Category: Design
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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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Peculiar Photo Books
Once in a while, I write about children’s photo books. Nowadays, most children’s books are illustrated, but there was a glorious period from the 1950s to the early 1980s when the format thrived, only to decline and almost disappear. I researched and collected those books to assess their unique narrative qualities and why the genre…
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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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The Designer as Tiger Woods as Joan Didion
I was laughing, and then I realized plenty of graphic design articles are just like this: “Joan Didion was never a graphic designer, but her writing had qualities for which all designers should strive.” It’s even funnier. From the initial backhanded warning that designers are a separate breed to the inevitable “but”: they can also…
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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…
Unseen by Design 