Category: Design
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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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Graphic Design Tropes: Water on Flat Image
I love Oliver Munday’s cover for The Water Statues. It risks a literal interpretation of the title but pulls it off with an understated suggestion of tears. The use of drops of water over a flat surface, a drawing, or a photo of a statue hints at layers of distance and emotional unavailability. The subdued…
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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…
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Coming soon
I’m working on the second issue of my Impossuivel magazine. A small bilingual yearly publication. This one is about trends in graphic design.
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The Absence of Objects in Design Criticism
In the past two decades, there has been an ever-widening effort to develop forms of graphic design criticism. There are new programs, new writers, new curators, and unusual vehicles and formats. To someone like me, who studied graphic design before that, it is an unbelievable profusion. A sign of that abundance is that most of…
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Arts & Crafts and the Non-human
I’m increasingly interested in non-human-centered design, and one of the places to find its traces may be in pre-modern design. In part, that is why I’m going back to the Arts & Crafts movement, and in particular to the writings of Walter Crane. He was an illustrator and a painter who worked closely with William…
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Arts & Crafts and the Paris Commune
I’m going through Walter Crane’s autobiography. Crane was a painter and illustrator, one of the central figures of the Arts & Crafts movement. Crane’s memoirs are full of fascinating insights. For instance, he crosses paths with several famous exiles from the Paris Commune, such as Louise Michel. A remarkable passage describes the events of the…
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The Inner Life of the Space Between Letters
I’ve just finished watching Simon Schama’s excellent series The Romantics and Us. I’m not a typographically obsessed designer, but I couldn’t help noticing an amusing detail: the title page of the first edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is almost entirely composed of letterspaced lowercase blackletter. Frederic Goudy famously stated that anybody who letterspaced lowercase blackletter…
Unseen by Design 