Category: Design History
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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…
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Modern Swiss Architecture – Max Bill
Perhaps the most salient feature of being a teacher, researcher, and curator in graphic design history is dealing with images from Philip Meggs, «A History of Graphic Design» – the closest equivalent to a material embodiment of the discipline’s canon. Over the years, I found myself looking for the artifacts that appeared on those pages,…
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Loose teeth
Some years ago, I collected several instances of the same engraved denture for an exhibition. Initially, it appeared on a Deberny & Peignot catalog of stock engravings. Then it found its way to a David Pelham Penguin cover, a recent book about censorship, a thick Portuguese humor anthology. I keep seeing it in all sorts…
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Positive Space
This is one of my favorite 80s book covers. Designed by the incomparable Vaughan Oliver and illustrated by Russell Mills. Both are best known for their work on record jackets, especially for 4AD. I love Oliver’s typography, combining very different fonts in a tight geometric composition eased by the swash of the ‘m’ and the…
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The Designer as Form, the Designer as Fiction
Twenty-one years ago, Ernst Bettler appeared for the first time on the pages of the second issue of Dot Dot Dot magazine. He was a fictional swiss designer character, concocted by Christopher Wilson from a collage of bits and parts nicked from graphic design’s canon – the Container Corporation of America, the Futurists, Muller-Brockmann, Vivarelli,…
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Paul Rand, the Culture Wars and Feminism
Today, I read another raving article about Paul Rand. I like his designs, but I cannot enjoy the hagiographical little stories that people tell about him. His text, Good Design is Goodwill, is still passed around by teachers to students without much commentary as if Rand had written it yesterday. In this essay, Rand explains what it takes…
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Design Over the Phone
In Bob Gill’s New York Times obituary, Michael Beirut talked about the so-called Big Idea style of graphic design: “Bob was not alone in his generation in thinking that you should be able to sell the idea over the phone,” he added, “that it didn’t depend on your color sense or your ability to do…
Unseen by Design 