must-see art and design events

    The designer and designjunction creative director curates this month's diary of art, design and architecture events

  • Wish you were here? Postcards by Jonathan Meades

    Commentator, film maker, critic and author, Jonathan Meades, has also spent many years taking photographs and collecting postcards. These two loves have come together in Pidgin Snaps, a collection of 100 of his own pictures presented as postcards

  • Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Glasgow School of Art: Blueprint #333

    The latest issue of Blueprint features Brazil’s greatest living architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, and Steven Holl’s new Reid Building for the Glasgow School of Art – here’s what else to expect from the magazine, out next week

  • Is Avoriaz the word's most beautiful ski resort?

    Opening in 1966, the French ski resort of Avoriaz was only accessible by cable car and looked like something from an expressionist movie. It still does, and there are still no cars to be seen...

  • Graubünden’s new generation of architects comes of age

    The Swiss alpine canton of Graubünden is fast becoming a treasure trove of new and exciting architecture thanks to a crop of local practices that are emerging from the shadow of earlier, much-lauded, practitioners from the area, not least of which is Peter Zumthor

  • Man Machine: the visionary work of Dr Fritz Kahn

    After looking at the graphic visualisations of the human body and its organs as devised by German scientist, gynaecologist and author Dr Fritz Kahn as a way to explain complex functions, it may not be possible to think of them in any other way again