Category: Design History
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Alda Rosa, Designer
Alda Rosa was one of the great typographic designers of the heroic era of Portuguese design. Perhaps Sebastião Rodrigues is her only peer. By this, I mean that they made a design where typography was part of the whole—no more, no less than that. In other practitioners, like Vitor Palla, there was a strong sense…
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Forget design?
«Forget Photography» has a clever cover for a book that is a great read.1 Andrew Dewdney believes that the paradigm of photography can no longer explain what he calls the networked image. Photography can’t account for its central role in constructing capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Dewdney proposes, in short, to forget photography. He does…
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The missing centennial.
W.A. Dwiggins first used the term graphic design in the text “New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design,” published in August 1922 in a special section of the Boston Evening Transcript devoted to the graphic arts. It was a hundred years ago this August. I waited in vain for the fireworks. As a discipline,…
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What Comes After Form? (2)
If Form is not Design’s paradigm anymore, what comes next? If you’d asked art critic Hal Foster around the turn of the Millenium, he would probably answer Design itself succeeded Form. In 2000, Foster published his influential essay “Design and Crime,” which echoed Adolf Loos’ “Ornament and Crime.” Loos’ text was a violent, often racist…
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What Comes After Form?
There was a time when every other design book or magazine had to mention «form» on its title. When did speaking about form in graphic design begin to feel so dated? It’s not that form has vanished, but designers no longer consider it an overarching problem. It’s taught at school using old Bauhaus or Swiss…
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Design as a morality of form
What had Jan Tschichold and his adversary Max Bill in common? Both equated form with morality. During design’s high modernist phase, it was usual to talk about form in terms of morality, personal but, above all, civic. Good form was a moral and not so much a political objective. On the old form/content divide, politics…
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Form is political
What are we speaking about when we speak about the politics of design? The “First Things First Manifesto,” published originally in 1964 and updated periodically, is an excellent place to search for an answer. In brief, the manifesto appeals to designers to do less publicity work for corporate clients, choosing instead to solve public and…
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Louise Brooks, 1986
If not for the year printed on the lower right corner, you could date this small collection of Louise Brooks’ essays designed by Luís Miguel Castro just by the generous letterspacing. In the first half of the 1980s, it was fashionable to space every typographic element forming grids. The blown-out halftone pattern underlines this formal…
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Max Bill’s Form
I love my copy of Max Bill’s Form, its cloth-bound cover covered in old age spots. A previous owner cut and glued the incredible dust cover on the paste-down endpaper. It was affordable though not cheap, a utilitarian purchase. Many modernist designers believe they can determine an object’s meaning and use once and for all.…
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Design’s Lock
I enjoyed Ruben Pater’s Politics of Design. Pater has a knack for engagingly weaving ideas from a vast array of sources. Now I’m reading Caps Lock, his big book on Design and capitalism. It will be a welcome addition to the bibliography of my design criticism course. There is, however, a detail that tickles one…
Unseen by Design 