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Tag: design history

The Book Cover Review

Designer David Pearson and friends have launched a new website for 500-word (or thereabouts) reviews of book covers from the past and present.

There are a lot names you will be familiar with among the reviewers. I particularly enjoyed John Gall‘s review of the cover for The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin designed by relative unknown Lawrence Ratzkin for Farrrar, Straus & Giroux in 1976:

“Cover design in the US went from being house-styled, design driven and idiosyncratic (think Grove Press or New Directions or whatever Push Pin was up to) to the ‘big book look’ of the 1970s defined by designers like Paul Bacon. Make the type as large as possible, centre it, and combine with some non-specific imagery. That look still defines what we see on the bestseller list to this day. It established a generic way for covers to look and a familiar shorthand for sales teams and booksellers to understand – ‘aah, this must be a … big book!’. It ignored design principles of layout, composition and conceptual thinking that had been codified over the previous 50 years in favour of a commercial literal-ness. It also took away a lot of the fun.”

Jamie Keenan’s review of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s naughty cover for The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie is also a good time.

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Why Cooper Black is Everywhere

For Vox, Estelle Caswell talks to Steven Heller and Bethany Heck about the history of Cooper Black and why it’s been pop culture’s favorite font for so long.

(via Kottke)

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Design Canada

Design Canada, is a new documentary celebrating the ‘golden era’ of Canadian graphic design: 

The film is screening in Canada in the summer 2018, and releasing digitally in the fall. 

(via Coudal)

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Design Canada Documentary

Greg Durrell of Canadian design firm Hulse&Durrell, and Jessica Edwards and Gary Hustwit of Film First are putting together a documentary about Canadian graphic design:

The project is currently on Kickstarter. There are a couple of weeks to go and they are still a few thousand dollars shy of their goal. Please help out if you can. 

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Back to Futura

Vox takes a lighthearted look at the history of Futura, “the font that escaped the Nazis and landed on the moon”: 

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Roy Kuhlman Archive

Early this week I posted about the Robert Brownjohn online archive created by his daughter, Eliza. Today, a new website dedicated to the work of the graphic designer Roy Kuhlman curated by his daughter, Arden Kuhlman Riordan, has gone live.

Kuhlman is best known, of course, for the brilliant mid-century modern book covers he designed for Grove Press. The site is not comprehensive — at least not yet — but given the number of covers  and other pieces Kuhlman must have designed over his career that is, perhaps, not surprising. Archiving his work must be a massive undertaking. Hopefully there is much more to come.

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Robert Brownjohn Archive

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The work of influential designer Robert Brownjohn, best known for the title sequence for the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger, has been archived online by his daughter Eliza.


If you’re unfamiliar with Brownjohn’s work, I would also recommend picking up a copy of Sex and Typography, Emily King’s book on the designer published by Princeton Architectural Press a few years back.

(via Creative Review)

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Willem Sandberg: From Type to Image

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Writing for The Guardian, Simon Garfield (Just My Type), visits the first UK retrospective Dutch designer and curator Willem Sandberg:

“This is printed on wallpaper, very asymmetric … an amazing thing really,” Fraser Muggeridge, the curator, says as he shows me his collection of Sandberg ephemera in his studio in London’s Smithfield. It is a space Sandberg would have admired, with its display of promotional work for emerging artists and galleries crowding in from the walls. “I don’t think he was trying to make the most perfect work, but it was always free-spirited and arresting.” His letters were highly sculptural, revealing negative space; at first glance a torn “T” becomes a sideways “E”. They speak of his obsession not only with making intricate objects by hand, but also with solid branding: his graphics for the Stedelijk created a look and mood for a museum that today would require a huge budget and corporate pitching.

Astonishingly, most of Sandberg’s catalogues and posters were a sideline, designed in the evenings and at weekends. Sandberg was the director of the museum from 1945 to 1962, and his close relationship with the local state printer produced an identity that transformed the Stedelijk into one of Europe’s first truly modern galleries. He created what he liked to refer to as an “Anti-Museum”, rejecting the traditional dark and hushed rooms and creating something bright and accessible, a place of social interaction. He championed young artists, and he succeeded in attracting people who had barely set foot in a museum before. There was a shop, a learning centre and a cafe, all brave innovations in the middle of the century. As was Sandberg’s scheme to get the Stedelijk a little more noticed in the city: he painted the entire building white.

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Willem Sandberg: From Type to Image‘ is at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK until 4 September.

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Graphic Means

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Before the desktop computer revolutionized the way the graphic design industry worked, type and image were painstakingly put together by hand with the aid of various ingenious machines and tools.

Currently in production, the documentary, Graphic Means explores graphic design production of the 1950s through the 1990s—from linecaster to photocomposition, and from paste-up to PDF.

It looks fascinating:

You can support the production the film by pre-ordering a copy from the Graphic Means website.

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Bob Gill: Design as Idea

Mark Mahaney: Bob Gill
Mark Mahaney: Bob Gill

In another great profile for It’s Nice That, Rob Alderson talks designer, illustrator, and writer Bob Gill:

“I don’t know what people talk about when they talk about a golden age because of a million designers in 1950 or 1960 or 1970, 13 did anything that was worth ten cents. They can call that a golden age but the gold has been tarnished I think.”

What has changed of course is technology and the way it’s altered the design process…. In fact now that the craft side of design has become demystified and democratised, he thinks designers should be able to come into their own.

“Now for a designer to make a living, they have to do more than just know how to set some type because the client can do that. So what’s left? Well the most wonderful part is left, which is to discover how you say new things. I often talk about design as idea; I am not interested in design as layout – obviously I have to lay things out in order for them to be read – but it’s very low down on my priorities. I spend the majority of my time having an opinion and trying to invent an image that says that opinion like nobody’s ever said it before. That’s the fun of it.”

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Mark Mahaney

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