I’ve spent a few years examining how the slippery idea of “modernism” was Americanized and soon, thanks to the work of design historian Prof. Christopher Long, whose book on Lucian Bernhard was a boon to our knowledge of early modern practice, there will be more ingredients for the origin-story-stew. Long’s forthcoming book Modern Americanness: New Graphic Design in the United States 1890-1940 (which will be assessed in depth in a future DH column) questions the mythology and truth of modernism as a tool kit of tropes versus what Paul Rand said was modernism’s fluidity and adaptability. In his view, there was a modern spirit rather than modern commandments. Nonetheless, certain principles fortified and underscored that spirit.

So, back to the debate: Who did what and when is a rabbit hole that I’ll avoid for now. In The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design by me and Greg D’Onofrio, we wrote:

Throughout the mid-thirties and forties, Lester Beall was one of the two most influential American graphic designers—the other was Paul Rand—for having introduced European avant-garde concepts of visual expression into an otherwise decorous American graphic design scene. Beall was fluent at translating into American the Constructivist style of the twenties and early thirties, which was characterized by an asymmetrical layering of words and images, dynamic use of flat color and block type, experimental photography, and iconic/ironic photomontage to achieve both an identifiable style and clarity of message. He developed a personal style, exemplified by the three series of Rural Electrification Administration posters he created for the U.S. government between 1937 and 1941, that was exceptionally and emblematically his own.

In a November talk at Poster House New York focusing on Lester Beall’s iconic Rural Electrification Administration posters, Mark Resnick, a leading Beall collector, asserted that Beall was the outlier of modernism in the USA. Rand said that modernism was not composed of one, but many attributes, notably the rejection of conventions, sentimentality, and cliche; it was an approach that embraced the best of the new and re-imagined old methods. This is best illustrated through these covers of Scope magazine, published by Upjohn Pharmaceuticals, designed by Lester Beall between 1944-1948, employing a range of distinctive styles under a wide modern umbrella that rejects dogma, sentimentality, and cliche in favor of new and old imagining. Scope was a hot house for Beall; its editor, Dr. A. Garrard Macleod, gave him freedom to experiment with photography, montage, illustration and bespoke typography. In the spirit of “modernism” Beall said his goal as a designer was to “pave the way for a new visual approach” that advocated the Bauhaus and The New Typography in America.

The post The Daily Heller: The Scope of Lester Beall’s Art and Design appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I stood in the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, having just asked the archivist, “Where can I find the ‘Ukraine in World War II’ folder?” The archivist looked into my eyes for a few awkward seconds; then, she opened the catalog. Her fingers moved nimbly over the glossy pages. “Search in ‘Russia in World War II’ one,” she suggested. Her eyes never lifted from the catalog.

It was not the first time I’d been advised to search for Ukrainian materials in the Russian section, yet I was expecting more from the New York Public Library. “Maybe I can find what I need in the ‘Soviet Union in World War II’ folder?” I proposed, hoping for a more accurate categorization.

She responded briskly, “No, we keep both the Soviet Union and Ukraine in the Russian folder.” I was confused and frustrated. The logic behind this classification seemed alien to me, distorting historical reality. “But it was the USSR that consisted of republics, not Russia. The Russian Federation and Ukraine were once republics of the USSR, not the other way around.”

“Well, that’s how we do it here,” the archivist explained as if blaming me for my lack of understanding of how the world works.

A cultural gap persists in how history is organized and interpreted.

With its rows of shelves holding folders that housed snippets of history frozen in photographs, the setting around us took on a surreal quality. The hushed whispers of researchers, the shuffle of papers, and the soft creaking of the library’s wooden floors underpinned our dialogue. The air in the room carried the weight of historical narratives, both accurate and skewed.

The archivist’s response hinted at a broader misconception prevalent in the Western world—a subtle rewriting of history that overshadowed the distinct identities of nations within the former Soviet Union. A cultural gap persists in how history is organized and interpreted.

I left the library without my requested images but with a lingering realization that how we organize history, even within the hallowed walls of an institution like the New York Public Library, can reflect the biases and oversights of a collective cultural perspective. The dialogue echoed in my mind, reminding me that the search for historical truth is not just about finding the right folder. It is about navigating the layers of interpretation that shape our understanding of the past. As a design writer, I started to think about the influence of the conflation of the words “Soviet” and “Russian” on Ukrainian graphic design.

Search “Ukrainian graphic design,” and you will see art that emerged after the fall of 2022. Yellow and blue posters with anti-war slogans, soldiers, tanks, drops of red on tranquil village landscapes, destroyed buildings, and many more pictures that index sorrow, despair, and hope. Mostly, their creators hoped for help from the outside world. Visual communication could transmit messages to groups with the power to influence the unfolding of events, and graphic design became a successful medium for building a conversation with the Western world.

The term “graphic design” first appeared in a 1922 essay by William Addison Dwiggins called “New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design.” Around that time, Ukrainians had just lost the Ukrainian–Soviet War, which lasted from March 1917 to November 1921. By its end, the Soviet Union absorbed the territory of present-day Ukraine and made it the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The very moment the graphic design appeared in the world, Ukraine disappeared from the political map.

As a republic of the USSR, Ukraine did not have a right to its language, literature, and art. Everything that was created then had to be titled “Soviet.” Those Ukrainians who managed to produce art were killed and accused of nationalism. Their works were saved and renamed “Soviet.” Those artists who followed the Kremlin line were called “Russians.” The written history of that period (written by the USSR) has very little visual evidence of the UKRAINIAN heritage during those years. Yet that does not mean that heritage was absent. You might find evidence of it when checking folders, links, books, and museums of Russian art or, at worst, of the Soviet Union.

Language choices play a crucial role in how people remember the past. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, everything “Soviet” became “Russian.” During the Soviet times, the gems of fifteen Soviet republics were accumulated in the capital of the USSR—Moscow. After the collapse of the superstate, Russia inherited the art of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine. To this day, in the eyes of many, the present-day countries that were once under the USSR’s control are still one big monolithic “Russia.” The West conflates the language, using the adjective “Russian” rather than “Soviet” when meaning “Russian,” “Belarusian,” and “Ukrainian.” The East is saying “Russian,” meaning “Russian”, “Belarusian,” “Georgian,” “Latvianian,” ”Lithuanian,” “Moldovan,” and “Ukrainian.”

Today, Ukrainian graphic design is rooted in national identification, in search of future needs, and in understanding the cultural influence of a painful past on a, once again, painful present.

But what happens if you try to find evidence of Ukrainian graphic design from before 2014 when Russia annexed Ukrainian Crimea, and there appeared an urgency in world attention? Search in English and you will find images and links on war themes. Search for it in the Ukrainian language, and you will see links that I translate as “Design Tells the Story of Independent Ukraine,” “Graphic Design with a Ukrainian Face,” “Discovering Authenticity,” “The Status of Design Development in Ukraine,” and “What design traditions did Ukraine inherit from the Soviet Union?” Click on Images. Most of them were created after 2014, reflecting on the war in Ukraine. Others are in the form of photos from interviews, covers of YouTube videos, and books, inviting the curious reader to check the articles discussing Ukrainian typography, book design, and imagery. These post-2014 discussions claim that Ukrainian art existed for as long as the Ukrainian blood was running and that Ukrainian people were always finding inspiration in their nation’s complicated history. Today, Ukrainian graphic design is rooted in national identification, in search of future needs, and in understanding the cultural influence of a painful past on a, once again, painful present. Their past was abundant in revolutions, wars, losses, and endless efforts to put the country on its feet, leading to a broken heritage that, for centuries, existed in the shadows of other countries.

“The Face of War” [2016] emerged as a testament to the impact of conflict on Ukrainian lives. Crafted by Daria Marchenko in collaboration with American artist Daniel Green. A mosaic portrait of Vladimir Putin, meticulously constructed from bullet casings collected in eastern Ukraine, speaks volumes about the resilience and endurance of the Ukrainian people. Once an instrument of destruction, each bullet casing undergoes an organic metamorphosis, becoming an element of creation. The colors of the casings range from muted metallic grays to darker, oxidized tones, creating a textured surface that reflects the history and impact of each shell.

A graphic designer and illustrator, Maria Kinovych, has created a collection of sixty posters of Ukraine war art. In her “Home soon, dear” [2022], she drew a map of Ukraine, colored in blue and yellow, with the Crimean peninsula, colored in white, blue, and red. The hand above Crimea holds an eraser, freeing the yellow land of the peninsula from the colors of the Russian flag. Another poster titled “80 days of the full-scale Russian invasion. I almost forgot what I was like before all these rockets and tanks” shows a half of a black silhouette of a woman blurred on the red background.

Posters (all unnamed) by Maria Kinovych

Today, the Ukrainian graphic design identity is strong, but for a sad reason. Even though it is working in the country’s favor, addressing the current problems and communicating them to a broad audience, the traditional Ukrainian design is yet to be uncovered by the world. The nation’s cultural tapestry is encoded in a palette of deep reds, blues, yellows, and greens, each color carrying historical and symbolic significance. These hues echo the vibrant landscapes, traditional costumes, and folklore. The use of bold colors serves as a visual celebration of the country’s vitality and resilience. The geometric design connects graphic design to the country’s textile heritage. Floral patterns communicate a connection to nature. Folk symbols create a visual dialogue with Ukraine’s historical narrative. Embroidery, a cherished Ukrainian craft, significantly influences graphic design. Traditional embroidery’s intricate stitches and patterns resonate with contemporary graphic elements, fostering a connection between the past and the present.

Ukrainian motifs in unnamed works by Maria Kinovych

When I think of Ukrainian art, the first thing that comes to mind is the Petrykivka painting style, with its intricate floral and plant motifs. It suffused so many household items in my childhood: wooden spoons, ceramic plates, vases, and other household items depicting asters, dahlias, roses, chamomile, and fruits combined in fantasy compositions of plants and shrubs. Sometimes, floral patterns were combined with the images of birds and animals. Originating in the village of Petrykivka, this unique painting style is a hallmark of Ukrainian folk art that has recently inspired Ukrainian graphic designers. Characterized by its intricate floral and plant motifs, the Petrykivka paintings blend colors and a distinctive freehand technique. The style originated in the 17th century, and its continuation signifies a commitment to preserving cultural heritage. Graphic designers draw inspiration from the organic forms and vibrant palette, incorporating the Petrykivka elements into logos, posters, and digital designs. Flowers, birds, and animals depicted in the Petrykivka paintings often carry symbolic meanings, connecting the artwork to themes of fertility, protection, and spirituality. As an integral part of Ukraine’s artistic heritage, the Petrykivka motifs tell stories and evoke a sense of national pride in contemporary graphic design. Inga Yoon, a digital illustrator, developed an online course, Petrykivka Ukrainian Folk Art: Digital Floral Illustration. Using a combination of gouache and watercolor, she teaches foreign audiences to draw in the Petrykivka style. She presents Ukraine as a modern country with original art, creating designs using the Petrykivka technique for lush and life-affirming paintings.

After the dialogue with the archivist of the NYPL Picture Collection, I kept searching for answers. I bought a ticket for the “Decolonizing Ukrainian Design” event organized by the Ukrainian Museum and Cooper Union’s Herb Lubalin Study Center. There, two graphic designers, Aliona Solomadina and Yurko Gutsulyak, a professor of Ukrainian Literature and Language at the University of Manitoba, Dr. Myroslav Shkandrij, and the curator of the Lubalin Center, Alexander Tolchilovsky, discussed the ongoing efforts to correct Russian and Soviet colonialism in Ukrainian design, with a particular focus on graphic design and typography. Yurko Gutsulyak stated, “Over the past decade, Ukrainian graphic design has undergone a revolution. Its roots are being slowly decolonized.” Since the beginning of the war, Ukrainians stopped being so focused on Western culture, centering their attention around their heritage. I am heartened that the Ukrainians attempt to decolonize Ukrainian graphic design. Still, it will take a long time before I can walk into a Western library and search for Ukrainian art directly in the Ukrainian section. Today, Ukrainian graphic design artists do not have enough time and resources to dive into the rich cultural past, mainly focusing on yellow and blue posters with military scenes through which they address the urgent pain of their nation–war.

It is difficult to imagine the future of the Ukrainian design. What visual language will be created after the war is over? Will Ukrainians struggle with distancing their works from the war themes? Have they already built an identity of an oppressed nation that only talks about sadness? Ukrainian graphic designers must answer these questions soon so we do not have to live in a world where Ukrainian art is left to be discovered in Russian folders.

This is a guest post by postgraduate design researcher, writer, and adventurer El. Stern. Her research explores the influence of design within mass media on identity formation.

Header image: “Home soon, dear” by Maria Kinovych

The post Decolonizing Design: Ukraine’s Fight for Visual Identity appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

It was one of a dozen Q-and-As we did together. He had claimed he preferred this format to giving a lecture. Indeed he was in his comfort zone.

Below are selected clips from the Cooper Union evening event, starting with my introduction of Rand.

Below, Rand responds to W.A. Dwiggins’ critique of modern designers, which he derisively called “those Rand boys,” accused of disrupting typographic conventions and following the Bauhaus approach and tradition (which Rand called “very vague.”)

Rand discusses the role of intuition and play in art and design, below. “I just like being playful,” he said.

Rand on art schools in general, the content of textbooks, and the teachers, “of course.” Most teachers, he said, talk about technique, biography, and if lucky, aesthetics and beauty, another vague topic, which is usually drowning in sentimentality . . . (below)

On Rand’s first introduction to the Bauhaus, which was never mentioned in art school (below). Rand told his mom he wanted to go. “Fortunately we were too poor . . . ,” or Mr. Hitler would have got him, he said.

In this last clip, Rand discusses the role of imitation in art and design — in fact, the necessity of doing so. “Even Picasso imitates,” he said. He also talks about the need to have good — enthusiastic — clients in order to do good work. “I don’t know how you get them,” he noted, “you just have to be lucky.”

The post The Daily Heller: Excerpts From Paul Rand’s Penultimate Public Conversation, 1996 appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

The Artifacts from the Eames Collection is a series of catalogs that comprehensively documents pieces from the Eames Institute collection, making these iconic designs more widely accessible to all, thus further advancing the legacy of 20th-century designers Ray and Charles Eames.

The Eames Institute has already offered themed virtual exhibitions and is thrilled to continue its growth into the physical print medium. Forty-thousand+ objects have been lovingly collected, preserved, restored, and documented by the Eames Institute so far, with Artifacts from the Eames Collection presenting curated selections from these objects in six thematically themed catalogs: Tables, Ray’s Hand, Eames Aluminum Group, Toys & Play, Steinberg Meets the Eames, and Postcards. (The first five have already been released, with the Postcards catalog coming soon.) Many of the objects featured in these editions have never been seen before, and all have been newly photographed to highlight design details.

Each catalog includes an introductory note from Llisa Demetrios, Chief Curator of the Eames Institute and granddaughter of Ray and Charles, and an essay written by a leading design expert. The catalogs also present a variety of archival material and photography from the Eames Office, Library of Congress, and the archives of Herman Miller and Vitra.

The catalogs are softcover with a short cover wrap and a special insert and range from 122–172 pages. They are available for purchase from the Eames Institute here.

The post All the Eames That’s Fit to Print appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Those who were there remember that compulsive uncovering of the new. Take the genres of the time—jungle, ragga, drum n’ bass, goa trance, hard house, French house, tech step, hard step, and on and on. The distinctions don’t seem important now, but at the time this was important stuff. Once a sound was conquered, the rules and norms were drawn up, and with boundaries in place, they were abandoned for new sounds.

Amongst all that discovery, no one took sound farther afield than a group of electronic musicians in Cologne in the mid-1990s, and one designer was responsible for creating their record art. From their perch on the shelves of the new and still slim electronic music section of the record store, Frieda Luczak’s designs pulled us in and introduced us to the new and indescribable.

Her covers from that time capture what brought people to that specific type of left-field music. Not a love of technology, but a new form of beauty that only technology could allow—an alien kind of beauty.

“Frieda is a curious mind,” says Jan St. Werner of the electronic duo Mouse on Mars, “as modest and cautious as she’s into change and new ways to see and do things.” She doesn’t have much of an ego, he adds, “We surely forgot her name a few times on projects, sleeves, etc. and she had never been upset about it.” Luczak who describes herself as “much fantasy, much anxiety,” was born in an evolving rural Düsseldorf that was home to a strange mix of professional commuters and villagers. A next-door neighbor would shoot into a cherry tree to keep the birds from eating the cherries. There, she was first exposed to design through the Letraset letters her father, “an architect with talents in designing futuristic living spaces, but with two left hands,” used for his building plans.

After a rigorous design program at university, she took a break and moved to Cologne, where she would fall in with a community centered around A-Musik, an independent record store and label for experimental music. In the avant-garde, she says, “Money isn’t the key, but changing views of what beauty is.” Amongst their activities—exhibitions, publications, filmmaking, and concerts—Luczak soon found herself as their cover artist. After being introduced by another designer, Mouse on Mars instantly knew they wanted to work with her. She became the designer for Mouse on Mars, St. Werner’s solo work, his label Sonig, and other associated acts, making covers, posters, stickers, ads, and merch.

Her covers from that time capture what brought people to that specific type of left-field music. Not a love of technology, but a new form of beauty that only technology could allow—an alien kind of beauty. Inspired by the destructive punk art and home computer craft, and after what she calls, “absolutely unleashed discussions about why one detail is more inventive than another,” she designed some of the most beautiful and imaginative record covers of the ‘90s. “We wanted to have no reference to anything we had previously done,” she said. St. Werner recalls “playing her our music, telling her the ideas we had around the songs, how they had come about technically, the threads and revelations we had while recording them.” These discussions could have gone on for years and only stopped because of deadlines. 

“We never thought of sleeve art as something that would sell the music,” St. Werner says, “but rather [it would] tell its own story in dialogue with the music.” Tom Steinle, who hired her to do covers for several Tomlab records for artists like The Books, also says Luczak’s work was “a second artistic layer,” but adds that she “had a talent for developing a brand for the musician.” 

I first encountered Luczak’s work in a small record store in a small Vermont town. It called to me plain and simple, probably because it looked absolutely nothing like trees. Life in Vermont, and all printed matter associated with it, looks like trees. Logcabin.ttf, I’m looking at you. Luczak’s work was pure alien. How did this weird music and art make it from Cologne to New England? Like all great artistic revolutions this period had a lot to do with the supply chain. Specifically, CDs, those beautiful iridescent disks where music was data. The profit margins were much greater, and CDs could be produced much quicker, so the major labels installed CDs as the ruling format of the era. With the addition of new digital recording and mastering technologies, suddenly the overhead for an independent record label became much lower. If you had a unique vision, you could have one tool. Maybe more than punk, this was independence. CDs, that’s how new ideas were distributed and conversations could play out between restless artists across the world.

Luczak created the packaging for influential albums by Markus Popp, recording under the moniker Oval, whose early records were constructed out of sounds from scratched CDs. Popp would talk about “music as software” and “file management.” That sounds pointy-headed, but the records are carefully composed, abstractly beautiful, and quite listenable despite coming with a hefty thesis. But that listenability was obvious from Luczak’s album art. Using a copy of Cinema4D, which she didn’t quite know how to use (and which looked very different than today’s C4D), she built lush, organic landscapes out of pixelated 3D forms and somehow seemed to reference both Cy Twombly and Microsoft Excel graphs. The writer Mark Richardson, who wrote a feature on Oval’s second album for Pitchfork 20 years after its release, describes it as, “the tension between digital precision and the uncertainty of nature… Luczak’s imagery captured this dichotomy beautifully.”

Tim Saputo, a designer and former Art Director of electronic music magazine XLR8R, says that her records, “tap into an impossible beauty, objects and color bloom and blur. They suggest a freeze frame of some kind of dance, there is so much movement and beauty, and I think it lends those Oval records a certain softness and expansiveness that I don’t know if it would be present if it wasn’t presented with such grace.” 

There seems to be so much depth to these covers because they were mere snapshots of an expansive world developed through a years-long collaboration between Luczak and Oval. Popp explains that he would imagine a scene—a virtual location—and then Luczak would attempt to realize it. They would explore and document this environment by capturing stills using the software’s virtual camera. “We developed these fantastical 3D worlds, following the logic of an imaginary… game engine.” He points out that this was “decades before 3D game engines like Unity were on the horizon” and adds that he doubts Luczak has ever played a modern immersive video game.

Her designs and design language would also extend to the user interface of Oval’s Ovalprocess software, an interactive musical tool that allowed users to create their own version of Oval’s music. This software was made available in several art installations that featured a large sculptural kiosk—a small part of the world they built made tangible through 3D printing.

Left: Ovalprocess software’s user interface, 2002; Right: The Ovalprocess software’s help screen, 2002

Her work for Mouse on Mars is some of her most noteworthy. Like the band itself (which can go from a sound that I can only describe as a “tiny squish” to a full marching band in a matter of seconds), her work dips in and out of abstraction and joyful associations. Her cover for the US release of Niun Niggung features a crude, amoeba-like 3D hairbrush combing what is presumably hair. As a bonus, the liner notes were a fold-out poster of the hairbrush in an oddly intimate position with another hairbrush. St. Werner suspects but does not know for sure, that the cover features an image of Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor at the time. Unlike the maximalism of this 3D work, her designs on their Idiology and Agit Itter It It albums were flat black-and-white dadaism via MacPaint and seemed to predict the anti-design of studios like Hort.

Left: Cover of Niun Niggung (1999) by Mouse On Mars, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA; Right: Poster insert of Niun Niggung (1999) by Mouse On Mars, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA.

Left: Cover of Agit Itter It It (2001) by Mouse On Mars, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA; Top right: Cover of Diskdusk (1999) by Mouse On Mars, released by Sonig in Europe; Bottom right: Record label of Diskdusk (1999) by Mouse On Mars, released by Sonig in Europe.

Today, Luczak has no social media (“too shy,” she says) and primarily focuses on corporate design work. One of her most important clients is a funeral home. She tells me, “The key is empathy and modernity,” when working with a funeral home. While the music industry has changed, and there’s less design floating in its orbit, she’s still designing records. The back cover of  Kid Millions and Jan St. Werner’s Imperium Droop is a pattern that is hard to place. It could be Mesoamerican-inspired? Or maybe thermal imaging of a refrigerator evaporator coil? From this pattern, two glyphs are placed on the front cover, perplexing, totemic, and mischievous as ever.

Left: Front cover of Imperium Droop (2021) by Kid Millions & Jan St. Werner, released by Thrill Jockey; Right: Back cover of Imperium Droop (2021) by Kid Millions & Jan St. Werner, released by Thrill Jockey.

I no longer have a CD collection, but I do have one CD, Oval’s Szenariodisk—a digipak, made of print cardboard that, unlike a plastic jewel case with a locking mechanism, swings open naturally like a book. For this article, I had to rebuild this design from Luczak’s ancient QuarkXpress file and discovered a beautiful hidden forest. Not a metaphorical forest of meaning, but an actual photo of a forest hidden in the design, mapped onto 3D cubes. Twenty-five years later, I fell in love all over again. 

Left: Record label of Szenario Europa (1999) by Oval, released by Form & Function in Europe; Right: Record label of Szenario USA (1999) by Oval, released by Thrill Jockey in the USA. Note the subtle type changes.

Why is this work so interesting all these years later? Tom Steinle explains it like this (although many others I spoke to said the same thing): Luczak always focused on the content of the object she was designing, not what was happening around her aesthetically at the time. What was happening around her at the time? Mostly the cool, ironic corporatism best embodied by studios like The Design Republic. TDR loved to revel in the transactional nature of the whole thing, but, to be fair, that was another thing CDs are known for. Luczak’s work isn’t couched in irony—she seems unable to approach anything with irony. Her work is earnest and big-hearted. And so this is a story of genre. You can borrow some of the genre’s energy, some of its buzzy interest, and put it right into your own work free of charge. But that energy is on loan and you must give it back. One day, sooner than you think, it will look tired. This is what the economic philosopher Thorstein Veblen describes as “the process of developing an aesthetic nausea.” And it is doubly true if you borrow from a genre in revival. Luczak never touched that genre stuff; she was too curious for that, and it helped that the musicians she worked with were too. This is the real work of creativity: to make the unknown so beautiful and intriguing that we are lured farther and farther into the new.

Phillip Nessen is a Brooklyn-based designer, strategist, and educator. He is the founder of Nessen Company, a studio with a focus on building distinctive, performant brands and consumer packaged goods.

Header image: Promotional poster for Ovalcommers (2001) by Oval, released by Form & Function in Europe.

The post Beautiful Unknown: The Y2K Album Cover Art of Frieda Luczak appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Cue the collective groan.

But, but! We’d be remiss if we didn’t pay our respects to this much-maligned specimen of typography history. I chatted with Monotype Creative Type Director Terrence Weinzierl, co-designer of the 2011 extension, Comic Sans Pro.

Fresh out of school, Weinzierl was working at Ascender during the MS Office 2010 release, working on bringing OpenType features to the software’s core typefaces (Comic Sans, Impact, Trebuchet, etc.).

“Vincent Connaire drew the original typeface using only his mouse. It was a digital typeface from birth,” Weinzierl said. “To create Pro, I mimicked Connaire’s process. Using a Wacom tablet, I drew all the new characters, ligatures, dingbats, swash caps, everything.” Weinzierl also designed italic styles (Connaire’s original only offered regular and bold).

“The irony was not lost on me—adding professional features to a cartoon typeface,” he said. “When we released the retail version as Comic Sans Pro, we did it on April Fools Day.”

But, for all the ridicule (even the self-deprecating kind), perhaps Comic Sans deserves a reconsideration.

In a recent conversation with Brad Atkinson, creator of the Braille Institute’s Atkinson Hyperlegible, I learned that teachers love Comic Sans. Classrooms have tested it against workhorses like Arial and Helvetica). Whether down to “ugliness” or its spacious aperture, students retained more of what they learned when it was delivered in Comic Sans.

There’s also some talk about Comic Sans being dyslexia-friendly (though I haven’t found any specific studies where the typeface was actually studied in this regard). The things that potentially make it so (such as open character spacing) are also true about many other typefaces.

“It’s so human, modest, and approachable, and people see themselves in it.” Weinzierl, who has a seven-year-old, said of Comic Sans’ appeal. “It doesn’t look serious or scary. You don’t want them to be overwhelmed by learning to read and write. Comic Sans looks like a child’s handwriting. It looks like how teachers teach kids to write letters (like the i with a serif or a single story a).”

There’s also the subtext of Comic Sans that speaks to a different kind of accessibility: it’s not for designers (read: it’s not for aesthetes), it’s democratic in its personality—an approachable font for everyone. And not only because it’s been on every Windows computer for decades.

One example of this is the let’s-just-call-it strategic use of the Comic Sans on Tory social feeds in the lead-up to the Brexit vote, which seemed to thumb its nose at the left-leaning voter with self-awareness. (It also could have come down to a split-second decision by a well-meaning intern on a fast-moving campaign, but exploring the former is interesting.)

Ten years ago, Comic Sans appeared on t-shirts in response to Eric Garner’s brutal murder at the hands of the NYPD. Garner’s words, “I can’t breathe,” laid out in all caps, overwhelmingly in Comic Sans, became a striking black-and-white show of solidarity worn by NBA players in the weeks after his death. Critics came calling. The content of the message wasn’t up for debate; the font choice was. But, as John Brownlee pointed out in Fast Company, “Comic Sans is better than any other font at conveying innocence.” What better way to illustrate the tragedy of Eric Garner’s senseless killing? “It can be a very powerful typeface when used well,” Brownlee wrote.

The shirt the Bull’s Derrick Rose wore during pre-game warm-up is now in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture.

Isn’t design’s highest power in sparking conversation?

Great Design is always up for debate. Great, after all, is subjective. It can be a bit like Marmite—you’re a fan or not. Good design, however, is effective design—effective in delivering information to encourage a response.

“It’s not just a joke typeface,” said Weinzierl. “It’s also very human. Art doesn’t have to be beautiful to be effective.” In this, Comic Sans will continue to have a role to play.

While there are no plans to design a Comic Sans 3.0, if Weinzierl was tasked with this challenge, he said it would be all about the variability. But, he also acknowledges that, especially with a typeface like Comic Sans, it wouldn’t be recognizable if you change the core too much. “It would have to balance newness and comfort and maintain a lot of that original DNA.”

Let’s be honest. If someone were to create a contemporary take on Comic Sans, imagine, for a moment, the ensuing firestorm from all sides of the debate. In its own way, Weinzierl believes that Comic Sans is an artifact and an icon.

When I asked him about his favorite sighting of Comic Sans in the wild, he said. “I saw it on a menu at a local Thai restaurant. Seeing it used in a fast-casual noodle shop was memorable but maybe not my favorite. It’s interesting when it shows up in places like that. A professional designer didn’t design it, but it’s endearing. I respect the restaurant owner for the choice.”

“Comic Sans is kind of like Crocs,” Weinzierl said. “It doesn’t have to be a formal, slick typeface to be a successful thing.”

So, happy 30th, Comic Sans. In the words of a fellow designer,

What would our visual landscape be without dear Comic Sans? It tries so hard to be liked
and knows no limits of context, taking even the most serious things in stride. But watch out—
it can stir lollipop cravings and send one’s imagination out on roller skates!

Don Tarallo, Typeface Designer and Graphic Designer, Tarallo Design

The post For Comic Sans’ 30th Birthday, a Reconsideration? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Designer (textiles, furniture, and interiors), graphic designer, and architect Alexander Girard refused to be boxed in by medium or style. He played with an aesthetic uniquely his own—defying the design canon. You may not know something to be “an Alexander Girard,” but his work is most definitely stamped on your design DNA.

Here are just some of the phrases Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee, our guests and collaborators on Let The Sun In, used to describe the ineffable Alexander Girard:

“An incredible synthesizer.”

“A joyous creator.”

“Endless cross-pollination.”

“Inspired by everything.”

“Would have been himself anywhere.”

“Both timeless and ahead of his time.”

Todd Oldham’s first exposure to Girard was at eight or nine years old, in DFW’s new Braniff terminal. Oldham remembered being surrounded by patterns and color (and being able to touch the dinosaur bones they had excavated while building the new terminal). That explosion of color and pattern, though he didn’t know it then, was courtesy of a collaboration between Alexander Girard and Emilio Pucci to redesign every aspect of Braniff International Airways. Oldham later learned the extent of the Braniff project: Girard and Pucci designed 17,000 items across 80 colorways (luggage tags, ticket jackets, timetables, seat fabric, the actual jets!).

Kiera Coffee’s recognition of Girard happened naturally as a design writer. She had long admired his work without knowing his name and understanding who he was. Coffee’s collaboration with Oldham on Girard has been an ongoing project. Let The Sun In is the second book on the artist they’ve worked together on. (Fun fact: the first had serious “plunk value,” weighing nearly twelve pounds!) Let The Sun In is the perfect coffee table size.

This book is glorious everything. It’s the superstar tribute [Alexander Girard] deserves.

Todd Oldham

How do you encapsulate Alexander Girard’s singularly open and curious mind in a short recap? We can’t. But we hope you’ll register here to watch the recording and buy your copy of Let The Sun In.

Here are some additional links worth your time:

The gorgeous Girard Studio website.

Girard’s work on the La Fonda del Sol restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, in Architectural Digest.

More about a fan favorite: Girard’s John Deere mural.

A fun feature on the Braniff redesign by Billie Muraben: “The End of the Plain Plane.”

Coming up on November 21, the PRINT Book Club will welcome Nicolas Heller, aka New York Nico. Look for an announcement soon!

The post Book Club Recap: Celebrating Joyous Creator Alexander Girard appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Mostafa Asadollahi was among the first graduates of the Graphic Design program at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, in 1976. Unlike the previous generation of graphic designers, mainly painting graduates, Asadollahi studied graphic design academically, though he had previously studied painting at the Tehran School of Fine Arts. Asadollahi found influence in teachers such as Morteza Momayez and Jalal Shabahangi in the field of graphic design and by professors like Karl Schlamminger, Rouin Pakbaz, Sima Kouban, Violette Mottahedeh, and Parviz Tanavoli, who taught the foundations of art. He describes that period: “Part of the exercises in college were related to the pure and essential expressions of graphic design, where we sought concepts. There, I developed an interest in simple and unadorned graphic design: the fewest fonts and colors for the greatest expression.” Subsequently, Asadollahi’s graphic design oeuvre draws on geometry, which is influenced by modernism and constructivism. His refined approach later incorporated classical Iranian art, making him one of Iran’s most unique and celebrated graphic designers.

Clockwise, from upper left: (1) Poster, The 9th Tehran International Poster Biennial, 2007; (2) Logo, Tehran International Poster Biennial, 2004; (3) Poster, Book Week, 1993; (4) Logotype, Kalameh weekly magazine, 1992; (5) Logotype, International News Network, 2001

Mostafa Asadollahi’s influence in my life reflects his generous nature and professional character as a mentor, graphic designer, friend, and colleague. All three roles hold equal priority; just as his role as a designer was of particular significance, his roles as a teacher and colleague were equally important. Asadollahi’s aesthetic, which made use of the three primary shapes, makes me think of each as an aspect of his influence: squares symbolizing his role as an educator, triangles a nod to his identity as a designer, and circles encompassing his professional persona.

Mentor

My most fundamental relationship with Mostafa Asadollahi involves his mentorship. He was one of the most influential, disciplined, and capable instructors during my studies at the College of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran in the 1990s. Having dedicated nearly three decades of his professional life to education, his passion for teaching was evident, paying attention to each student’s needs and supporting their growth. He was a beloved educator. His classes, especially those on poster and packaging design, are fond memories of my studies in the early 1990s. Asadollahi modeled strategy, discipline, and structure in the graphic design practice, which significantly impacted my work. His authorship of three books from the “Graphic Design Fundamentals for Visual Communication” series, including Environmental Graphic Design (2016), The Language and Expression of Imagery (2018), and Poster Design (2022), is the result of over five decades of teaching and professional experience.

Graphic Designer

Following in the footsteps of great designers such as Sadegh Barirani, Morteza Momayez, Ghobad Shiva, Mohammad Ehsaei, Farshid Mesghali, and Ebrahim Haghighi, I found Mostafa Asadollahi to be a uniquely distinguished graphic designer. Initially, I found his works overly rigid, but as I became more familiar with his perspective, I realized that he was a graphic designer unlike any who came before or after. One of his most brilliant works, a poster for the 5th Biennial Exhibition of Works by Iranian Graphic Designers (1996), helped me grasp the depth of his point of view as a graphic designer. In the poster, the tree balances simplicity and visual complexity, a nod to the dynamism of the graphic design profession. This work opened my eyes to his earlier poster masterpieces—such as the one for the Iranian Cultural Exhibition in Almaty (1992) and later works like the Book Week poster (1997). Asadollahi also designed remarkable logos for various companies and institutions, including Asia Insurance (1990), International News Network (2001), and the Tehran International Poster Biennial (2004), which, after nearly three decades, remain fresh, effective, and relevant.

Left: Poster, Exhibition of Iranian Culture in Kazakhstan, 1992; Right: Poster, Book Week, 1997

Logotypes: (Top) Day Bank, 2009; (Bottom Left) Asia Insurance Company, 1990; (Bottom right) Taban Printing, 1996

Friend and Colleague

The Iranian Graphic Designers’ Society (IGDS), established in 1998 through the persistence of Morteza Momayez and the collective efforts of several graphic designers, played a significant role in my relationship with Mostafa Asadollahi as a friend and colleague. During the three years (2003 to 2006) when he served as the board of directors president, I had the opportunity to work closely with him as the board treasurer. At that time, in addition to teaching and his professional graphic design work, he dedicated a large portion of his daily schedule to guild activities, organizing, and managing the profession of graphic design. This aspect of his personality reminded me that graphic designers must pay attention to industry and professional matters alongside their educational and professional responsibilities to ensure strong and enduring societies (outside of the governmental realm).

Posters, left to right: Commemoration of the Cultural Heritage & the International Museum Day, 2002; Polish Posters 2, 1973; Poster, Coffee-House Painting Exhibition, 2007

In 2019, when he was living in Toronto, his collection of works, Fifty Years of Graphic Design by Mostafa Asadollahi: 1968–2018, was published in Tehran. I brought him a copy on a trip to Toronto, but I couldn’t resist asking if I could open the package to have the first look. It was a fitting and comprehensive look at Asadollahi’s life and career. Though Mostafa Asadollahi, the patient teacher, brilliant graphic designer, and my responsible friend and colleague, is no longer with us, his legacy lives on among Iran’s most influential graphic designers.

Majid Abbasi is the design director of Studio Abbasi, an internationally active studio based in Tehran and Toronto. He leads design projects for start-ups, non-profits, and cultural institutions, specializing in visual identity and wayfinding. A member of IGDS and AGI, Abbasi contributes to the global design scene as an instructor, jury member, and writer. From 2010 to 2020, he was editor-in-chief of Neshan, Iran’s leading graphic design magazine. He is currently editing a book on the history of Iranian graphic design.

The post Remembering Mostafa Asadollahi (1950-2024) appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Miller’s new historical memoir, Here: Where the Black Designers Are, is part of this topical resurgence with Cheryl Miller at the helm, but it’s also the story of a woman coming into her purpose, a reflection on all she’s learned, and a passing of the baton to the next generation. Steven Heller and Debbie Millman will discuss the book with Miller at our next PRINT Book Club on Thursday, October 17.

Miller and I chatted recently; excerpts from our conversation are below.

Advocacy and activism are just part of Cheryl Miller’s DNA. Growing up in Washington D.C. (her father, what she called a “highbrow negro politician”), Miller’s upbringing was somewhat insulated amidst the backdrop of Black nationalism, “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” and Nina Simone, her father scooting out the back door to attend the March on Washington. She was busy “dancing and graduating” when MLK was assassinated. “I was a kid,” Miller said, “I didn’t realize I was deep in a big part of history.”

Design was also a central theme of Miller’s childhood. Dansk flatware, ceramics, and jewelry filled her family home, carefully wrapped in local newspapers and shipped by her West Indian grandmother, a perfumier. The juxtaposition of the muted, minimalist, function-forward Scandinavian housewares with the newspapers’ Afro-Caribbean iconography and the family’s traditional, patterned textiles of the Danish West Indies (now the Virgin Islands), planted the seeds of design. However, she wouldn’t realize this until she landed in the commercial/graphic art program at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art).

Often, we have to go back to move forward. We all have those foundational things that shape us, and if we’re listening and open to the world as adults, these things tend to bring us to our purpose. Talking about her childhood resonances made me curious. Miller’s career could’ve gone in a myriad of different directions. I wondered about those moments of change, choice, and struggle in Miller’s life—what, in hindsight, does she believe made the most significant impact?

One of those pivotal moments was the death of her father. Miller was in her first year of art school at RISD. “I went up to RISD to paint,” she says, utterly unaware of the conversations swirling around the school about the value of Black art, the ongoing civil and human rights violations, and the Vietnam War. Moving to Waspy New England from D.C. was a culture shock, and she felt the isolation of being one of very few African-American students. Her father would soon be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and would pass away ten months later. Miller moved closer to home, where she would study graphic design at MICA in Baltimore (the only regional school with a commercial art program). There, she met Leslie King-Hammond, a woman who would serve as her academic mentor (and still does).

Moving to New York with Phillip, the couple met in high school, was juncture number two. The move required her to leave her burgeoning broadcast design career in D.C. to start over essentially. Miller could’ve picked up the broadcast career in NYC without a beat—she had a tempting offer at ABC—but she felt the pull towards publication design. “I wanted the dream of what New York could be.” She contends that had she taken the ABC job (a job that, by any account, would’ve set her up for a successful and financially rewarding career), “I wouldn’t have made the contribution I did, had I taken it.” Miller decided to go to grad school instead, entering Pratt. Many of the things she’d seen at RISD and in Baltimore coalesced with what she was experiencing as a Black designer in NYC.

Being in New York really brought into light that Black designers were underexposed and under-educated in the field of graphic design. My community was suffering and I had something to say.

Cheryl D. Miller

On the cusp of finishing her graduate degree, her advisor threw her a gauntlet: instead of a graduate design project, Miller was to undertake a written thesis. She called King-Hammond, who encouraged her toward scholarship. “I started learning how to write history, about social justice. I started owning my skillset,” Miller said. “Leslie gave me the heart and the rigor for the work. The only way I was going to be able to make a difference was in the footnotes. Data and scholarship move the needle.”

Miller at the helm of her successful design studio, Cheryl D. Miller Design (1984-2000); In 1992, Miller was commissioned by NASA to create the poster for Dr. Mae Jeminson, America’s first African American woman astronaut.

I may not look radical, but I am.

Cheryl D. Miller

The third moment is our current moment, the resurgence of the social justice conversation in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and far too many others. The next generation is asking many of the same questions as Miller and her peers have asked in their time, “There’s nothing new about this,” Miller contends. She readily admits that after fifty years in the business, she doesn’t expect that 3-4% representative number to jump up suddenly. “Where the Civil Rights Movement pushed the idea of equality, it didn’t mean that it would then be equitable,” she said. What is Miller’s prescription for what needs to happen now so our industry can bolster the equity of opportunity for Black creative talent? “We need to diversify design organization boards, we desperately need professors who are versed in a broader cultural perspective, we need more inclusive curricula, we need network affiliations that will offer us business opportunities, and we must carry on,” Miller said.

So, what would Miller like to dismantle in this time of sustained awareness and activism, her “Confederate statue”? “I want to take down the players who make you feel with intentionality that you’re not supposed to be here and the cult of the mid-century male designer,” Miller said. “It’s the imagery of my oppressor.”

But Miller is also an optimist, and she believes, as does Kamala Harris, “We’re not going back.” To close her book, Miller includes a quote from her commencement speech, an inspirational baton passing, to the RISD class of 2022:

Be better than the history I’ve traveled through and make your history far more inclusive and welcoming for everyone to encounter.

Cheryl D. Miller to RISD’s class of 2022

Cheryl Miller is still writing, researching, and advocating for recognizing and celebrating the Black designer and artisan’s contributions to society. Still, she’ll admit, “On this side of the story, I’ve done more finishing than starting.”

There is always more to do.

It is always essential to have people like Miller remind us to look and to see things as they are, not as they are curated for us.

I have only scratched the surface; there is much more to Cheryl Miller’s story. We hope you can join us next Thursday, October 17, for the first of two PRINT Book Club events this month!

The post “Be Better than the History I’ve Traveled,” a Chat with Cheryl D. Miller appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

For more on Steven Heller, you can also read PRINT’s recent interview with Heller, his wife Louise Fili, and their son Nicolas Heller (aka New York Nico). Grab a coffee or a cup of tea, the Heller-Fili family roundtable is worth a diversion.

Welcome to the DesignThinkers Podcast! Join host and RGD President Nicola Hamilton as she digs into the archives of the DesignThinkers conference, reconnecting with past speakers about their talks and ideas that have shaped Canada’s largest graphic design conference. Follow the RGD on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit them at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.

The post DesignThinkers Podcast: Steven Heller appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

There’s little else in America as inherently nostalgic as a bowling alley. From those ‘90s kids such as myself who grew up attending duckpin bowling birthday parties at kitschy spots in suburban strip malls to those who remember high school dates spent at the local lanes, to grow up in the States is to have a heartfelt reverence for the institution of the bowling alley.

The signature style and aesthetic of bowling alley architecture is central to their mystique, which originally developed in mid-century California after World War II, in an effort to get more people going to the lanes. Suffice it to say, the strategy worked, with bowling alleys blooming nationwide. The history of this bowling alley boom is beautifully preserved and articulated in a new book from Angel City Press of the Los Angeles Public Library, Bowlarama: The Architecture of Mid-Century Bowling.

Written by the LA preservationist and senior editor at Los Angeles Magazine, Chris Nichols, along with historian, advocate, and former president of the Museum of Neon Art, Adriene Biondo, Bowlarama encapsulates the enthusiasm and splendor surrounding mid-century bowling alley culture through vintage photographs, ephemera, and hand-drawn architectural renderings.

An architectural style called Googie architecture was the dominant look of this era of bowling alley design, which is characterized by space-age shapes, materials, signage, and more, meant to catch the eye and entice onlookers. Last year, I took a tour of relics of Googie architecture that remain in Los Angeles with Nichols himself as the charismatic tour guide. Considering the grip Googie had on LA in the 50s and 60s, it’s no surprise the city served as the epicenter for the mid-century bowling alley frenzy portrayed in Bowlarama.

For gamers and architecture buffs alike, Bowlarama is an at-home library must-have. So many bowling lane structures are no longer with us following the crash of the craze in 1962; Bowlarama is a critical historical record that helps keep them alive.

Hero image above: The gloriously googie Covina Bowl (1956, Powers, Daly & DeRosa), shortly after it was completed in 1956, was an instant landmark in the new suburbs. (Photo credit: Charles Phoenix)

The post A New Book Honors the Bygone Bowling Alley appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

While this client work comprises the crux of Chermayeff’s legacy, he maintained a lively personal art practice on the side, primarily using mixed media collage and printmaking techniques. Following Chermayeff’s passing in 2017, his family generously donated more than 700 pieces of his original art to SVA’s Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives.

To showcase these unique pieces and honor Chermayeff’s lesser-known artistic prowess, SVA Galleries and the SVA Archives have curated an exhibition of these works entitled “Copy, Cut + Paste: The Visual Language of Ivan Chermayeff.” On view through October 1 at the SVA Gramercy Gallery in New York, the exhibition presents nearly 50 of Chermayeff’s collages, a number of early works, works in progress, and professional works— plus some finger paintings! The show was curated by SVA Archives’ Head of Archives Beth Kleber and Assistant Archivist Lawrence Giffin.

“Collage makes it possible for everything to be something else.”

Ivan Chermayeff

As a lifelong mixed-media collagist and collector, Chermayeff incorporated many of the objects he found into both his personal and professional work. The pieces shown within “Copy, Cut + Paste: The Visual Language of Ivan Chermayeff” exemplify his playful and experimental point of view and the way in which he used collage and mixed media to unlock new ways of seeing.

“I love the idea of discovering that two things that have no relationship are the same size and color. It’s like a chef who discovers that bananas are perfectly okay with fish—there are new relationships that when made, come to life,” Chermayeff once said. “Collage makes it possible for everything to be something else.”

Take a deeper dive into the exhibition with curator Beth Kleber, as she unpacks Chermayeff’s personal works alongside his professional pieces and draws parallels between the two.

Hero image: Mrs. Lovell at the Window, 2015. Mixed media collage, 16.5 x 13.5 in.

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Letterform Archive is offering a reprinting of W.A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design by Bruce Kennett with a Kickstarter campaign and a special $60 pricetag until September 10.

This is a book to spend a year with.
—Steven Heller

Letterform Archive kickstarted the first printing of Bruce Kennett’s comprehensive biography of Dwiggins. It was funded in two days and quickly sold out. This beautiful book is not just a biography; the pages are typeset in a custom digital version of Dwiggins’ Electra typeface, with 1200-plus images and Dwiggins’ essays set in his typefaces.

“The name W. A. Dwiggins usually brings to mind typefaces for Linotype and books for Knopf, but his amazing career has myriad additional facets. Over a period of fifteen years, I researched, wrote, photographed, and designed this book to honor his creative forces, exploring material from the Boston Public Library, Letterform Archive, my own private collection, and other archival sources,” says Kennett, the book’s author. “The book serves as inspiration for anyone in the visual arts — whether it be graphic design, illustration, textile design, printmaking, calligraphy, type design, or puppetry.”

The book will remain available on Kickstarter and at museum shops after this date. However, the early campaign premiums are worth a look.

Running through his life is a joie de vivre and lightness of spirit than can serve as inspiration for all of us.
—Bruce Kennett, author

Learn more about W.A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design and become a backer on the book’s Kickstarter page.

The post Call Yourself a Graphic Designer? You Have W.A. Dwiggins to Thank appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

At the next PRINT Book Club, architect James Biber and designer Michael Bierut will join Debbie Millman and Steven Heller to discuss their new book, The Architect & Designer Birthday Book.

The book is described as a thoughtfully curated collection in a stunning package that recognizes and celebrates the birthdays of famous, infamous, and often overlooked designers and architects.

 It’s the design book you didn’t know you needed (and will not be able to live without).


Inspired by architect James Biber’s mid-pandemic Instagram project, in which he posted a birthday bio of a designer or architect (famous or less so) every day for a year, The Architect and Designer Birthday Book is filled with personal, opinionated, and humorous observations on fascinating figures past and present.


These anecdotal histories include:

• Architects from the Aaltos (Aino and Alvar) to Zumthor
• Rivals Bernini and Borromini
• Photographers Lee Miller, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Vivian Maier, Dody Weston Thompson, Margaret Morton, and Judith Turner
• Midcentury modernists Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, and Florence Knoll

The book’s author, James Biber is an architect and founder of the firm Biber Architects, based in New York. He has designed projects as diverse as the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, the USA Pavilion at the 2015 Expo in Milan, Italy, the restoration of Richard Neutra’s Sten-Frenke house in Santa Monica, and, for one client, twelve houses across the country.

Michael Bierut, the book’s designer, is a graphic designer, design critic, and educator. A partner at Pentagram since 1990, Bierut has worked with clients such as The New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, The Robin Hood Foundation, MIT Media Lab, Mastercard, and the New York Jets. He also designed the ubiquitous H logo for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Don’t miss our conversation with James Biber and Michael Bierut on Thursday, August 22 at 4 PM ET! Register for the live discussion here, and buy your copy of The Architect and Designer Birthday Book right here.

The post Biber & Bierut Talk Birthdays at the Next PRINT Book Club appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Understanding Bayer’s connection to Aspen and honoring his legacy is the singular mission behind The Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies (The Bayer Center). In the three years since it opened, the center has put on two deeply researched exhibitions (the inaugural retrospective showcased Bayer as a fine artist, and the second, in 2023, explored a particular moment in Bayer’s career and life after he moved to Aspen until 1953, and his work on the World Geographic Atlas).

The Bayer Center’s third exhibition covers new ground, putting Bayer in context with fellow artists and contemporaries. Bauhaus Typography at 100 (open June 2024 through April 2025) is the center’s first collaborative show and the first traveling exhibition for Letterform Archive (the original was in the archive’s San Francisco gallery in 2021). Lissa Ballinger, The Bayer Center’s executive director, worked with James Williams of The Common Era, one of Letterform Archive’s original exhibition designers, to help the center translate the exhibition into a much larger space. While keeping to its intent, Williams helped The Bayer Center create a unique flow specific to its space while expanding the scope and size of the original exhibition. “It seemed like a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with another organization,” says Ballinger. “The Bayer Center and Letterform Archive are both very young organizations. We’re learning a lot through this process.”

We are so happy to collaborate with Letterform Archive to explore what Bayer is most known for—his graphic design, typographic contributions, and his work with the Bauhaus.

Lissa Ballinger

Bauhaus Typography at 100 spans the center’s lower galleries, flowing from its expressionist origins to the singular aesthetic we most associate with the school to conversations far beyond the mid-20th century. Following the organization of the book of the same name, the exhibition’s five curated sections detail “Early Visions,” “The First Exhibition,” “Bauhaus Publications,” “Typographic Masters,” “Toward a New Typography,” and “Beyond the Bauhaus.” In addition to chatting with Ballinger, I was delighted to chat with Letterform Archive’s executive director, Rob Saunders, to get his perspective on this expanded celebration of Bauhaus typography.

New Acquisitions in the Exhibition

New Letterform Archive acquisitions in the exhibition. On the left: Herbert Bayer’s original boards for Universal Type lettering, 1925, Ink on paperboard, which Saunders describes as “fucking amazing.” Center: Work from László Moholy-Nagy’s preliminary course, 1926 by Erich Comeriner, Collage on board; Right: Letterhead for Das Bauhaus in Dessau, 1926 by Herbert Bayer, Letterpress

When we think of the Bauhaus, we tend to think of the later work: asymmetrical, photo montage, stark layouts with lots of white space, and the distinct aesthetic of internal documents, publications, and books. But, Saunders explains, “The Bauhaus encompasses two very significant and different bodies of work. Both have had echoes in time.” In the early years, as the school had no typographic master, the design was all produced without type. Johannes Itten’s Utopia is one incredible work of the early Bauhaus. In the exhibition, you’ll see a full breadth of this work, including a dozen letterpress compositions by Friedl Dicker and Itten’s interpretations of old master paintings. Saunders believes the early expressionist output is worth a larger conversation, calling it “bizarre and magical.” He explains that we can see its influence in punk, counterculture, and digital work.

Bauhaus’ Expressionist Beginnings

Beyond the Bauhaus

Left top: The Igarashi ABC Book, 1988 by Takenobu Igarashi, Offset lithograph; Left bottom: Emigre #19: Starting from Zero, 1991, by Rudy VanderLans, Offset lithograph; Right: Waimiaku Kakarmari, Transmission of Knowledge, from Ecuador, the Land of the Shuar poster series, 2020 by Vanessa Alexandra Zúñiga Tinizaray, Digital printing

Herbert Bayer is well-represented, and it makes sense. Bayer had a long, illustrious career. His two fellow Bauhaus typographic masters had their careers cut short. László Moholy-Nagy died young, while Joost Schmidt stayed in Germany. As the Bauhaus fell fowl of the Nazi idealogy, Schmidt’s career was truncated in a different way. 

In addition to the main exhibition, the upper galleries feature Herbert Bayer’s original artwork, paintings, works on paper, and photographs with text embedded in them. “The alphabet became part of his visual vernacular, and it’s fascinating to see how he integrated it into his fine art practice,” says Ballinger.

The Bayer Center sits on the campus of the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to solving the greatest challenges of our time through dialog and leadership. It’s an apt environment to explore the Bauhaus because of the school’s similar principles centered around open dialog. “The Bauhaus was about using experimentation and collaboration between resources, mediums, and people to solve the design problems of the day,” explains Ballinger.

The [Bauhaus’] pedagogical openness is where the juice is still.

Rob Saunders

As to the Bauhaus’ continued resonance (though not without a fair share of “let’s throw Bauhaus under the bus”), Saunders explains, “There are things that will endure forever, and there are things that have become tropes. But, it was influential because it had a unified pedagogical purpose. It espoused one core knowledge of art and design, and while specialization was encouraged, so was cross-disciplinary exploration. It’s still the right idea, I think.” He continues, “The pedagogical openness is where the juice is still.”

Saunder’s advice? Lose the tropes. Get to know more about the early work—the expressionistic stuff is worth a deep dive. While existing literature on Bauhaus focuses heavily on the later work, both Bauhaus Typography at 100, the exhibition, and the book are unusual in that they underscore the entirety of the work. 

This collaboration between The Bayer Center and Letterform Archive is a testament to the Bauhaus’s ability to still surprise.

At the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival in late June, Debbie Millman interviewed Paula Scher and Rob Saunders. Watch and listen in as they trace the roots of typography from Gutenberg to Bauhaus and beyond, drawing on how innovation in design is always in conversation with the past.

Header image: exhibition photograph by Tony Prykryl.

All other imagery from the Collection of Letterform Archive, San Francisco, CA, except where specifically noted.

The post The Magnetism of Herbert Bayer and Bauhaus Typography on View in Aspen appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Ever since, I’ve had an appreciation for Hirschfeld and an affinity for his artistic style. The energy, emotion, and humor he elicits from a thin black line on a white background feels like a relic of a bygone cartoon era, and the figures he drew will forever have the honor of being interpreted and preserved through his unique lens.

The Al Hirschfeld Foundation is doing its part to keep Hirschfeld’s legacy alive by presenting an online archive of his work and curating virtual exhibitions. In celebration of Pride this past month, for example, they released the “Hirschfeld’s Drag Show,” an online catalog curated by author, playwright, and drag legend in his own right, Charles Busch. On view through their website until August 15, “Hirschfeld’s Drag Show” presents a collection of the greatest drag performances of stage and screen as seen through Hirschfeld’s eyes and, most importantly, his pen.

“Through Hirschfeld’s remarkable catalog, we’re able to chart the ways cross-dressing has been used as a theatrical tool over the past century,” says Busch via the Al Hirschfeld Foundation. “At first, it was often the only way closeted LGBT artists were able to express their voices. At other times, drag has been employed as a plot device, allowing society to articulate in a light-hearted manner its fear of the ‘other.’ In more recent decades, openly gay artists have taken drag into new realms, both dramatic and comic. With this collection of drawings, we chart the history of performers and shows that have used drag in a variety of creative strategies. Hirschfeld’s great gift in portraying the joy of theatrical self-expression gives all of these drawings a humanity along with their outrageous flamboyance.”

I can’t think of a subject better suited for Hirschfeld’s caricature style than drag performers, and this online exhibition is certainly proof of that! Enjoy it here.

The post The Al Hirschfeld Foundation Celebrates Pride with “Hirschfeld’s Drag Show” appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Until the launch of Wonder City of the World (book and exhibition), there had never been an exhibition about New York City travel posters. We found this hard to believe! In fact, no one has written a book about them, either. Not even PRINT’s prolific design history hunter, Steven Heller. Poster House wanted to rectify this.

So, Nicholas Lowry (Poster House board member, writer, and antiques expert—you may know his face from Antiques Roadshow) and Angelina Lippert (chief curator for Poster House) set out to design an exhibition on this poster design genre. Abrams then proposed a book. The sheer amount of posters worthy of our discussion and appreciation wouldn’t fit on Poster House’s walls—the book became a great vehicle to explore this fascinating slice of design history.

The book’s name comes from one of the many monikers given to New York City throughout its history as a destination: for immigrants seeking better lives, for droves coming to the 1939 World’s Fair, for the thousands of tourists who’ve flocked to the city’s sights for centuries. The original name for the exhibition was “Mythmaking and the Metropolis”—we love this, for the record!—however, the book’s editor wanted to simplify and so Wonder City, the book, was born.

Wonder is appropriate. The collection offers an idealized portrait of New York City, accompanied by essays on the posters’ design, the artists (if known; most are not), and the artists’ representation of the city. Our discussion included all kinds of fun facts and little-known details about New York and the history of advertising the city all over the globe. The topic proved to be the ultimate rabbit hole for Lowry.

I haven’t met a rabbit hole I haven’t wanted to jump down.

Nicholas Lowry, writer and curator

If you’d like to go down your own rabbit hole on this topic, register here to watch the recording of our fascinating discussion with Lowry and Lippert.

Haven’t purchased a copy of Wonder City of the World: New York Travel Posters? You can order one here.

If you are in New York, visit the Poster House exhibition, which features a selection of these incredible artifacts of design history. Wonder City of the World is on view until September 8. Poster House’s upcoming exhibitions include everything from Lester Beall to the London Underground to the Munich Olympics, the NYC subway, Nike, and more. Learn more at posterhouse.org.

See you next month!

The post Mythmaking and the Metropolis: Book Club Recap with Nicholas Lowry & Angelina Lippert appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Too long to be in a conference room when just down the hall was the lobby of the famed Carlton Hotel. And through the busy but cozy wood-paneled revolving door was the Croissette, the Mediterranean Sea, and all of the delights of Cannes.

But here we were, seven hours into an eight-hour global creative directors meeting.

It was sometime around 2002. 2003? 04?

All of the TBWA global creative directors had presented their work save for one last office.

London.

And the star of the show? Creative Director Trevor Beattie.

Before he took the floor, the staff of the hotel wheeled in a new a/v set-up.

We had been watching a few TVCs throughout the day from places like TBWA\Hunt/Lascaris in South Africa, TBWA\Paris, Chiat Los Angeles, and several other offices.

But the staff replaced the ad-hoc video machine and wheeled in a different set-up. Something that looked slightly more sophisticated with a larger screen.

TBWA’s legendary global creative director, John Hunt, had been the day’s emcee and set the scene. Other legends like Lee Clow and Marie-Catherine Dupuy were in the room paying rapt attention.

“The London rollercoaster continues,” John said in his distinct South African lilt. “But at this moment, the roller-coaster is riding high. And it’s one helluva ride.”

There were appreciative smiles and chuckles even at this late hour.

He continued.

“So without further ado, the man leading the charge…Mr Trevor Beattie.”

If you didn’t know Trevor, you might mistake him for Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page.

Trevor had shoulder-length curly locks and the confident swagger of a man who has presented to a million faces and rocked them all.

He took the floor.

“Thanks, John.” Trevor began in his distinct Brummie accent. “Now, I know I’m the only thing standin’ between you and a few bottles of rose, so I’ll do my best to proceed at a rapid clip.”

Smiles all around.

And from there, Trevor shared a few presentation boards for brilliant campaigns for Absolut and PlayStation.

He also recounted a hilarious new business story involving a prospective client and an actual bullwhip.

He then paused a beat.

“Now, I’d like to show you something special for our client, French Connection.”

Before he pushed play, he talked about the origin of the French Connection FCUK moniker and the subsequent FCUK Fashion brand idea.

He explained that he had been trying to come up with an idea for the brand when one appeared before him at their offices in the form of an old-school fax.

The telephone-transmitted document was marked “from FCHK to FCUK.” Meaning: from French Connection Hong Kong to French Connection United Kingdom.

Those four letters — F-C-U-K — caught his attention.

He said to us, “Fuck me, there’s the idea — “F-C-U-K…Fuck Fashion!”

Every creative director in that room melted just thinking about the magic of that dyslexic bit of genius.

“Anyway, mates, let me show you a bit of what we’ve been up to.”

He then stepped over the pile of boards around him and pushed play.

I don’t remember all of the specifics of that three-minute hype film other than a veritable tsunami of FCUK executions: OOH, stores, street posters, print ads, and a sponsorship of boxing great Lennox Lewis.

What I do remember clearly — and I can still feel it to this day — was the feeling I had watching it and that could be summed up in a single word: “FUCK!”

It was truly a gob-smacking experience.

It felt like the first time any of us had seen a “summary” of creative work put together in something equally and profoundly creative as the work itself — a case film.

For seven hours, we saw everything in two dimensions on some form of paper. Or simply a TV commercial.

The FCUK film was three dimensions, multi-sensory and longer-form storytelling.

It was like going from black and white to CinemaScope.

It was an entirely new medium.

Today, we take these case study films for granted. Heck, we actually resent them. I hate them at times.

But Trevor’s FCUK film was the first.

It was bloody extraordinary.

And certainly, my world, TBWA’s world, and the industry at large have never been the same since.

When was the last time you were FCUK-ing blown away?

Rob Schwartz is the Chair of the TBWA New York Group and an executive coach who channels his creativity, experience, and wisdom into helping others get where they want to be. This was originally posted on his Substack, RobSchwartzHelps, where he covers work, life, and creativity.

Header image courtesy of the author.

The post The First Case Study Film appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

I was sad to learn that Village Cigars closed after more than 100 years in business, but its bright red sign with its charming, handmade letters will live on. Village Preservation, a nonprofit working to preserve the architectural heritage and cultural history of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, has just released a Greenwich Village Building Set. Comprised of 449 genuine LEGO bricks, the set features architecturally and culturally significant places in Greenwich Village, artfully rendered — from Village Cigars and the Stonewall Inn to Jefferson Market Library and the quaint streets surrounding Washington Square Park.

The Village is a center for LGBTQ culture, advocacy, and history, and it overflows with singular character and spirit. Christopher J. Devine, founder of Peacham, a creative agency committed to making history fun, worked with Vocal Type’s Tré Seals to artfully render this storied neighborhood in miniature, right down to its two most iconic signs: Village Cigars and the Stonewall Inn.

Signage plays an important role in creating a sense of place. A neighborhood’s character is shaped not only by its people, architecture, and street layout but also by its visual culture more broadly.

Christopher J. Devine

Village Cigars is less a type specimen than a hodge-podge of quirky letters. The letters of the store’s no fewer than four different signs vary in height, width, weight, and axis — sometimes within a single word. “When designing the Greenwich Village Building Set, it quickly occurred to me that an off-the-shelf retail font could never appropriately express the unique idiosyncrasies of the Village Cigars letterforms,” said Devine. So he enlisted Seals to recreate the letting of the horizontal sign on the store’s facade, the one that I’d used so often to get to where I was headed.

Devine said of the completed lettering, “[Tré’s work] beautifully reproduces the nuances of the original—including the irregular letter spacing, which I imagine goes against the instincts of every skilled type designer.”

Village Cigars went out of business during the design process. The building enjoys some protections as part of the Greenwich Village Historic District. But, interestingly, as Devine explained, “signage is generally regarded as ephemeral — especially when it advertises a business that no longer exists.”

Though 51-53 Christopher Street is architecturally unremarkable (built as horse stables in the mid-19th century), the ground floor became The Stonewall Inn in the 1930s (a cocktail lounge and restaurant). “Although the Stonewall sign was removed in 1989, it was an important part of the streetscape for many decades,” explains Executive Director of Village Preservation Andrew Berman.

Devine chose Vocal Type’s Marsha typeface for the miniature sign, designed by Seals in 2020. When creating Marsha, Seals found inspiration in The Stonewall Inn’s original sign and named the typeface after legendary LGBTQ+ activist and Stonewall Uprising veteran Marsha P. Johnson.

Like Tré’s Village Cigars lettering, Marsha also reflects the irreverence of the original Stonewall sign, including the backward W, which is one of the font’s contextual alternates.

Christopher J. Devine

The limited edition set will go on sale on Thursday, June 20. The proceeds will benefit Village Preservation’s work and mission, serving to document, celebrate, and preserve the special architecture and cultural heritage of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo.

The post Preserving Greenwich Village Signage History in Miniature appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

It is with sorrow that our future AIGA San Francisco Design events, San Francisco Center for the Book openings, and California College of the Arts gatherings will be without Tom Ingalls. He had a warm smile, infectious laugh, and effervescent spirit that will be greatly missed. Tom left us on the afternoon of April 10, surrounded by his sister and close friends.

Tom’s accomplishments were many. From the moment he arrived in the Golden State during the 1970s, when he received his Master of Fine Art from California Institute of the Arts, he was a star. Tom began his rapid rise in design, first as an in-house designer at Los Angeles County Museum of Art then expanding to a publishing career at the Los Angeles Magazine, Outside Magazine, and Rolling Stone.

When “the Michael’s” (Vanderbyl and Manwaring) recommended that he come north and teach at California College of the Arts, he took on the challenge with great zeal and spent the subsequent 40 years tutoring the next generation of Bay Area designers.

In the 80s, he was a founding member of the San Francisco AIGA Chapter. Many years later, he was honored as an AIGA Fellow for his “contribution to raising the standards of excellence within the design community.” A well-earned recognition of his passion for the printed word.

Not satisfied with running his own design office and teaching, he expanded his interests to include another of his loves—food. Tom always liked to combine his work and play whenever he could, so it was only a matter of time before his love for designing and collecting cookbooks merged with his pursuit of new ways to grill, scramble, roast, or sauté. His seemingly endless joy from finding the best, most unique butcher, baker, and sausage maker in San Francisco could only be surpassed if he could engage you in his journey of discovery.

Tom’s other passion was golf. He didn’t agree with the oft-quoted “a good walk spoiled,” as Tom just loved playing, be it in the Bay Area at Berkeley Country Club (where he also designed the logo) or anywhere he traveled that had lush greens, 18 holes, and a great grill. Again, his love of design and golf were intertwined with Missing Links Press, where he published a range of fine art and design books, many including poetry.

Tom was always warm, generous, and inclusive in every social situation. You were never alone when he was with you. Once, for a July exhibition opening at the San Francisco Center for the Book, which featured my collection of Flags on Paper, Tom volunteered to be the grill master—complete with chef’s tools and aprons—coaxing my son Christopher into being his sous-chef. His generosity made our evening so much more special. Thank you, Tom.

Tom will be missed by all: those who spent just 15 minutes with him, enjoyed a round of golf with him, or shared a lifetime with him. He lives on through everyone he taught or shared a meal with.

I will remember him as a great designer, colleague, and friend.

Photographs courtesy of Petrula Vrontikis

The post Remembering Tom Ingalls (1949-2024) appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

With a body of work throughout the 1990s that enthusiastically and provocatively amalgamated dualities—word/image, real/virtual, hand/machine, past/future—American graphic, type, and multimedia designer P. Scott Makela established his reputation as a creator of postmodern visual languages outside normative graphic design. While designers of different generations, mindsets, and training disagreed acutely (and sometimes quite nastily) about what graphic design was and what, how, and to whom it should communicate, Makela was his own kind of designer. An enduring inspiration was weighty, machined stuff—the primordial analog output of industrial production, which he frequently rebuilt into dimensional letterforms, married to meaning, and presented in a succinct, unambiguous single punch. “Actually,” Makela said, “I find 2D type a backward transformation from 3D, a 2D way of describing 3D events.” Revisiting his work and philosophy is an opportunity to appreciate his prowess in reconstituting meaning and breathing life into language. I interviewed Makela in the spring of 1997 as part of my MFA Thesis at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Our exchange, below, is lightly edited and condensed. 

I think of 3D type as your signature style. 

Well, I think that it has been for the last three or four years. I’ve really never gotten tired of the mass it creates and the ability to create [the appearance of metal] alloys. I’ve always been interested in this idea of alloys. It wasn’t specifically “Oh, I want to look at 3D type because it was on a Metallica or heavy metal cover.” It really was more because of growing up in a household with manufacturing and aluminum extrusions. 

So it was about material?

Yeah. It was about material and the way it was formed and the way it was extruded out of machining tools. I grew up in a household where all these pieces were around, and I grew up with these pieces and these forms. By the other token, 3D type has become such a popular mode of trying to get people’s attention, even more so recently, that actually I’m struggling with trying another strategy because it has begun to lose meaning. Like Dead History loses meaning after it’s out.

What was the first piece you did using 3D typography?

The first piece I did officially, a printed piece using 3D typography, was the Mohawk piece, Rethinking Design, and it was the “Do Nothing” article I did with Tucker Viemeister. Before 3D programs were available, I started to use a program called Pixar RenderMan[1987], which was the old animation special effects engine for creating shapes. I tried to form typefaces using that. 

Mohawk Paper Mills promotion “Re-thinking Design,” copyright 1992, pages 14-23, Tucker Viemeister and P. Scott Makela’s collaboration “On Doing Nothing.” Scans of the original, courtesy the author.

So you and the software grew up together? 

Yeah, and then when certain fonts were available, I’d import them into that environment and create new possibilities. That was the advent of what was called Pixar Typestry[1990]. The software became a real basis for the way I would do things. Most of the stuff I’d do would actually be by default; when you moved the object, it became a cheap effect. I became interested in looking at things head-on. That style became a boilerplate.

While cruising around the grocery store, I noticed three genres of 3D type on products. It’s interesting; each medium has a different way of using it, connoting different things. 3D type is used on junk food for kids, household chemicals, and dog food. On television, I noticed that it’s used in sports, news, and toy commercials and often to imply technology, speed, or power. I found it cheesy. What’s your definition of cheesy when It comes to 3D type?

I think cheesy is newscasts. I’m so enamored of this thing, floating, hanging …

It’s slightly menacing, which I like.

I look at Stanley Kubrick films and realize what I really like about his direct use of models, like in 2001, was feeling that weight and that gravity. I’m interested in that gravity.

When you’re using 3D type, what do you feel it means?

When I think of how I use 3D type and how I used these floating planetoids, I think of them as giving me the opportunity to have XYZ coordinates. Instead of an implied depth of field, having the object appear as a real 3D object with some of the shadows it throws on the surfaces allows for a natural photographic depth. At the same time, it has the effect of being very modern. I like it when it’s not clear whether it’s a 3D rendering on the computer or a photograph. Some other designers have worked with a pixelated quality. I’m interested in how it feels when it’s burnished, really brushed and direct. It’s about implying depth. I’m interested in small, massive chunks. I don’t have a lot of language in my work. [I have] A simple language. I find it interesting to create dynamics within that equation.

So you think of type as having a back, a top, and sides?

Yeah. Absolutely. And what’s behind, because there’s a thickness and depth to the actual object, at least to me. I see it through my eyes, and that’s a problem.

Why?

I see language in the way that I’d like to read it, and it’s about reducing. When I was a student here years ago[1989-1991], Michael Hall, the head of Sculpture, had a really big effect on me during my reviews. He talked about reducing and isolating the work. I still had a lot of extraneous asteroids floating around, which didn’t solidify the message. So, for me, it became about (attaining) focus and isolation.

How influenced were you by Pop Art?

One of the biggest influences in my becoming a graphic designer was the work of Ed Ruscha. He was one of the California Pop artists, but he went beyond that because he wasn’t borrowing from commercial culture as much as from pedestrian strip mall culture—almost a lack of style. Ruscha brought language to life with his thick, floaty words. He and John Baldassari had the biggest impression on me. In the last five years, I’d say Lawrence Weiner. 

The Minneapolis College of Art and Design 1993-1995 catalog, designed by P. Scott Makela;
Courtesy the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Is there a message in the work?

The overall message in all my work is simply levitating directness in front of you. The language in the work is formed by the message or problem I’m solving at that time, but its delivery vehicle is about putting the message in front of someone and letting It levitate with a certain degree of weight. That’s the formal message. That’s the formal container.

Is the type hollow or solid?

I’d like to think the type is solid (laughter). It’s definitely die-cast solid without a hollow core. And remember, alloys contain mixtures of metals.

To me, [even] if it casts a shadow, it’s not necessarily 3D. It has to have substance as an object, and your work and Glaser’s stuff are there, even though they’re hand-rendered and funky. 

Peter Max, as well. 

And Ji Byol Lee in New York, whose stuff is done in Adobe Dimension. He rotated Univers. It has a top and a bottom and a front and a back. I look at the range of stuff, and they’re all different vernaculars. You said something about moving away from it or redeveloping it.

Here’s the thing. The way 3D type was used, was part of the 70s vernacular. The airbrushed type that was always the standard art house solution had a masculine quality. Now, with post-rave culture, 3D type has become everyday and accessible, just like how Photoshop has become, so it has become a convention now, a new vernacular. Part of my struggle now is to keep defining my work. First, when we’re designers, we can make our work about constantly jumping ahead as if that’s the only impetus for making it. You’re trying continually to refine something. That’s why it’s still interesting to me to go into those three-dimensional (programs) and try to create hybrids, which are a kind of shaving-off of skin. There are so many people doing the 3D type thing right out of the box with Pixar that I can’t help but feel that my own work is reduced if I don’t move onto a new plane of seeing how I can add more weight, more mass, even if it’s implied or more psychological rather than becoming structural or formal. 

I know people have talked about looking at the interior of typography, and I haven’t seen that exploration done successfully. It’s like the first time you saw a ceiling in a film was in Citizen Kane. So this is the thing to explore. Legibility on the outside of the word isn’t even an issue. I think it’s [3D type] supremely legible, but to go to the inside of the word, legibility is not going to be the same thing.

Yeah. We’re going to [learn to] recognize new shapes.

All you can do is look at the inversion, the concave part of a letter. If you look at the upper inside corner of the slab [serif] on an “I” it will look like the inside of a metal bird box or like you’re stuck inside a heating vent. So it’s really difficult formally to move forward. It’s why I’m now trying to concentrate on a psychological mass of something that’s implied. And that might be about a mysterious billowing like Freddy Krueger with the stretching face emerging from behind a very black surface. There are ways to interpret inflation. It’s interesting that you mention it because I’m not as interested in super-chiseled letters that feel like you’re not sure if they’re filled with liquid or if they’re solid. Pneumatics. Air. Fluid. Hydraulics. 

I was talking to Ji about this because when I look at his forms, I’m not sure what they’re made of. Plastic? Metal? They could be ceramic; it’s twirled around in that way. He said they can be made out of anything – even chocolate; he doesn’t care, it’s fine with him.

Let me say this: I think it’s a downer to be labeled as the 3D-type guy. When we went to London and visited Vaughan Oliver, he said, ooh, the 3D guy, 3D, 3D. It’s funny, but my work has never been about fine details; it’s been about the macro chunks. And that mechanism, up to now, has been successful for me. This is a strong communication of this idea; it is a strong way to present this text. But now, I feel that I’m at a crossroads in moving forward because I’d like to leave everything behind—but it’s easier said than done. I still find myself trying to refine some of those things that I barely started to scratch the surface of. And unfortunately, or fortunately, people are researching the same areas. Maybe that’s the reason to go on even stronger and continue to refine it. I don’t know.

On one hand, everybody makes work that really characterizes and showcases their interests and affinities. And to say, “I have to make a change,” if there’s still appeal, I’d say go with your interests. Because everyone’s identifiable. Vaughan’s work is identifiable, too.

But also, it [an investigation] takes 10-15-20 years, like with a painter. But as time becomes more modern and people move to the next. Do the enema paint on the wall … make little plastic dolls with penis noses … so, it’s also about the shock of the new, being able to relate to what the new is. When Ruscha’s work came out, peo­ple couldn’t figure out if it was commercial signage or an actual painting. The question is: is it a painting?

The other thing about making “new” is about making “uncomfortable.” Have you done things with this style of type that have made you uncomfortable? Have there been shocks?

The biggest shock is when something is incredibly ugly because, to get to something beautiful to my inner eye, I usually have to go through some ugly things—like I showed you some of the Sweater things. There’s a fine line between what I might do and what a 13-year-old might do in his bedroom or what Mondo 2000 looks like. It’s wanting to slum a little bit. So there’s definitely a wanting to enjoy part of that slumming. I don’t know if that’s a good answer.

What was that Pixar-generated form that was gray and dimensional?

That was Summer’s (Summer Powell, Cranbrook 1997) font pumped into 3D. It became this floating monolith that made me think of those young ravers looking up at this floating thing in front of the speakers. We talked about it. It reminded me of 70s Led Zeppelin covers when they had these monoliths, and we all sat around the table looking at these things. So that was our idea. A new god. A floating, again, a levitation. Whenever something’s floating above you, you’d better take notice. To bring 3D type to life, that industrial quality is attention­-getting because it sticks out into the atmosphere from the surface. And that’s another thing, formally, that I can’t resist.

A Walker Art Center Fall promotion circa 1992 -1996. Scans of the original, courtesy the author

For more, listen to Debbie Millman’s 2020 interview with Laurie Haycock Makela on Design Matters Live; they discuss her revolutionary typography days at Cranbrook with Scott Makela, surviving two brain hemorrhages, and arriving at “the project of a lifetime.”

The post 25 Years After P. Scott Makela’s Death, A Former Student Revisits the Idiosyncratic Designer appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Compiled by the award-winning typographer and graphic designer David Jury for Merrell Publishers, Mid-Century Type offers a visual exploration of the rise of the typographer after World War II, between 1945 and 1965. With advancements in printing came booms within the magazine and book industries, and further technological breakthroughs led to an elevated era of film and television title sequences. Coupled with a thriving travel economy which saw an increased need for signage and advertising, the golden age of the typographer came to the fore. 

Each chapter of the compendium is dedicated to a particular sect of design in which typography has played a significant role. These chapters range from categories like Posters and Corporate Identity to Transport to Film & Television. Jury provides insights into European and American typographers within these fields, accompanied by over 500 illustrations of typefaces, advertisements, book covers, specialist journals, posters, and more.

If you’re a type lover or even if you’re just type-curious, Mid-Century Type is absolutely essential for understanding the history of the art form.

The post “Mid-Century Type” Unpacks the Rise of the Typographer appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

For Charlene Prempeh, author of Now You See Me! An Introduction to 100 Years of Black Design, it became clear that Black creatives weren’t getting their due. Her book researches the contributions of Black thinkers and creatives across the fashion, architecture, and graphic design industries—hoping to open up a more nuanced and layered conversation about them rather than the typically quick mention in Black History Month lists.

The book covers a century’s worth of creative innovation, and for Prempeh, every single story came with an “a-ha moment.” Not only did she learn about people she hadn’t heard of before, but she also revisited the prevailing narratives about familiar names. 

“What I thought I knew about them wasn’t necessarily right, or did not have the depth required to understand their journeys or practices properly,” said Prempeh. She gives the example of Zelda Wynn Valdes, who often gets mistakenly credited with designing the Playboy bunny costume. In her research, Prempeh found Valdes sewed the costumes rather than designing them; that experience points to “how surface our information is about these individuals.” In 2019, The New York Times published Valdes’ obituary as part of the “Overlooked” project, which featured “remarkable Black men and women” that “never received obituaries in The New York Times — until now.” Valdes passed away in 2001.

Left: Joyce Bryant in a figure-hugging gown by Zelda Wynn Valdes, 1953; Right: Joyce Bryant wearing one of the “tight-tight” gowns designed for her by Zelda Wynn Valdes, 1953 – Images © Van Vechten Trust

Now You See Me incorporates significant materials that help tell each person’s story, such as a letter by Ann Lowe to First Lady Jackie Kennedy, whose wedding dress she designed. Lowe read an article featuring Mrs. Kennedy in the Ladies Home Journal, which referred to her as a “colored woman dressmaker,” diminishing her identity as a designer. While many texts about Lowe’s life focus on her connection to Mrs. Kennedy, Prempeh sees her story differently. Lowe was “this woman who was brave enough to stand up for herself in a moment where it would have been much easier just to cower.”

Left: Ann Lowe with the “First Lady” doll from the Evyan Collection, 1966; Center: Ann Lowe, Ebony Magazine, 1966; Right: Ann Lowe fitting a dress to a mannequin, 1966 – © Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy J.Paul Getty Trust & Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture

“As a Black woman, or as a woman [in general], knowing that someone else did that at that moment in history gives me a sense that I can do that, too,” said Prempeh. “That if something is not right, [I can] stand up and say so.”

Yet, Prempeh emphasizes that writing about these makers means including their shortcomings as well.

“We sometimes struggle to be critical where it’s actually completely fair to be critical and where there’s an important lesson to learn in that criticism,” said Prempeh.   

Now You See Me also weaves in Prempeh’s own upbringing and career trajectory, showing how her background shaped her perspective of the people she researched. Prempeh is the founder of the creative studio and consultancy agency A Vibe Called Tech; meeting business mentors is one of the challenges she has faced and continues to experience. Prempeh emphasized that it’s important for her agency to be “rooted in this idea of intersectionality and cultural storytelling,” and she hasn’t met many leaders who have done this while also ensuring their agency is a household name with a long-term history. 

Regarding the next generation of makers, Prempeh says we need better support systems, not just one-time accolades or grants. It takes considerable time “to build up a body of work and to feel confident in your work,” and many artists need financial support to create that space. In researching the creators featured in Now You See Me, Prempeh stressed that while short-term help isn’t insignificant, we still need to do more.

“How can we create creative support that allows people that time to develop?” said Prempeh.
“Because my experience is [that] without that structure and support, it’s impossible to keep going. There’ll be some mavericks in between who make it quickly and don’t need that support. Obviously, I love that for them. But I worry about who we miss out on because the structures aren’t in place to let them thrive.”

Left: Grace Jones wearing a black leather jacket and Eiffel Tower hat designed by Patrick Kelly, 1989, © Gilles Decamps. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Janet & Gary Calderwood, & Gilles Decamps, 2014; Center: Outfit from Bianca Saunders’s Spring/Summer 2021collection, “The Ideal Man,” Photo, Silvia Draz; Right: Sketch by LaQuan Smith of a jacket and jumpsuit outfit inspired by the Black Panther film, 2018, © LaQuan Smith

Prempeh worked with graphic design studio Polymode to bring Now You See Me to life. Some of the major visual decisions in the book, explained Prempeh, involved not using photography on the cover or in the section introductions.

We were really clear that we didn’t want to say that any one story or any one image is the most important part of the book. We needed to have some visual language that spoke to all of the different stories.

Charlene Prempeh

Left: Interior of Gando Primary School, Photo, Siméon Duchoud; Right: Paul R. Williams standing in front of The Theme Building, LAX, 1965, Photo, Julius Shulman © J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10).

The book uses a bold typeface: Jaamal Benjamin’s Harlemecc, inspired by the commercial lettering of Harlem Renaissance artist and painter Aaron Douglas. The book’s title, Prempeh explains, plays with the versatility of meanings: “Now you see me” as both a statement and a question that implies these Black creatives have always been important. The fonts VTC Spike, VTC Tre, and The Neu Black—designed by Tre Seals—appear in the subheadlines of the book, while the book copy uses Halyard, designed by Joshua Darden Studios.  

“We also really wanted the Blackness of it to come out in the colors,” said Prempeh. Polymode created an overall look that incorporated “African fabric and cloth block colors,” as described on the studio’s website.

Left: Emmett McBain, 1968. Reproduced with kind permission of Letta McBain. Courtesy of University of Illinois Chicago, Special Collections and University Archives; Center: Emmett McBain, 1972. Reproduced with kind permission of Letta McBain. Courtesy of the Emmett McBain Afro-American Advertising Poster Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; Emmett McBain 1973. Reproduced with kind permission of Letta McBain. Courtesy of the Emmett McBain Afro-American Advertising Poster Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

While the book contains numerous stories and spans many eras, its design and size make it easy to carry in a bag—a contrast from some larger, coffee-table-style books often published about histories like these.

“As much as the book is beautiful and the pictures are really, really beautiful, we wanted to make sure people took the stories home with them,” said Prempeh.

The post In “Now You See Me,” Charlene Prempeh Uncovers a Century of True Stories about Black Creatives appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Allen Ginsberg was one of the foremost minds of his generation. He was also a prolific collector. From his extensive archives at Standford, Pat Thomas worked with Peter Hale of Ginsberg’s estate to pull nearly ten thousand items for consideration. From this, Thomas narrowed it to 1,000 items encompassing Material Wealth: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg.

The three most remarkable pieces, according to Thomas, are a satire of Ginsberg’s Howl written by screenwriter Terry Southern (below); a transcript of a call between Ginsberg and Henry Kissinger about ending the war in Vietnam, one in which the famously exhibitionist Ginsberg suggests they discuss the issue naked on national television (below); and (not pictured), a letter from the American Nazi Party to Ginsberg about all the reasons they wanted to assassinate him: likely a “commie,” possibly gay, definitely a Jew.

The book is a collection of 600,000 words and 300 pages, yet it is also light (uncoated paper!). Andy Outis took us through the myriad of design decisions that give this book its singular aesthetics. He began the project by reading Howl aloud to internalize it (during the pandemic). Outis leaned heavily on 90s graphic design, specifically deconstruction, for inspiration in creating a book that was more than just the sum of its artifacts—the unique open spine, the leveraging of low-resolution scans with all the original scratches, dirt, and flaws, and the use of color. Outis also typeset the accompanying text on an Underwood 315 typewriter. From there, he scanned it, making the book’s pages look very much like archival material they hold.

Ginsberg was neither conventional nor conservative. So, Andy went for it …
It’s a work of art.

Pat Thomas on collaborating with Andy Outis, designer of Material Wealth

For those who find the intersection of history fascinating, Thomas has a beautiful sentiment about this very thing as it relates to Allen Ginsberg, Stonewall, and The Beatles about 38 minutes in. You’ll also hear a surprising admission from Steven Heller, who, as a young Ginsberg fan, stole a copy of Howl from Doubleday Book Shop (eventually returning it to the shelves after he read it).

Our conversation wound from music to poetry to design to politics to culture, so there’s something for everyone. Register here to watch the discussion.

Don’t own a copy of Material Wealth: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg? You can order one here.

The post The Material is the Meta Narrative: Book Club Recap with Pat Thomas & Andy Outis appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

At our next PRINT Book Club, Debbie Millman and Steven Heller will discuss the book, Material Wealth: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg with writer Pat Thomas and designer Andy Outis.

Pat Thomas is an author, historian, and archival music producer (and liner-note writer). His books have enlightened many on the cultural and musical zeitgeist of the sixties and seventies, with topics ranging from the Black Panthers to Jerry Rubin, photographer Les McCann, Lou Reed, Jack Kerouac, and more.

His latest book takes us through the personal archives of poet, activist, and prolific collector Allen Ginsberg, promising “an unprecedented look inside one of the most prolific poets and agitators of cultural mores of the 20th century.“

“A poster for Patti Smith’s first-ever poetry reading. Correspondence from Allen’s stint as literary agent for William S. Burroughs and Herbert Huncke. Yippie manifestos from Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and John Sinclair of the MC5. A ticket for a 1974 concert by Bob Dylan & The Band (with Yoko Ono’s phone number scribbled on the back). Posters documenting early Beat Generation readings in 1950s San Francisco as well as later ones capturing the 1960s Haight-Ashbury Hippie era.“

These are just some of the treasures in the book, alongside photographs and ephemera in what is a “visual annotated compendium that reveals one of the unparalleled minds of his generation.”

Andy Outis, Material Wealth‘s designer, began his creative journey as a graffiti artist. Before founding his own practice, Shift7.Studio, Outis led the in-house agency for a group of national media brands and was the Creative Director of events and marketing at New York Media, where he led the team responsible for brand management and revenue-driving creative for New York magazine and its websites, including Vulture and The Cut.

Don’t miss our conversation with Pat Thomas and Andy Outis, hosted by Debbie Millman and Steven Heller, on Thursday, March 28 at 4 PM ET! Register for the live stream discussion and buy your copy of Material Wealth.

The post Mine Allen Ginsberg’s Archive with Pat Thomas & Andy Outis at our Next PRINT Book Club appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Whether we realize it or not, everyone has a connection to cursive. For me, at least, my cursive story began in fourth grade. It was part of the curriculum, and we spent one class every day learning how to write in cursive.

At the time, I didn’t understand it; it was a class I dreaded because, like math, I didn’t understand the point. Now, as an adult who’s made a hobby out of calligraphy, my workbook from elementary school with dashed, traceable letters is a visual ingrained in my memory. But at ten years old, with computers becoming increasingly portable, my classmates and I didn’t understand the concept. We rolled our eyes as we moved through learning the alphabet, wondering why we couldn’t just go to our computer class.

By the time we got to the letter “x,” all motivation had been lost. Our teachers continuously told us about the importance of cursive–that it was not only a more mature way to write, but it would enable us to read historical papers and letters from our ancestors one day. As a class, we collectively groaned.

Eventually, the classroom began to phase cursive out, likely seen as a waste of resources and funds. With the rise in technology, educators found, with their limited time, that teaching students technology outweighed the importance of the curly-cue letters. In 2010, the Common Core standards, also known as established benchmarks for reading and math, became more widely adopted, and they no longer required states to teach cursive, leaving the decision up to individual states and districts. With this shift in the standards, 45 states chose not to teach cursive, leaving hundreds of thousands of students without the skillset.

“Writing in cursive or in script is part of history, and it feels like a weird thing to just say, ‘this isn’t important anymore,” shares Adam Vicarel, Principal and Creative Director of Vicarel Studios. “It’s like saying, yeah, the War of 1812 happened a long time ago, so let’s just stop talking about it.”

He continues, “Everything is informed by the past, and the best way to take action is to be informed by what happened before you. To stop practicing cursive or learning cursive is strange.” Vicarel feels it’s an extreme oversight to think that no one cares about it. 

(© Vicarel Studios)

Kelsey Voltz-Poremba, assistant professor of occupational therapy at the University of Pittsburgh, told BBC that children can learn and replicate cursive more easily. “When handwriting is more autonomous for a child, it allows them to put more cognitive energy towards more advanced visual-motor skills and have better learning outcomes,” she told the publication. Cursive has proven to have a range of benefits for students. Even beyond advancing their visual-motor skills, learning cursive has been demonstrated to help children with dyslexia. According to PBS, “For those with dyslexia, cursive handwriting can be an integral part of becoming a more successful student.” 

As a sign of progress, in 2014, a bill in Tennessee required that cursive be a mandatory subject in grades two through four. Then, in 2019, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina followed suit and required similar measures. 

Most recently, California and New Hampshire have reintroduced the mandatory teaching of cursive. According to the LA Times, “Even before the new law took effect on January 1 [2024], cursive was a California learning goal in grades three and four, but the state and school districts had not enforced its teaching or tested to see whether students had mastered it. The law states that handwriting instruction for grades one to six includes writing ‘in cursive or joined italics in the appropriate grade levels.”

And while some states are introducing mandatory cursive lessons, they are not required to be enforced or funded. Without a Common Core standardization, schools do not have much motivation to enforce the education. Hopefully, other states will follow suit, with California and New Hampshire recently adopting the curriculum. 

For now, though, we’re existing in an interesting space where current designers are creating for people who weren’t taught cursive in school. We’re seeing more and more heritage brands redesign their well-known cursive logos to simple, sans-serif typography. From Eddie Bauer and Johnson and Johnson, the logos are getting less and less curly. But as brands leave behind the cursive designs, they leave behind the human touch. 

Phil Garnham, Executive Creative Director at Monotype UK, states, “There’s a tactility to cursive, the kind of warmth that is reminiscent of nostalgia. I think there’s a human crafty element to it that is important for brands.” Essentially, cursive has the innate ability to allow brands to showcase a more humanistic side. 

(© Vicarel Studios work for The Wild)

I’m also completely depressed by the kind of sans-serif of digital modernism of the state we’re in. …We’re missing emotive design. That’s why cursive is so appealing to me at the moment. There’s a great opportunity. [Cursive] is almost like a gateway to uncovering new ideas and new potential.”

Phil Garnaham, Monotype

While the humanistic touch in design is vital for consumers (and people) to feel a visceral connection, Vicarel has been asked by brand clients to refrain from using cursive because their target demographic can’t read it. “We’ve done projects where the agency gave us all the creative direction and then specifically said, ‘Don’t explore scripts because GenZ is our target audience, and they can’t read script,'” he notes.

“It’s not only sad to acknowledge that that generation already struggles to read it,” says Vicarel. “High-end fashion brands are moving away from using ornate serifs, and now they’re all sans-serif. It just takes so much character and like life and personality out of whatever it is that you’re creating.”

Garnham agrees, “I’m also completely depressed by the kind of sans-serif of digital modernism of the state we’re in. We’re not seeing any bravery in brand design at all right now. There’s an obsession that you can just take any sans-serif and apply some quirky character or some subtle shift on it and put the same color palettes in. We’re missing emotive design. That’s why cursive is so appealing to me at the moment. There’s a great opportunity. [Cursive] is almost like a gateway to uncovering new ideas and new potential.”

But while some designers and brands are moving away from cursive in fear that future consumers or brand loyalists won’t be able to read their designs, others are leaning in. Vicarel is one of those designers, creating a typeface inspired by a third-grader’s handwriting practice book that he purchased on a visit to Portugal. “There are enough letterforms in the book to create a typeface. We are able to digitize all of the letters very easily, so, quite literally, the process would be scanning it in. It’s possible that we can take the primary structure of all the letters and almost leave them as is,” he notes. “We will probably make certain adjustments on some letters, but in particular, the accent stroke because it will have to be the same on every single character to be sure that they meet together nicely.”

Now that California and New Hampshire require students to be taught cursive, the design pendulum will hopefully swing back in the opposite direction. If younger generations can confidently read script typefaces, designers and brands won’t be afraid to use them. 

The design world is cyclical, but never before have we seen a cycle so obvious in typography. It’s fascinating to break down the importance of typographical education, especially if it’s in the form of teaching children how to write. The cognitive benefits are there, but so are the humanistic, emotive design benefits. Technology is essential, yes, but there’s nothing quite as dynamic as the human touch. 

The post The Curious Case of Cursive appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

*My criteria for choosing my top African American Designers were simple: a) I must love their work, and b) they must be older than I (born in 1966).

I do not intentionally exclude well-deserved and talented younglings. But I wrote this article as a call back to my younger self, to recognize that the path before me was designed Black and beautiful.

Now, read on and shine on.

Charles Dawson (1889 – 1981)

Best known for his illustrated advertisements, Charles Dawson (Charles Clarence Dawson) was an influential Chicago designer and artist through the 1920s and 30s.

He was born in 1898 in Georgia and went on to attend Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. After two years, he left when he became the first African American admitted into the Arts Students League of New York. Dawson abandoned the pervasive racism of the league when he gained acceptance to the Art Institute of Chicago, where, in his own words, their attitude was “entirely free of bias.” During his time there, Dawson was heavily involved and went on to become a founding member of the first Black artists collective in Chicago, The Arts & Letters Collective.

After graduation, he went on to serve in the segregated forces of WWI, where he faced combat in France. He returned to find a changed Chicago: one racially charged due to a slowed economy and trouble finding jobs. In 1922, Dawson began freelancing, producing work for other black entrepreneurs. Five years later, Dawson played a major role in the first exhibition of African American art at his alma mater called Negro In Art Week.

Dawson took part in two different Works Progress Administration programs under Roosevelt’s New Deal, including the National Youth Administration, where he designed the layout for the American Negro Exposition, a piece composed of 20 dioramas showcasing African American history.

He eventually returned to Tuskegee, where he became a curator for the institute’s museum and passed away at the ripe old age of 93 in Pennsylvania. Dawson will always be remembered for his great contributions to African American art, design, and advancement.

Aaron Douglas (1899 – 1979)

Known as a key artist in the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas was a pivotal figure in developing a distinctly African style of art through his blending of Art Deco and Art Nouveau styles with connections to African masks and dances. His illustrations, published in Alan Locke’s anthology, The New Negro Movement, showcased his detachment from European-style arts and evolution into his own style, clearly communicating African heritage.

Douglas graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1922 with a BFA. He then taught high school art before moving to New York two years later to study under German artist Winold Reiss.

He became the most sought-after illustrator for black writers of his time after his covers for Opportunity and The Crisis, dubbed “Afro-Cubanism” by leading art critic Richard Powell. Among his other notable covers and illustrations are his designs for Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and God’s Trombone, James Weldon Johnson’s epic poem.

Douglas was well-versed in Harlem nightlife, where he spent many nights gaining inspiration for his designs and depictions of the black urban scene. His murals, adorning the walls of various institutions, cemented his name as a major artist of the Harlem Renaissance. His best-known work is a series of murals called, Aspects of Negro Life, which Douglas created for the 135th St. branch of the New York Public Library.

He later left New York to become chair of the art department of Fisk University in Nashville, where he resided until his death in 1979.

Leroy Winbush (1915 – 2007)

One week after graduating high school, Winbush left Detroit for Chicago to become a graphic designer. His inspiration and mentors at the time were sign designers on Chicago’s South Side. He began creating signage, flyers, and murals for the Regal Theater, where he rubbed elbows with some of the most famous black musicians of the time.

Winbush then went on to join Goldblatt Department Store’s sign department, where he was the only black employee. In 1945, after years of working for others, Winbush started his own company, Winbush Associates, later Winbush Designs. Here, he landed accounts with various publishing houses, doing layouts for Ebony and Jet, among others. His ambition and charisma eventually helped him gain acceptance as a black designer and entrepreneur.

Later in life, Winbush began teaching visual communications and typography at various Chicago universities. He concurrently mastered the art of scuba diving, a feat that helped him land a position as part of the crew tasked with creating Epcot Center’s coral reef.

Winbush was adamant in his desire to be remembered as a “good designer,” as opposed to a “Black designer,” but was well aware of the influence he could have on the progression of the Black community. He designed a sickle cell anemia exhibit and exhibitions of the Underground Railroad for different Chicago museums to illuminate Black history, past and present, to the public. His accomplishments throughout his lifetime make LeRoy Winbush a notable African American graphic designer worth checking out.

Eugene Winslow (1919 – 2001)

Born in Dayton, Ohio, into a family of seven children, Eugene Winslow’s parents stressed the importance of education and encouraged their children to study the arts. Winslow attended Dillard University, receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He then served in WWII as part of the revered Tuskegee Airmen.

After the war, Winslow nurtured his lifelong artistic interest by attending The Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology. Winslow then went on to co-found the Am-Afro Publishing house based out of Chicago, where in 1963, they published Great American Negroes Past and Present with Winslow’s illustrations. That same year, he also designed the seal commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation for the Chicago Exposition. Throughout his career as an artist, designer, businessman, and entrepreneur, Winslow always sought to promote racial integration wherever possible.

Georg Olden (1920 – 1975)

Born in 1920 in Birmingham, Alabama, to the son of an escaped enslaved person and opera-singing mother, Georg Olden was a revolutionary designer who helped pave the way for African Americans in the field of design and the corporate world.

After a brief stint at Virginia State College, Olden dropped out of school to work as a graphic designer for the CIA’s predecessor, The Office of Strategic Services. From there, the connections he made helped him land a position at CBS in 1945 as Head of Network Division of On-Air Promotions. Here, he worked on programs such as Gunsmoke, and I Love Lucy and eventually went on to help create the vote-tallying scoreboard for the first televised Presidential Election in 1952.

Praised in his day and posthumously, Olden appeared multiple times in publications such as Graphis and Ebony. In 1963, he became the first African American to design a postage stamp. His design showcased chains breaking to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. By 1970, he had won seven Clio Awards for creative excellence in advertising and design and eventually won the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) award in 2007. Celebrated for his talent, charm, and business intelligence, Olden was a revolutionary African American graphic designer who made advancements in the industry and for all African Americans.

Thomas Miller (1920 – 2012)

Born in Bristol, Virginia, the grandson of enslaved people, Thomas Miller’s talent, hard work, and ambition helped him become one of the first Black designers to break into mainstream graphic design.

Miller graduated and earned a Bachelor of Education with a focus on the arts in 1941 from Virginia State College. Soon after, he enlisted in the army and served in WWII, achieving the rank of First Sergeant.

After the war, Miller was determined to learn about commercial design. He gained acceptance to The Ray Vogue School of Art in Chicago, where he and fellow student Emmett McBain were the only African Americans besides the janitors.

After graduation, Miller searched for jobs and denied one offer in New York because he worked “behind the screen.” Unwilling to tolerate the company’s overt racism, Miller passed on the offer and eventually joined the progressive Chicago studio Morton Goldsholl Associates. It was here that Miller, as chief designer, worked on high-profile campaigns such as the design for 7-Up in the 1970s. As a supporting member of the design team, he also worked on the Motorola rebranding, the Peace Corps logo, and the Betty Crocker “Chicken Helper” branding, earning accolades for himself and the company.

Miller also freelanced, starting when he served in WWII and continuing through his work with Goldsholl. Through his independent work, Miller was commissioned to create a memorial to the DuSable Museum’s founders. This job resulted in one of his most well-known pieces, the Thomas Miller Mosaics, now featured in the museum’s lobby.

Miller’s hard work, dedication, and artistic talent helped him pave the way for many African-American artists and designers to come.

Emmett McBain (1935 – 2012)

Emmett McBain, born in Chicago in 1935, is lesser known than some other designers I’ve profiled. But McBain made major contributions to the advertising and design world and for all African Americans through his successes in the business world.

Emmett McBain, a true visual thinker and communicator, attended The American Academy of Art and the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he became a talented watercolor artist. Post-graduation, McBain worked for several notable agencies and firms as a designer, art supervisor, and creative consultant before co-founding Burrell McBain Incorporated. This advertising agency, which later became the largest African-American-owned agency in the States, aimed to serve their accounts while gaining the trust and loyalty of the Black community. McBain was key in running the agency, landing valuable accounts, and constantly developing new and fresh ideas. His former partner, Thomas J. Burrell, praised his leadership skills and ability to think outside the box.

McBain left Burrell McBain in 1974 to focus on independent art and design in his Hyde Park, Chicago neighborhood, where he later passed away in 2012 at 78.

The University of Illinois at Chicago has a collection featuring his works entitled Emmett McBain Design Papers. You’ll find print ads, record album covers, and transparencies of Billboards, all McBain designed.

Archie Boston (born 1943)

Known for his blatant self-deprecation and humor, Archie Boston was a pioneer in challenging the racism of the 1960s and 70s through his designs and attitude.

One of five children, Boston grew up poor but well aware of the importance of education. In 1961, his artistic talent landed him acceptance to Chouinard Art Institute. While at university, he interned with the advertising agency Carson/Roberts, where he cemented his desire to work in design and eventually returned to the agency years later.

After graduation, he worked at various advertising and design firms before forming Boston & Boston with his older brother, Bradford. It was here that they created provocative pieces showcasing their race, as well as creativity, in pieces such as “Catch a Nigger by The Toe” and by selecting the Jim Crow typeface for their logotype.

For the majority of his career, however, Boston was an educator. He landed a position as a full-time lecturer in the art department at California State University, Long Beach, before creating their design department and eventually becoming head of the visual communications design program. He influenced countless young designers there, inspiring them through his encouragement and standard for excellence.

Emory Douglas (Born 1943)

The former Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Emory Douglas’ career in commercial art has been centered around civil and equal rights propagation from its beginnings.

Douglas’ first exposure to design came when his crimes landed him in the Youth Training School of Ontario, California. Here, he worked in the print shop and learned about typography, illustration, and logo design. Later, Douglas enrolled in commercial art classes at the City College of San Francisco after running into a former counselor from the center who encouraged him to do so

During this time, Douglas became active in the Black Panther Party after being introduced to the founding members, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Douglas offered up his design skills while watching Seale work on the first issue of the party’s paper, The Black Panther. He was well aware of the importance of having illustrations and artwork to help reach the many illiterate members of the communities the party was targeting. Much of his art and illustration for the paper initially focused on Black rights, but it soon expanded to include women, children, and community figures alongside the party’s focuses. While working on The Black Panther, Douglas coined and popularized the term “pigs” in reference to police officers.

In the 1980s, the Black Panther Party, as Douglas had once known it, was mostly dissolved by law enforcement efforts. Later, Douglas moved to care for his ailing mother and continued to pursue some independent design. His revolutionary artwork helped to educate and agitate repressed and suppressed communities of the time.

Sylvia Harris (1953 – 2011)

Noted for her unwavering desire to help others, Sylvia Harris was a graphic designer, teacher, and business owner who used her research and skill set to reach far and wide.

Born and raised in Richmond, VA, Harris experienced the desegregation of the 1960s directly. This experience provided the foundation for her interest in social systems and their effect. After receiving her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Harris moved to Boston, where she worked with various creative types. Through her work with WGBH and Chris Pullman, she realized the design field’s breadth and depth. After much prodding from her mentor, Harris enrolled in Yale’s Masters in Graphic Design program.

Two Twelve Associates was created with two of her former classmates in 1980 after graduation. Here, Harris began to explore how to use and grow her skill set to develop large-scale public information systems. Her work with Citibank set an early precedent for human-centered automated customer service.

In 1994, Harris left Two Twelve to create Sylvia Harris LLC, where she changed gears and began focusing more on design planning and strategies. Harris helped guide some of the largest public institutions, hospitals, and universities with systems planning. As creative director for the US Census Bureau’s Census 2000, Harris’ rebranding efforts helped encourage previously underrepresented citizens to participate.

Harris was awarded the AIGA medal posthumously in 2014, three years after her untimely death at the age of 57. Harris will always be remembered for her contributions to the design field and far beyond.

Art Sims (Born 1954)

From his first foray into the art world with the “Draw Me” test from magazines and TV of the 50s and 60s, Sims excelled. He attended Detroit’s Cass Technical High School, known for its dedication to the arts. From there, Sims gained acceptance to the University of Michigan on a full scholarship. During the summer between his junior and senior years, Sims landed a job with Columbia Records to produce a series of album covers. After graduation, the Sunshine State called his name, and Sims headed to LA.

Sims scored a job with EMI, but he was ultimately let go for pursuing freelance work. He went on to work for CBS, where he continued building his independent portfolio. When he was let go this time, Sims was prepared and already had the office space for his firm, 11:24 Advertising Design.

After seeing one of Spike Lee’s films, Sims knew he had to work with the director. He went on to design posters for Lee’s New Jack City, Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, and most controversially, Bamboozled.

Ever the entrepreneur, Sims is developing a greeting card line and writing screenplays while teaching graphic design to African American middle schoolers. Art Sims is the epitome of talent, drive, and ambition, someone every graphic designer should know.

Gail Anderson (Born 1962)

Known for her uncanny ability to create expressive, dynamic typefaces perfectly suited to their subject, Gail Anderson is a designer and teacher with an impressive tenure in the field.

Born and raised in New York, Anderson’s ever-burning curiosity about design began with the teen magazines of her adolescent years. It was cemented while studying at the School of Visual Arts in NY. Here, Anderson began to develop her methodologies and no-holds-barred approach to design.

After college, Anderson eventually landed at The Boston Globe for two years, working with those responsible for pioneering the new newspaper design of the late 1980s. Moving on to Rolling Stone in 1987, Anderson worked seamlessly with AIGA medalist Fred Woodward, where their creative process always included lots of music, low lighting, and late nights. Her work with Woodward was always exploring new and exciting materials and instruments to create Rolling Stone’s eclectic design. They utilized everything from hot metal to bits of twigs to bottle caps to create their vision.

After working her way up from associate to senior art director, Anderson left Rolling Stone in 2002 to join SpotCo, where her focus shifted from design to advertising. At SpotCo, she’s been the designer behind innumerable Broadway and off-Broadway posters, including that of Avenue Q and Eve Ensler’s The Good Body.

Praised as the quintessential collaborator for her inclusive, expressive, and encouraging attitude towards working together, Anderson also admits that many of her “high-octane” designs occurred at night, solo. Whether it’s her collaborative work, solo projects, magazine layouts, or theatrical posters, Anderson designs work with and for her subjects, always emphasizing their highest potential.

The Unknown & Overlooked Designers

They are many, often invisible, but we feel the impact of their work throughout history, and we should acknowledge them. Many African American graphic designers worked behind the scenes and did not receive credit for their work due to the racist norms of the times. 

These include:

• The logo creators for the uniforms of the Negro baseball and basketball leagues;
• Trail-blazing entrepreneurs like Madam C.J. Walker, Annie Malone, Carmen C. Murphy, Mae Reeves, Anthony Overton, Frederick Patterson, and many more;
• The unknown graphic designer who painted the bold and sobering “A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY” flag, hung by the NAACP from their New York offices whenever they learned of a hanging;
• Those presently active (Black Lives Matter) are creating banners, posters, signs, and media protesting discrimination of all kinds. Graphic design, after all, is about communicating a message effectively.

The truth of all history cannot be understated. As a designer of the African diaspora (African-Jamaican-Canadian), I believe in knowing those who paved the way. These men and women boldly pushed past racial inequality with their talent and perseverance to help create the way for all.

Glenford Laughton is founder of Toronto-based agency Laughton Creatves, a design studio that believes design is a highly-collaborative endeavor (hence the missing ‘i’). This article was written and researched by Glenford Laughton and originally published on the Laughton Creatves website. Republished with permission of the author.

Sources: AIGA, The Design Observer, The University of Chicago Library, Atlanta Blackstar, The History Makers, Wikipedia, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Design Archive, and The Root.

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Alina graduated from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1970 and, in 2012, received the university’s Silver Star, an award given to outstanding alumni. In 2003, she first published Designing Brand Identity. This book demonstrated the relationship between strategy and design and showcased compelling best practice case studies from the global public and private sectors. Designing Brand Identity was a novel reinvention of the idea of a marketing textbook because it demystified branding and illuminated the range of tools and techniques used by experienced practitioners. Alina’s book was an immediate hit, striking a deep cultural chord and unequivocally proving how the branding practice engaged intelligence, creativity, imagination, and emotion, unlike any other business discipline. Now available in eleven languages, the sixth edition of Designing Brand Identity will be published next month (February 2024). Wheeler also co-authored Brand Atlas: Branding Intelligence Made Visible in 2011, a comprehensive guide to the brand process enriched with illustrative diagrams.

Alina was also a passionate member of AIGA. In 1980, she was a founding board member of AIGA Philadelphia and became its president in 1985. Alina also served on AIGA’s national board from 1991 to 1994 and was honored as an AIGA Fellow in 1999, the inaugural year of this prestigious award. In 2020, she was a founding board member of African Design Matters, a global partnership cataloging the creative work of people of African descent.

Alina Wheeler, one of the world’s great brand consultants, described her business as managing perception. She could talk as vividly about David Bowie as about Dove Soap or Deloitte. Alina was an enchanting presence, deeply committed to her family and friends, and one of the kindest, most generous souls in design and branding. Alina’s celebration of life will be held on January 27 at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

Read more about this extraordinary woman on her website. And listen to Debbie Millman’s 2011 interview with Alina Wheeler on Design Matters.

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The Genesis of Braille and Boston Line Type

Louis Braille, a blind man, developed the Braille system with a deep understanding of the needs of blind people. Utilising a set of raised dots to represent letters, Braille provides a tactile method for reading and writing. It was born out of a genuine need and was grounded in the practical experience of the visually impaired.

On the other hand, Samuel Gridley Howe’s Boston Line Type system emerged from his visit to the Institute of the Blind in Paris, where he encountered the raised letter systems of Valentin Haüy. Howe’s approach, however well-intentioned, was rooted in the Roman alphabet, which both sighted and blind individuals could read. This noble idea, however, failed to consider the lived experience of the blind community. Boston Line Type proved too complex and challenging to use effectively, leading to over a century’s delay in adopting the more user-friendly Braille system in the US.

Sample of Braille (left); Sample of Boston Line Type (right), courtesy of Ricky Irvine.

Howe’s resistance to a fundamentally different system for visually impaired people stemmed from the belief that this would isolate the blind community. While he intended to ensure inclusion, the reality was the opposite. This episode underscores a critical point: good intentions are not enough when designing for inclusivity. Without a continuous conversation between design and the users’ needs, even the best intentions can lead to fundamentally misguided approaches.

Inclusive Design Doesn’t Work in Isolation

Leaving people out of the conversation will always lead to isolation and exclusion. In contrast, inclusion leads to a world where more voices are heard, more people can contribute, and new perspectives enrich our collective experience.

This concept of inclusion versus exclusion in design extends beyond accessibility for the visually impaired and is still an issue today. In the world of branding, for instance, the digital execution of a brand must be an inclusive experience. However, creative agencies are often tasked with creating a brand independently from its digital expression, which a digital agency executes. So, while the creative agency may be well-informed about accessibility and how the brand they created needs to exist in a digital environment, the website can suffer if they are not guiding the production.

In a recent example, the Natural History Museum underwent a rebrand that was visually appealing and rich in design. However, the digital execution, seemingly developed in isolation, needed more elements that made the rebrand engaging. This situation highlights the need for a holistic approach combining creative and digital design. With more communication between the disciplines and the intended audiences, the result could have provided the richness of the rebrand and been accessible and appropriate for the broadest possible audience. Instead, it became a tickbox exercise rather than an opportunity. Both design and digital agencies must establish direct communication with the right communities, as even small efforts can lead to significant industry-wide progress over time.

How do we provide an equally rich experience and brand expression while still working within the boundaries of accessibility?

Learning From Experience

At UnitedUs, our experience working with D&A, a social enterprise led by and for disabled people, has significantly shaped views on practical design and inclusivity. The D&A project, undertaken while our team was still developing its accessibility knowledge, provided valuable insights.

Visiting the end users in person taught us that it can be just as discriminatory to say, “Here is your AA (ADA)-compliant colour combination,” and leave it there rather than providing a choice. So we created a system that allowed users to pick colour combinations from a predefined set of accessible combinations. Those choices could be needs- or aesthetic preference-driven–choice being the key aspect. The consultations showed us that good accessibility based on AA (ADA) standards barely scratched the surface of how people can genuinely engage with the website on their terms. It underscored the importance of understanding accessibility from the end user’s perspective and the limitations of rigid compliance with standards.

Additionally, the choice of typography in the project demonstrated how design can impact accessibility. Protest placards inspired the visual identity, so we used all-caps typography; however, we discovered that it could pose legibility challenges for some. Accessibility encompasses a broader perspective that considers compliance with standards and factors like legibility, letter form, and the overall reading experience. Therefore, as an agency, our approach is: How do we provide an equally rich experience and brand expression while still working within the boundaries of accessibility?

Lessons From the Past Inform an Inclusive Future

The example of Braille vs. Boston Line Type emphasises that good intentions alone are not enough; we must continually engage with the communities that need inclusive and accessible design.

We can’t collectively make the same mistake as Samuel Howe and stick doggedly to our conceptions of what is right. We must prepare to abandon our notions of inclusive and accessible design when demonstrably better alternatives emerge. We also can’t be afraid of advancing our understanding of this topic; we must take a proactive approach and ask questions we might get wrong rather than unquestioningly sticking within the accessibility guidelines, which date quickly. Guidelines are just the beginning step; we should always look to add, enrich, and develop what we do, understand, and how we work.

A hero of mine, William Blake, showed us that adherence to dogma, however sanctified, without challenging and questioning, only leads to stagnation. Progress happens when we engage in conversations challenging the status quo, moving us toward a more inclusive and accessible future.

This is a guest post written by Carl Rylatt, Design Director at UK-based strategic branding agency UnitedUs, is a seasoned and creative graphic designer. His extensive expertise spans print production, advertising concepts, branding, and identity. With a keen focus on the finer aspects of design, Carl is particularly passionate about branding, typography, custom type, and the intricacies of print preparation and production.

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A nondescript envelope arrives in the mail. It contains a bound black folder labeled “Influences, Inspiration and Role Models” along a gray spine, and a note: “I have been designing for over six decades without stopping … much like a cow grazes. It now seemed the time to pause and take a look in the rearview mirror.”

It comes from George Tscherny. For the uninitiated, Tscherny’s own influence runs vast, and runs deep: He’s a two-time AIGA president. He’s been inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame. He’s received the AIGA Medal. He taught the School of Visual Arts’ first design course, and created the SVA logo. His work has been archived or featured in permanent collections everywhere from the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives to MoMA and the Library of Congress. It’s not often you get a package from a design legend. So you open it, and you publish it. Some artists inspire you to talk. But the best inspire you to listen. Tscherny falls into the latter category. — The Editors

A Lifetime of Influence, Inspiration, and Role Models

By George Tscherny

We don’t readily recognize our true role models. It’s only after we’ve found our own voice, our own vision, that sources of inspiration and influence can be acknowledged. Then comes the obligation to pass on to the next generation a body of work worth emulating.

It was apparent fairly early in my life that I had a strong visual sense as well as an aptitude for drawing, and it didn’t take long before I knew what I wanted to do with that ability. In the neighborhood where I grew up in Berlin, there was a movie theater that displayed huge hand-painted portraits of the actors featured in the current film. These portraits triggered my desire to become a “commercial artist”—a job description with which I’m still quite comfortable, despite its current lack of popularity. For just as copy can be literature, design can be art when it reaches certain levels of originality and distinction.

Growing up in a poor, working-class household, I had to find art and culture outside the home. Modern architecture, which began to appear on the streets of Berlin around 1930, captured my interest on walks through the city. A memorable example was Columbushaus by the prominent architect Erich Mendelsohn. On the street level of the building was a Woolworth’s. I remember seeing a reproduction there of Franz Marc’s painting The Large Blue Horses and thinking, What an outrageous idea—everybody knows that horses aren’t blue. It was decades before I learned who the painter was and that art need not necessarily be literal.

Economic and political circumstances prevented me from receiving formal art training, but propaganda art was all around me, most of it repugnant in form and content. There were some sane and humane voices during the Weimar Republic, such as George Grosz, John Heartfield and Käthe Kollwitz, but they were fighting a losing battle. I was much too young then to distinguish between these competing political voices, and by 1933, when I was 8 years old, the battle was over and lost.

In Berlin during the 1930s, a dominant visual presence in advertising was Ludwig Hohlwein, the most successful German poster artist between the two World Wars. Admired for his virtuosity in articulating light and shade as well as his sense of pattern, he was underestimated for his ability to focus on the essence of a message. His cigarette poster for Grathwohl is a striking example of minimalism. The glowing cigarette is the very “point” of the message.

Then came Kristallnacht, the war, and emigration. Eventful years, but not relevant to this essay, except for the welcome gift of the U.S. GI Bill for my army service in World War II, which made it possible to finally pursue my interest in art. I enrolled in the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, simultaneously scrambling to obtain a high school diploma so that I would be able to attend Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Before entering Pratt in 1947, I met Sonia, now my wife of 60+ years. What united us was our mutual interest in modern dance. In addition to being an astute and honest critic, Sonia has been a lifelong influence in guiding me intellectually and ethically by softening the edges of someone who is by nature a blue-collar designer.

At Pratt, my initial concern was with craft and technique. I saw my formal education purely as a trade and vocational school, where I pursued drawing, rendering and other skills with intensity and without concern for developing original ideas. When I eventually became interested in expressing myself creatively, I didn’t have to struggle with execution. My figure drawing became more expressionistic, and gesture became more important than detail. I had intuitively followed the advice, “First acquire an infallible technique, and then open yourself to inspiration.”

Drawing from the live figure played an important part in my curriculum at Pratt, and here the fashion illustrator Carl Erickson (Eric) exerted considerable influence. He was a remarkable draughtsman who drew with the ease that most people walk. He dominated his field from the 1920s into the ’50s. Eric’s drawing was notable for the confidence of the single line, which selectively stressed the essential and significant detail. Fashion illustration eventually lost out to photography—not to better capture detail as one might have thought, but rather to establish more contemporary moods and attitudes.

In my second year at Pratt, two professors contributed in a major way to my development as a designer. Herschel Levit was a revelation. Levit exposed us to the work of distinguished designers and to the fine arts, music and art history. This filled a gaping void, as art schools at that time offered no academic or liberal arts studies. A diploma was awarded after three years of study, much like a vocational school.

One of the graphic designers Levit introduced us to was Lester Beall, whose work I greatly admired and who, more than any other designer of that generation, became a role model. Beall integrated the European avant-garde of the 1920s and ’30s into his own distinctly American style. His skillful assemblage of photography, type, color and design elements led the way for succeeding generations of designers.

James Brooks, another key professor, taught lettering with a difference. There were two sides to the artistic personality of Brooks. On one hand there was the formal discipline required to do lettering in black and white, and on the other there was his painting, which was spontaneous and colorful. He deservedly became very prominent in the early 1950s as an abstract expressionist.

Brooks led me to the work of Imre Reiner. With exquisite sensitivity, Reiner combined traditional typography with highly personal and daring letterforms. This typographic range from cool to hot exerted a major influence on me, not only in typography but in design in general. Reiner’s skillful utilization of wood engraving showed me, as the work of Ben Shahn had done, that it was possible to blur the lines between “Fine” and “Applied” art.

It’s surprising how much I learned from journals and books. Typographie by Walter Bangerter and Walter Marti, published in Switzerland in 1948, was not only inspirational but also enlightening. It taught me that emphasis in typography is accomplished through differences in typeface or size and also through the use of color, weight and spatial manipulation.

In the 1940s (or even the ’50s) few art schools taught photography. There were no photo galleries and, with the exception of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, I found, no photography departments in museums. Magazines like LIFE, and once again books, were primary resources. Henri Cartier-Bresson demonstrated the significance of The Decisive Moment, be it in photography, design or communication. He taught us to walk softly and carry a little camera.

Although it was intended as a book on the dance of the same name, for me Martha Graham by Barbara Morgan was a photography book. Graham aficionados will be shocked to hear that I believe the actual performance never lived up to the promise of the photographs. Exquisitely printed in photogravure in 1941, these images are unsurpassed to this day in capturing the dance. The Graham book did increase my interest in the dance, which in turn led to a preoccupation with movement and capturing it on a two-dimensional surface.

Early on, a number of art historians and writers were immensely influential in refining and affirming my thoughts and attitudes, including Bernard Rudofsky ( “Are Clothes Modern? An Essay on Contemporary Apparel,” 1947), Siegfried Giedion (Mechanization Takes Command, 1948), and E.H. Gombrich (The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1982).

An unexpected influence was the Modern Jazz Quartet.

In 1958, John Lewis recorded European Windows with the Stuttgart Symphony Orchestra. The remarkable aspect of this composition and performance is how seamlessly the music moves from a classical to a jazz mode. In doing so, it echoes in music what Imre Reiner had achieved in typography.

My association (1953–1955) with George Nelson, the visionary architect, designer and thinker, provided the most important lesson of all, which was to bring no preconceived ideas to a new project—to begin each time with a blank page. While that isn’t the most economical way to run a design office, it provides the best climate for doing creative work.

High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, the 1990 MoMA exhibit by Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, was more important as validation and confirmation of my beliefs and attitudes than as a source of inspiration. Today, as in the past, the most pervasive influence on my work is the everyday culture around me. I draw sustenance from everywhere and enjoy finding the significant in the seemingly trivial. Although my respect for high art is unequivocal, there is no question as to which side of the high/low art debate I belong. Unlike the fine artist who values only the original, I, as a commercial artist, honor the reproduction as well as its source. I find myself comfortable at the intersection of high and low art.

Featured in header, clockwise from top left:

1) “The seven veils of the male stomach” from Are Clothes Modern? by Bernard Rudofsky (Paul Theobald, Chicago, 1947)

2) UFA Theater circa 1930, Berlin, Moabit

3) Franz Marc, The Large Blue Horses, 1911; oil on canvas, 41 5/8 x 71 5/16”; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

4) ”Wordless Poster,” in-situ photograph, 2012; School of Visual Arts

5) Modular display towers (one of a series), 1971; Pan American Airways

6) Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs by Barbara Morgan (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, NY, 1941)

7) Logo suggesting floorplan (Architect Fischer) from Typographie by Walter Bangerter & Walter Marti, Switzerland, 1948

8) & 10) Quick figure studies, ink and watercolor; student work, 1949, Pratt Institute, NY

9) Exhibition catalog (front and back cover), 1961; American Federation of Arts

11) John Lewis, European Windows; RCA Victor recording, 1958

12) Portrait of George Tscherny’s father drawn from life at age 9

13) Cover and detail, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, 1929; Kurt Tucholsky, author; John Heartfield, designer

14) Poster, 2011; Voices and Visions / PJ Library

15) Advertisement, 1955; Herman Miller Furniture Co.

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The NASA Worm Logo: you know it, you love it. How could you not? Designed in 1974 by Richard Danne in partnership with Bruce Blackburn, the futuristic Worm Logo succeeded NASA’s Meatball Logo, created by James Modarelli in 1959. The Meatball ousted the Worm once more in 1992, only for the Worm to be revived in 2020. The good-natured debate wages on to this day:

Worm vs. Meatball. 

My colleague Steven Heller staked his claim last week on the occasion of NASA honoring Danne at its DC headquarters with a media event about the insignia’s nearly 50-year history. To get in on the celebration, I had a few questions for Danne, which he answered below.

How does it feel being the brain behind a logo as iconic and culturally significant as the NASA Worm Logo? 

In a word: Thrilling! 

Having served as NASA’s external design director for almost ten years, it’s so rewarding to see its staying power and current popularity in the United States and the world. And my nearly 50-year NASA relationship is truly exceptional.

No one ever knows how long a Mark will hold up, but we knew this would serve the Agency for many decades to come.

Richard Danne

Do you remember the moment the core concept of the Worm Logo came to you? How did it develop? Did you immediately know that you’d created something brilliant, or was that more of a surprise?

This logotype and its evolution in our Danne & Blackburn studio was arduous and definitely not a quick-hitting surprise.

Back in 1974, the mountain of current visual material supplied to us by NASA was almost overwhelming. And, by any standard, poor! There were no designers at Headquarters or any of the Centers. So Bruce and I went back and forth and kept simplifying our symbols and logotypes as we tried to make them work in all two and 3-dimensional applications: from publications to signs to rockets and space vehicles! We even designed to survive the mediocre printing from GPO back then.

We just kept refining until we had a strong, progressive mark that spoke for aeronautics and space exploration. We had decided early on to present only one solution and back it up with multiple applications to show it was a real Program, not just a badge. It was the analog age, so Bruce (the lead designer) rendered the final logotype solution in a Pentel pen, and we were airborne!

No one ever knows how long a Mark will hold up, but we knew this would serve the Agency for many decades to come.

My greatest satisfaction comes from seeing apparel, sporting the Worm, worn by young people around the world.

Richard Danne

What is the magic of the Worm Logo? Why has it stood the test of time in this way, and why do you think people love it so much? 

It’s very hard to explain. It’s so simple (timeless design is always my focus). It’s a no-frills solution, but it still speaks for technology and innovation; it’s strong and still speaks to the future. It’s telegenic and can be read from miles away! My greatest satisfaction comes from seeing apparel sporting the Worm worn by young people around the world. It has that universal appeal, which bodes extremely well for NASA going forward.

Fellow colleague John Van Dyke said recently: “This logo is so great, it’s good for another 50 years!”

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Born in 1899, Albert was the sixth child of Izidor Kner, the head of the press. Showing artistic talent at a young age, he studied graphics at the Royal Hungarian School of Applied Arts at 15. Albert was on track to become the first member of his family to study at a university when the First World War intervened. Albert served on the Italian front and suffered a debilitating injury resulting in a paralyzed eye, which he was forced to tape shut to sleep. After the war, he continued his studies in typography and won a prize for an endpaper design. Albert received myriad commissions and became the art director of a small Viennese firm. His designs for board games went into production in Austria, and at the same time he continued his studies.

It’s hard to imagine contemporary life without Albert Kner’s influence.

In 1925, Albert was hired as the artistic director of the Romanian Helikon printing house and worked as a designer for the family business. He was a man of many skills, including graphic design, typography, illustration, woodcut, and industrial design. Albert returned to Hungary in 1927 and worked as the art director for the Hungaria Newspress, a prominent printing house in Budapest, where he oversaw the design of several daily newspapers, magazines, and books, many of whose covers he designed. He remained there for 13 years.

With the situation in Eastern Europe worsening for Jews in the late 1930s, Albert, 40, relocated to the United States with his family and was soon employed by the Container Corporation of America. At CCA, he designed the many breakthrough inventions that would become a part of everyday life: the six-pack for beverage bottles, cereal and detergent boxes, the flip-top cigarette box, containers for ice cream, and the toothpaste tube. It is hard to imagine contemporary life without Kner’s influence. Tragically, most of the Kner family in Europe perished at the hand of the Nazis.

KNER is stunning. Designed by Sarolta Ágnes Erdélyi, the book documents all of this history. Brooker and Erdész tell the Kner story in remarkable detail, including the tragic aspects of Albert’s life. Albert’s myriad works of art come to life beautifully, beginning with his childhood cartoons and throughout his career. The breath of work is inspiring: posters, books, paintings, advertising, photomontage, packaging, furniture, toys, textiles, and games. Personal correspondences and family photographs mingle with his work, bringing Albert and the Kner family to life in this comprehensively researched biography. It’s hard to believe that Albert Kner has not been included prior in the annals of design history. Thanks to Brooker and Erdesz, this is no longer the case.

Images courtesy Sarolta Ágnes Erdélyi.

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Like all design objects, novelty items carry a stratum of nuance. Designed for no practical purpose, our curios are timestamps of past and present, charged with histories often rooted in some of humanity’s ugliest habits. This particular silly toy has immortalized one of the greatest comedians of the 20th century.

Unless you’re a history buff, comedy-lover, or time traveler from Tin Pan Alley, very few people today still recognize the name Julius Henry Marx, but they certainly know his face. Better known as “Groucho,” Julius Henry Marx was a comedian who came up through the vaudeville circuit in the early 1900s with his brothers Leonard (“Chico”) and Adolph (“Harpo”). If you don’t recognize this classic trio, it’s through no fault of your own— the films, tv shows, and radio the Marx Brothers created are no longer in circulation. Groucho passed on years ago, but his iconic rubber face, with its big black mustache, jaunty cigar, and glasses has been immortalized in plastic. 

Also known as Groucho goggles, beaglepuss glasses, fuzzy puss, or disguise glasses, Groucho glasses are black plastic glasses with an attached pale plastic nose far from any human skin tone, big furry mustache, and large black eyebrows. You’ve likely seen these toys in joke or gift shops, haphazardly photoshopped into a meme, or as a horrid “disguise” worn by a character on TV.

Many notable objects of comedy date back to the early 1900s. As vaudeville and slapstick comedy infected audiences across the United States, so did props— lots and lots of props. Simple gags like breakaway furniture, funny foley, and bowler hats were lauded for their brilliance onstage, and entrepreneurs seized opportunity to usher in an era of novelties.

Julius Marx never meant to become a household face. Born into an immigrant family of German Jews, their mother Minnie encouraged three of the Marx brothers to drop out of school and join the vaudeville circuit. Julius would have much rather continued his education and became an academic, but Minnie insisted. Their uncle, vaudevillian Al Shean, took in Leonard, Adolph, and Julius Marx, and out came the soon-to-be iconic bumbling Chico, Harpo, and Groucho: The Marx Brothers. 

Early in their career, each brother each embraced an ethnic stock character: an Italian con artist for Chico, a mute Irishman with a car horn voice-box and red fright wig for Harpo, and a stuffy German professor for Groucho. Always longing to be an intellectual, Groucho donned glasses, a tailcoat, and adopted his ever-present cigar. Common practice in vaudeville, the trio became well-known for embodying these archetypes. 

In 1915, Germans took a less than favorable position in the public eye after the sinking of the RMS Lusitania. To regain favor with his audiences, Groucho adapted a distinctively Jewish accent and a slouched and bumbling walk, leaning into a new parody: an ill-informed Jewish immigrant. At the peak of archetypal humor, Groucho had developed “Jewface,” a physical representation of the vaudeville stock character of the stage Jew: a Yiddish-speaking caricature with a large nose that became increasingly more popular after Eastern European Jews began immigrating in the late 1800s. 

As the legend goes, one day Groucho was late to the theater for a show following the birth of his son in 1921. With no time to glue on the individual whiskers for his usual professor mustache, he drew one on using a generous swipe of black greasepaint under his nose, adding two above his eyes to match. Adding his professor glasses and ever-present cigar, Groucho’s iconic look was born, unintentionally perfecting vaudevillian “Jewface.” Julius Marx had designed the ultimate comedic mask: malleable, memorable, and able to be twisted into a million different expressions, each funnier than the last.

Audiences were surprisingly welcoming of the stage Jew’s lilting voice and familiar physicality. With Jewish performers actively playing a role in the creation of these characters, they became much more compassionate representations of the immigrant experience intimately understood by their Jewish audience. “An immigrant who has already acculturated a bit, when he sees this bumbling immigrant Jew onstage with his heavy Yiddish accent— he looks at that and can laugh at it and say ‘that’s not me,’” explained Eddy Portnoy, curator of Jewface: Yiddish Dialect Songs of Tin Pan Alley at the Center for Jewish History in 2015. “It’s a way to distance himself from his previous immigrant self.”

This iconic mask found Groucho Marx incredible success, rendering him virtually unrecognizable without the look. While traveling with the Victory Caravan during World War II, Groucho stepped off the train without his greasepaint mustache to no fanfare. Piqued, he slipped back onboard to reemerge smeared with greasepaint. Tremendous applause ensued, of course. In disguise, he (well, his character) was a hit.

As Groucho Marx rose to fame, novelties swept the nation. By the mid 1940s, joke shops and novelty shops were a common sight across the United States. According to Mark Newgarden’s Cheap Laffs, approximately 4,000 shops peppering the landscape by the 1940s, annually grossing around $3 million— even with the majority of items retailing for 25 cents or less. Mail-order catalogues from Johnson Smith & Co. were blazoned with “novelties” and advertised in the tabloids. A booming industry of joke fingers, false teeth, funny glasses, sleight of hand magic tricks, and witty “things you never knew existed” became mainstream.

Louis St. Pierre, celebrated owner of the Hollywood Magic Shop, claimed his brother invented the first iteration of disguise glasses. “They were beautifully made,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 1982. “You walked into a room and it looked like you had a real big nose. You couldn’t tell the difference. Now it’s a quickie thing.” Whether or not this is true, archival photos from as early as 1950 show women wearing big nose glasses, and black frames with a massive rubber schnoz.

In 1950, NBC-TV began to air You Bet Your Life, a game show hosted by Groucho Marx. Everything was heavily “Groucho” branded, complete with a mustachioed prop duck and cartoon title card. As a publicity effort to cross-promote the series, the network authorized the production of official Groucho Goggles. First appearing on the market in the late 1950s, these toys were the next variation of today’s disguise glasses. Groucho Goggles were one piece of heavy plastic with a block mustache, cigar attachment, and thick eyebrows fixed to two white donut-shaped eyes, with free black “pupils” which spun around when you blew into a whistle on the back of the toy. 

Big nose glasses and Groucho Goggles would merge in the coming years. The Franco American Novelty Company’s “Beagle Puss Disguise Kit” was sold as early 1974 as the “World’s Funniest Disguise,” claiming to provide the wearer with the appearance of a ‘city slicker’; otherwise specified as a ‘Jewish intellectual.’

While this cartoonish camouflage has been good for a laugh for decades, the prop alone— and as a depiction of Groucho Marx— holds complicated and arguably racist roots. The object was not initially mass-produced as a slur encased in plastic, but does perpetuate (and celebrate) Groucho’s immigrant character. Today, the majority of contemporary uses in media are not “Jewface,” but as a laughable, awful disguise.

Disguise glasses are cross-cultural. In Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run, the parents participate in an interview wearing Groucho glasses to conceal their identities. The Muppets Fozzie Bear and Oscar the Grouch appear on screen in the glasses at various points. Steve Martin features the glasses in “My Real Name,” a joke in his comedy tour A Wild and Crazy Guy in 1978. The City of Chicago’s Outdoor Film Festival broke the world record for “most people wearing Groucho Marx glasses in one place” in 2009 with 4,436 participants. When former President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in 2017, the internet exploded with suggestions for a replacement, including a viral meme of Vladimir Putin wearing the glasses. And in 2020 “disguised face” officially joined the emoji keyboard as part of Unicode 13.0. It’s safe to say this mask has become a contemporary cultural staple, though its original owner has not. 

The iconic greasepaint mustache, glasses, and cigar were once synonymous with Julius Marx’s professorial identity as Groucho. Now Groucho glasses serve an ironic purpose, revealing the identity of the slow-witted wearer. Though his brilliance in comedy is only remembered by a select few, the intricacy of our entertainment’s history lives on today, embalmed in plastic.

Brooke Viegut is a researcher, experience designer, theater artist, speaker, and professional merrymaker. Brooke co-hosts “so there’s this…” a podcast about design that disappoints. She is dedicated to the “art of having a good time,” studies objects & experiences that bring us joy, and is the owner of a rapidly growing collection of silly things. She is the author of Anonymous Intimacy (coming 2023) and holds an MA in Design Research, Writing, and Criticism from the School of Visual Arts.

Header image by the author.

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The expansiveness of graphic design is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the vastness of the graphic design world is indicative of the rich and beautiful works that have been created in media across the globe for centuries. But on the other, how in the hell do we preserve, document, and share it all?

This was the central question graphic designer and design educator Louise Sandhaus began asking eight years ago, propelling her to start plotting what would one day become the People’s Graphic Design Archive. Working with co-directors Briar Levit, Brockett Horne, Morgan Searcy, and support from Stephen Coles and Kate Long from The Letterform Archive, Sandhaus was able to turn what she calls a “crazy idea” into a critical, first-of-its-kind tool for preserving graphic design history.

The result is a crowd-sourced virtual archive of inclusive graphic design history, and a community-driven open access collection of anything that can be considered graphic design. The platform can be searched through key words and tags, with results organizable by “Contribution Date,” “Item Date,” “Most Discussed,” or “Most Viewed.” Anyone can create a PGDA account to submit works to the archive— in fact, Sandhaus implores you to do so.

To celebrate the PGDA’s official launch earlier this month, I spoke to Sandhaus about her journey with the project, the future of the platform, and how the public can continue to support its mission.

(This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.)

How did you come up with the concept for the People’s Graphic Design Archive? 

The original concept came out of my books, Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California and Graphic Design and A Colorful Life: Gere Kavanaugh, Designer. I saw what was being preserved in archives, and realized there was so much incredible material that I came across in my research but there was no place for this material to go. I was frustrated. I could see inklings of other things that should be researched, but there’s not enough time, and not enough researchers. And even if you cover all this material, most of the time, there’s no place where it’s going to be preserved where people are going to know about it.

I remember sitting in a meeting at LACMA in 2014 (they had this community of curators and design historians I was a part of), and I realized, Oh my god, there’s so much more they could collect! But how would they even know about it? What am I going to do? That’s when the idea dawned on me for a crowd-sourced virtual collection.

What was the development process like for the project?

I spent years trying to conceptualize it, prototyping it with students, seeing how we might digitize an archive, seeing if there was public interest. We did this graphic design roadshow in 2017, where we invited the public to bring in examples of graphic design that they thought were part of canonized graphic design history, and should be preserved and shared— kind of like Antiques Roadshow.

I also got together with a former student of mine, and the founder of BIPOC Design History, Silas Munro. We both had these big ideas for design history, but we needed support; we needed people to talk to. So we formed something called “Design History Fridays,” and invited people that we knew were also working in this realm of design history who might want to have a conversation and support each other. It was through that group that Brian and Brockett came forward.

Taking on a project of this magnitude can be incredibly daunting. How were you able to plow ahead for eight long years to bring your vision for the PGDA to life? 

There’s this tenaciousness that takes over you. You keep the blinders on, you see the possibility but you can’t get paralyzed by what it’s going to take. It’s also about not being afraid to fail. If it didn’t work, it didn’t work!

When I saw the platform Fonts in Use I realized, Oh, it can be done! It’s a crowd-sourced, virtual collection. That’s when we approached them about whether they could build a custom platform for us, and that’s when it became possible.

I know down the line, we’re going to hit all kinds of craziness in terms of the extent of endless space for all of the data. We’re realizing the practicalities, but none of them are out of reach. The thing that we have to do is get the word out so that people know, Oh, this exists, and I can decide what should be part of graphic design history. Graphic design history is not this complete story. There are endless stories.

What are some of the main features of the PGDA people should know about? 

On the site right now, under “Resources,” there are various tutorials and how-to guides so that we can facilitate people who are interested in adding to the archive, or uncovering the history in their community, or documenting someone that they know, and they think there should be a record of their work. We have “how to do an oral history fast and easy,” “how to document work fast and easy,” and more. 

One of the things that I panicked about originally was the idea of preserving the work of someone like Gere Kavanaugh; she’s now in her late 90’s. I have recordings from her, but those need to be shared! How are those accessed by other people? How is her story about her career and work preserved? I realized that there were tons of other people who have made incredible things, and we need to encourage people to actually document that work and the story. But if it seems daunting, if somebody is looking at 10 boxes of work, and they’re like, “Oh my god, I don’t even know where to begin; I don’t have enough time,” we can provide resources that say, this is easy. Here’s what you need to do; 1-2-3, that’s it!

One of the main things that we’re doing to show people that it’s easy, and that they can dip their toe in anywhere, are more of these roadshows. People bring a treasure, or a few treasures that they think should be shared. We’re not interested in it being worth something in terms of monetary value— we’re interested in what it’s worth to the history of graphic design. 

We have people at the roadshows from the community that might know about this material, so they can help fill in the information. Then we show people how to add it to the archive, so in this festive way, they learn that the archive even exists! They can bring in material, and add to that history, and hopefully they continue to add more and share it with others. We just had one at the Torn Apart exhibition at the Pacific Design Center in LA. People brought incredible stuff!  

We’ve also had so much outreach from different communities who want representation on the PGDA, so we have what we call Add-A-Thons. We ask ourselves what’s missing, and notice gaps like Latinx design, for example, so now we’re working with Ramon Tejadas to figure out how to do a Latinx Add-A-Thon. Maybe someone who is working on Southeast Asian graphic design history will want to do an Add-A-Thon, or maybe they want to do a roadshow! So we’re coming up with these different kinds of instruments to encourage people to make it festive, and to concentrate on areas of design that a community wants to see more representation of in the archive.

Do you have a review process in place to check submissions to the archive? 

We have somebody in a moderation role, but as long as a submission is graphic design, we just push the button to upload it. Let’s say somebody submitted a picture of a chair, and we’re not seeing it as graphic design— we still want to make sure we’re not overlooking something, so we would write to that person and say, “Can you help us understand how you see this as graphic design?” 

If there’s something that we want to have a record of, but we know that some people may find it offensive, we try to do two things. First, we window shade it to identify it, and then we also suggest that the photo used is low resolution, so that there’s a record of the work, but it can’t be used to celebrate it. 

We also ask people to use their real names. If someone uses an alias, it feels less like they’re participating together with us in this community. But we do understand occasionally somebody does need to use an alias— let’s say if they’re in a certain country, like North Korea or Iran, they might need to add anonymously. We understand that there might be those situations.

What are your goals for the PGDA? 

This is supposed to be a community archive— it’s “The People’s”— so hopefully, we will one day have the structure in place for the people to also be moderating it. Right now, we don’t mean to seem like we own the archive, but I know it appears that way. We welcome anybody who wants to jump in here and work with us, and eventually figure out how the community is actually able to run this.

What are the best ways for people to support the PGDA? 

Sign up for our newsletter! Create an account! Or throw a few dollars our way, or even more than a few dollars; we welcome that! The other thing that we have that we’re hoping people contribute to is our blog. Anybody can write for our blog! 

For those submitting work to the archive, one thing that is vital— and the only way that this becomes a rich resource— is through tagging. How the work may be seen as meaningful depends on the tag, as well as how the work comes up in a search. It takes a lot of imagination. The richer the tagging, the more useful the archive becomes. Our hearts fall when people submit things— which we’re so happy about— but then they didn’t tag it. We’ll have to figure out how to encourage people to do it as we go along.

Why is a platform like the PGDA so vital? 

People want to see themselves in design. They want their own stories and their own lineage that shaped design in their minds to be part of this. There are people like Corita Kent and Emory Douglas whose work was overlooked for so long, but was meaningful to so many, and yet so many people didn’t know about their contribution. So how many more people who have created work of significance aren’t recognized, or aren’t known about?

We hope that people use it as a resource to tell stories. To curate items in a way that creates new ways of thinking about the relevancy of this history. It becomes the ingredients that generate other creative work.

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Here’s a pair of exhibition posters from 1967-1968 for Glaser’s dear friend, abstract painter Frank Roth (1936-2019). Glaser pulled forms from Roth’s work for the central poster images. Roth, also a longtime former SVA instructor, passed away in 2019.

While looking at some contact sheets of the Push Pin office in the mid-1960s, I came across a few photos of Roth, including this one of him goofing on Glaser’s recent Dylan poster. Perhaps Roth was visiting to discuss his exhibition posters?

In 1964, Glaser designed the announcement for a Roth exhibition at the Borgenicht Gallery in New York, again working within Roth’s color vocabulary to bridge the gap between his friend’s work and his own.

Ten years later, in 1974, Milton designed a poster for a Frank Roth exhibition at Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer Gallery using similar color gradients, but this time in more subdued shades. 

Beth Kleber is the founding archivist of the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives and the School of Visual Arts Archives in New York City. Kleber also curated the exhibition “Primary Sources: Documenting SVA and the New York Art World 1966–1985.” She lectures on design history and research, and assists students and researchers with inquiries on everything from Push Pin Studios to the activities of the renowned artists who have taught at SVA. Kleber has also worked in trade publishing and began her librarian and archivist career at New York Public Library. For more from the Glaser/SVA Archives, head to Instagram.

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Milton Glaser’s interest in trompe l’oeil, implied movement, and color gradients were at peak levels in the 1970s. But he didn’t always require the giant canvas of a poster or even a book cover or album sleeve. Glaser’s lesser-known letterhead and logos designs were personalized mini-experiments in color and dimensionality.

Zaire 74

The best-known of this group, Glaser designed the logo for the huge 1974 music festival in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) that would accompany “The Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammed Ali and George Foreman. Foreman’s injury delayed the fight, but the music festival, organized by trumpeter Hugh Masekela (also connected to Glaser) and music producer Stewart Levine, went on as scheduled. Both the fight and the music festival were featured in the 1996 documentary When We Were Kings.

Astoria Press

For Astoria Press (an NYC-based printer to the Push Pin Graphic, as well as Peter Paul and Mary souvenir books from the 1960s designed by Glaser and Push Pin), Glaser designed lovely (though possibly impractical) lined color gradient stationery.

Security Printing Company

Letterhead for Security Printing Company features an “S’ that seems to circle the page.

Jorge Santana

This typographic treatment for Mexican guitarist Jorge Santana (brother of Carlos Santana) appeared on the back of his 1978 self-titled album designed by Glaser, but it seems the logo was also distributed on its own; we have this in our collection as a sticker.

Bonnier International Design AB

A three-dimensional “B” for the International Swedish design and media group Bonnier gets placed in the corner of color-blocked stationery.

Music Scene

Can one happy and one sad eighth note make it work? The generic nature of this company name makes it pretty impossible to research. If you know anything about it, let me know!

Cue

This New York City listings magazine covering theater and arts was published from 1932-1980; (at which point it was, ironically, bought by then Rupert Murdoch-owned New York magazine). Glaser’s dynamic logo takes up a third of the page.

Beth Kleber is the founding archivist of the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives and the School of Visual Arts Archives in New York City. Kleber also curated the exhibition “Primary Sources: Documenting SVA and the New York Art World 1966–1985.” She lectures on design history and research, and assists students and researchers with inquiries on everything from Push Pin Studios to the activities of the renowned artists who have taught at SVA. Kleber has also worked in trade publishing and began her librarian and archivist career at New York Public Library. For more from the Glaser/SVA Archives, head to Instagram.

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Wing on Wo & Co is the oldest operating store in New York City’s Chinatown. Founded in 1890 by the Lum family, they have owned and operated the shop for five generations. Now, the founder’s great-great-granddaughter, Mei Lum, has teamed up with a stellar pack of NYC-based artists to create a W.O.W. bible in the form of a meticulously crafted zine called Porcelain as Expression.

The zine provides a comprehensive overview of porcelain patterns and motifs, shedding light on their history and significance in Chinese culture and breaking down the meaning and symbolism of many of the hand-painted motifs and patterns in W.O.W.'s collection.

Porcelain as Expression is a labor of love brought about by Mei and Brooklyn-based designer, illustrator, and tattoo artist Gabrielle Widjaja (a.k.a. Gentle Oriental). Widjaja led art direction and design, working with photographer Mischelle Moy and Vivian Sangsukwirasathien, handling the zine’s content while assisting with art direction. The zine was printed and produced by the risograph printing press Lucky Risograph.

Like most tapped into the city's Chinatown scene, Widjaja holds W.O.W. in high esteem as a critical cultural landmark and community leader in the Asian American NYC circle. “I'm grateful that W.O.W. puts in a lot of labor and effort in regards to researching, writing, and translating a lot of knowledge that is difficult to come by,” she says. “For five generations, they have done a lot of work not only preserving, but breathing new life into porcelain ware and Chinese culture, and it felt amazing to be able to collab with them as this is also one of the main interests within my own personal practice under Gentle Oriental.”

One of the goals the creative team set out to achieve for this project was accessibility, prioritizing making the information presented within the zine’s pages digestible and approachable for folks across the diaspora spectrum. W.O.W. provided translations and pinyin pronunciation for every word of Chinese in the zine, making reading as easy as possible for a range of Chinese speakers. “Some people grew up speaking Chinese in their households, and some people like myself barely can speak it,” shares Widjaja. “This zine removes a lot of shame about being able to read our mother tongue and serves as a vehicle for learning and reconnecting with one's culture.”

Porcelain as Expression offers an avenue for those like Widjaja to connect more deeply with the culturally significant items they have been surrounded by their whole lives that they not know much about. “It's one thing to own these objects and feel physically closer to our culture, but it's another thing to be able to decipher the true meaning behind the iconic symbols and motifs that appear on these objects,” says Widjaja. “It reveals a deeper significance and meaning, and it's a way of bringing our cultures into our everyday lives.”

A limited quantity of Porcelain as Expression has been made available for purchase on W.O.W.’s online store.

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Frutiger imposed strict discipline across all elements of the series, from light to dark, extra condensed to extended. Univers was one of the first typeface families to address the requisite that a typeface should constitute a family of related designs.

Earlier sans serif designs such as Gill Sans had much greater differences between weights, while loose families such as ATF’s Franklin Gothic often were promoted under different names for each style, to emphasize that they were not completely matching. Univers allowed documents to be created in one consistent typeface for all text, and it was the epitome of the Swiss typographic style. The most common specimen sheet, distributed throughout Europe and the United States, was this one, which included a grid of weights similar, in a way, to the periodic table. It continues to evoke the mid-century corporate modern aesthetic.

The post The Best-Known Type Specimen In The Univers(e) appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Illustration: Peader Thomas

When the time comes for soon-to-be parents to name their newborns, there are plenty of books and websites to help find a fashionable or distinctive moniker. A typeface is a type designer’s baby yet there is zilch on what to name it after all those months or years of labor. If such a guidebook were available, it might offer the same wisdom as this paraphrase from the precis to a popular infant-naming resource:

There’s a lot of pressure in choosing a font name. It’ll be one of the first things people learn about your typeface and will be a part of its life. Though naming your new face is a daunting process, it can also be fun. Some designers discuss and research—and argue about the name until it is released. Other designers just hear a name and love the sound. There are about as many ways to pick a name as there are names themselves.

Even if naming a font is not actually that difficult, the result is consequential. It shouldn’t be too loony or obscure or uptight. One of the more conventional options is to name it after a living or dead family member or friend, or sometimes even a fictional character. To play it safe, though, while ensuring a modicum of immortality, it might be just as simple as the designer naming it after himself or herself—which is done all the time.

The following names are memorable—Robert Granjon, Philippe Grandjean de Fouchy, John Baskerville, Claude Garamond, Pierre Simon Fournier, Aldus Manutius, Nicolas Jenson and, of course, Giambattista Bodoni—because revivals of the original types they designed or punch-cut bear their surnames today.

And by virtue of these names being so prominent, their brands live on from one iteration to the next, one generation to the next. If these same fonts were anonymously conceived, they could have been forgotten long ago. But a name provides pedigree, like a signature on a painting. History remembers those who are known. A famous name makes a famous typeface, or vice versa.

Lending proper names to fonts did not all of a sudden happen. “In Bodoni’s epic Manuale Tipografico of 1818, over 100 romans and italics are shown with the name of a city as a kind of nickname,” Tobias Frere-Jones has written, “though the real name was still a size and a number. Trieste is really Ascendonica (22 point) No. 9, Palermo is Sopracanoncino (28 point) No. 3, and so on.” It may not have occurred to Bodoni to call a face by his own name, so it was left to others much later after his death. By the mid-19th century, typefaces were given descriptive names and numbers, or what Frere-Jones called “a tally” of attributes, with monikers like Gothic Condensed No. 7 or Paragon Italian Shaded. Many fonts were only numbered with a catalog reference.

The rise of industry and consumers in the early to mid-19th century necessitated the invention of advertising, which required unique eye-catching typefaces as hooks for consumers. To meet the demand, foundries created decorative, ornamented (and what were later called novelty) types and gave them names that either celebrated something or someone, or reflected their respective styles. For instance, Rustic (1845) was an alphabet made of logs (aka Log Cabin) at the Vincent Figgins Foundry.

It is not known which typeface was the first to be named for its creator, but by the late 19th century foundries found it commercially prudent to exploit the relative fame of their most respected designers. Frederic Goudy’s Goudy Old Style and Goudytype, originally named by American Type Founders, became models for eponymous self-promotion of Goudy’s Village Press & Letter Foundry.

Other designers in Europe and the U.S. understood the marketing value of linkage with reputation. Consider Otto Eckmann’s Eckmann-Schrift, Eric Gill’s Gill Sans, Louis Oppenheim’s Lo-Type, Lucian Bernhard’s Bernhard Gothics and a roman called Lucian, Marcel Jacno’s Jacno, and so many more. Later, Ed Benguiat’s ITC Benguiat and ITC Benguiat Gothic were emblematic of the 1970s. And while Herb Lubalin’s Avant Garde was his bestselling collaborative font, he only gave his name to ITC Lubalin Graph. Many type designers, however, were reluctant to capitalize on their own fame in this way; W.A. Dwiggins and Stanley Morison immediately come to mind.

What to name a typeface is still a difficult decision, but eponymous typefaces are less frequent today than earlier in the 20th century. Is it the end of the me generation? Naming is perhaps more similar to rock bands these days, like Geogrotesque and Brunswick Black. Or, it’s imbued with psychological and personal associations, like Eric Gill’s Joanna or Daniel Pelavin’s ITC Anna, both named for their daughters. A name can also reference the source material on which the face was conceived, like Frere-Jones’ Interstate, based on specifications for highway signage.

In the final analysis, perhaps a typeface name is not like any other name because it must be personal and universal—and, well, sound good, too.

The post Why Did People Start Naming Typefaces After Themselves? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.

Fan magazines were wellsprings of the preposterously profitable cult of celebrity, encouraging fame worship and ensuring ongoing newsstand sales. The design evolution of celebrity magazines from the early 20th century until now reveals radical shifts from mass to crass—pulp to sensational. They underscore the public’s trance-endental-state in the face of hypnotic manufactured images and graphic/printing tropes, such as saturated color intensity and blemish-free contrasts, used to make them so compelling. While there are various lenses through which to view the art and photography of these magazines, including the changing look of the manufactured flawless “idol”—and when that paradigm shifted into portrayals showing a fallen idol’s warts and all—there is not an entirely uniform stereotype.

Like today’s genre of TV shows mentioned earlier, each magazine had (and has) hints of a distinct personality. For instance, Photoplay’s earliest covers were made by America’s top painters and photographer portraitists: Neysa Moran McMein, William Henry “Haskell” Coffin, Alfred Cheney Johnston, Rolf Armstrong, J. Knowles Hare, Tempest Inman, Earl Christy and even James Montgomery Flagg, among others. They kept their respective styles but also conformed to an identifiable standard designed to make eye contact with the reader. The images to this day are still compelling.

On the whole, the cult of celebrity began in the 19th century. “Blame the industrial revolution,” as Megan Chance has written. “People suddenly had time on their hands and the disposable income to go with it. Religion began to lose its stranglehold on morality; its disapproval of entertainment for entertainment’s sake was no longer so influential.”

Celebrity magazines, like so many 20th-century newspapers, were in business to satisfy the vicarious pleasures of a public that, as alternatives to religious mythologies, began worshipping matinee idols because the film palace screens and the stars on it were bigger than life—and still are.

Celebrity magazines actually created the platform for what Libby Copeland in Slate called “the very idea of ‘movie stars.’” They validated the public’s fascination in their studio-sanctioned off-screen lives that left big gaps in their authentic real-life stories. The magazines “were deferential to the studios, which controlled access to their stars.” The studios, after all, also wrote some of the stories and provided the visuals, leaving little for the editorial staff to do but copy edit, create a layout and commission a cover.

Attitudes began changing in the postwar ’50s and ’60s when the studios lost power and the ability to control the genre; reporting on scandals, long kept out of the press, became red meat for the reader. Designs began to change as well: Rather than glamorous portraits, newsier, sometimes compromising shots, were de rigueur. The confluence of gossip columnists breaking timely stories in newspapers and the general transition in the entertainment industry cut into the fortunes of celebrity magazines. In the 1980s, People magazine, part sensational tabloid and part Life magazine hybrid, overtook the celebrity journals.

Celebrity obsession later entered a new age in the 2000s with TV, cable, blogs and iPhone voyeurism—and that’s the new photoplay!

Aside: Topping the Bop

During the mid-1960s, 16 magazine targeted starstruck adolescent girls in the manner of the 1920s Photoplay, Silver Screen, Movie Star and others. It was designed as a typographic carnival midway, replete with varied and discordant colorful typefaces and eye-catching headlines. Edited by former fashion model and pop idol–maker Gloria Stavers, 16 was the first bonafide American teenage fan magazine and hype engine for the popular music and television juggernaut headed for America’s baby-boom, teeny-bop generation. 16 was a voyeur’s cornucopia replete with “oodles” of never-before-seen “wow-ee” publicity pics of “adorable” blemish-free stars, and candid canned gossip about pop’s leading heartthrobs—presented without an iota of irony. Though it ceased publication in 2001, its elder relative, Seventeen magazine, first published in 1944, carries on.

The post Pulp Nonfiction: A Brief History of Celebrity Magazines appeared first on PRINT Magazine.