Alexandra Zsigmond's lecture "Inside the Editorial Eye"

On October 23, 2025, Alexandra Zsigmond, an award-winning art director with more than a decade of experience creating custom illustrations for leading international publications such as The New York Times and The New Yorker, gave a lecture at our university titled "Inside the Editorial Eye."

As part of the lecture, the audience had the opportunity to learn how illustrators are constantly reinventing a common visual vocabulary to engage readers and shed light on pressing cultural and political issues. In particular, they looked at the symbol of the eye, tracing its role in editorial images as a symbol of artificial intelligence, surveillance and psychology. Drawing on her years of experience as art director at The New York Times and The New Yorker, Alexandra shared behind-the-scenes insights into working with illustrators, editors and writers, offering a rare insight into how the symbolic images that shape public discourse are created and are created.

The lecture and workshop "The Art of the Spot" led by Alexandra was part of the first installment of the "Social Design" lecture and workshop series, which ran from October 20 to 24. The event will focus on the social contexts of design - the relationship between design, ethics, economics, culture and the environment.

Alexandra Zsigmond's visit is a project implemented by PJAIT and funded by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (FFSB).