Icon of the week

Dorothea Lange's photo of a mother with three children during the Great Depression of the 1930s has become one of the true icons of 20th century social photography. The image, taken in California in 1936, is undoubtedly the best known among the countless photos Lange took during her work for the US Farm Security Administration.

Despite being one of the very first photographers to embrace colour photography fully, the second photographer to appear in our 'Icon of the Week' series is relatively little known. A hundred years ago, between 1907 and 1915, Prokudin-Gorsky undertook an ambitious photographic survey of the Russian empire, recording thousands of amazing colour photographs on his travels.

For the very first photographer presented in our 'Icon of the week' series, it is only fitting that we start at the very beginning – with William Henry Fox Talbot.

A few selected brands are lucky enough to attain a status that makes them synonymous with a certain product, but I'm pretty sure that the Swiss Army Knife is unique in having entered popular vocabulary as a synonym for sheer versatility and multi-tasking ability.

This week's design icon is the cover of New Order's album Republic, released in 1993. The sleeve was designed by Peter Saville, who is probably among the best known and admired British graphic designers (if Creative Review reader polls are anything to go by).

For anyone who's been using a Mac for a few years, this week's design icon will be well known. Some of you probably hoped that you would never have to see the ominous 'Mac-bomb' ever again, while others may sense a slight tingle of interface icon nostalgia (to coin a phrase).

We're going way back to 1495 for this week's addition to our series of design icons. What will be next, you might ask, the cavepaintings at Lascaux? Despite its mature age, this is nevertheless a design that is not only historically significant, but also one that most of us see in everyday use on a regular basis, although we might not always be aware of it.

Often described by information designers as “the best information graphic ever made”, Charles Minard's map of Napoleon's march to Moscow, created in 1861, set a defining standard for the representation of statistic information, and has been a favourite among usability experts ever since.

Most large cities have one or several landmarks that have come to represent and define them in the public psyche; Rome has the Colosseum, Paris the Eiffel tower, Toronto the CN Tower and so on. A few cities have characteristic modes of transport too; New York has its yellow cabs, Venice has gondolas and Lisbon the 'funiculars' negotiating the steep streets.

No instrument has had such a profound influence and iconic status in the history of post-war popular music as the Fender Stratocaster. The characteristic Stratocaster head-stock and body design is a shape that has come to intrinsically represent the electric guitar in most people's minds.