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Tag: graphic design

Helen Yentus 3D Slipcase


Helen Yentus, the art director of Riverhead Books, designed two covers for the recently published On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee. The regular hardcover — which is beautiful in itself (see below) — has a hand-lettered jacket. The second, for a limited edition of the novel, comes in a white slipcase made on a 3D printer. In this video, Helen talks about the 3D printed slipcase, designed in collaboration with the MakerBot Studio:


This isn’t the first time Helen’s worked with MakerBot. In 2011 she used the 3D printer to create the letters on the cover of The Innovator’s Cookbook by Steven Johnson:

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Michael Bierut: Use Curiosity as a Route into Work


Interviewed at the AGI Open London 2013, Michael Bierut discusses his work, living in New York, and shares some advice for aspiring designers:

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Chip Kidd: Obsessed with Batman


In this interview from the AGI Open in London earlier this year, Chip Kidd talks about his work designing books covers, his involvement with comics and, of course, his obsession with Batman:


You can read recent interviews with Chip discussing his new book Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design at Publishers Weekly and The New York Times.

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Design Is One: Lella & Massimo Vignelli


Design is One, the new documentary film by Kathy Brew and Roberto Guerra about designers Lella and Massimo Vignelli, opened at the IFC in New York yesterday:

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The Heads of State: The Great Discontent


Designers Jason Kernevich and Dusty Summers talk about their work, inspirations and starting up their own studio The Heads of State (10 years ago now!), at The Great Discontent:

Dusty: I remember looking at album covers when I was 13 and can recall the smell of the ink on the booklet for In Utero. I knew that was graphic design, but it was more about the album and the beautiful artwork. I think that’s where my interest in design started.

Jason: Yeah. I made this fateful choice of wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt to a guidance counselor recruitment. It had a Raymond Pettibon drawing on it and my recruiter said, “That’s Raymond Pettibon. He’s in the MoMa.” That made a connection for me that something could live in the punk and fine art worlds at the same time. Then, when someone at Tyler made a statement that the record covers Pettibon did for Black Flag were graphic design, that connected it even more for me.


I talked to Jason and Dusty about their book cover design and other work way back in 2010.

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Peter Saville at The Talks

Graphic designer Peter Saville discusses his work and influences with The Talks:

It seemed we were in a revolution in our microcosm of youth culture and we had to propose a new way forward, so I began to reference early modernism – Malevich’s Black Square, Constructivism, Modernism in Germany, De Stijl in Holland, Marinetti and the Futurists in Italy. So when I met with Tony Wilson, with whom I would later start Factory Records, and said, “Can I do something?” and he said, “Yes, we’re having a night called The Factory, do a poster,” I knew exactly what I wanted. I knew I wanted to reference Tschichold, one of the pioneers of modern typography, a Swiss designer… [From]  then on the visual side of Factory ended up being my responsibility. For instance, Joy Division gave me some elements when they were ready to do Unknown Pleasures and I was just allowed to do it the way I wanted to do it. And when there was a second album they came to me: “What have you got?” And that’s where the Closer cover came from.


The Talks

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The Universal Arts of Graphic Design

The latest episode of the PBS Arts series Off Book is all about graphic design. Contributors include Debbie Millman, Emily Oberman, Drew Freeman, and Ecco book designer Steve Attardo:

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Something for the Weekend

You Can’t Keep a Good Creator Down — An interesting piece by Noelene Clark on women in comics for the LA Times ‘Hero Complex’ blog:

a broader look at the world of comics and the women who work there reveals the industry is far more gender-balanced than the superhero fare suggests. Though women still make up a minority of creative talent at Marvel and DC, their influence is growing. And in comics at large, women are on even footing and gaining ground… the frequently spotlighted superhero genre is just a tide pool in an ocean of work — a tide pool that has somehow managed to delay the sea change undergone by the rest of the industry.

See also: Why DC and Marvel Will Never Truly Target Female Readers by Heidi Macdonald, for Comics Beat, and author Belinda Jack on the history of women readers at The Browser.

And finally…

A brief history of Olympic pictograms, at The Smithsonian design blog:

In 1972, a German designer named Otl Aicher refined Olympic pictograms into the concise, clean system that most people think of today as the symbols of the games… Slightly modified versions (and in some cases exact replicas) of the Aicher designs were used at subsequent Olympics as the standard of universal visual language, though in the early 1990s, some designers began moving away from the simplified standard, adding embellishments that referenced the culture of the city where the games were taking place.

You can read about the pictograms for London 2012 (about which, I will say nothing) at The Creative Review, and here’s a great short history of Olympic pictograms by Steven Heller for the New York Times:

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Midweek Miscellany

I really enjoyed Naïve: Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design, so I really think I have to pick up  Echoes of the Future: Rational Graphic Design and Illustration, also published by Gestalten. A “compilation of recent graphic design and illustration that is inspired by our collective visual memory”,  the book includes work by Gianmarco Magnani, AKA Silence Television, who (calling all enterprising art directors) ought to be doing book covers (if he isn’t already):

But moving on…

“The only thing left on the high street that doesn’t want either your soul or your wallet” — Zadie Smith on libraries at the NYRB:

What kind of a problem is a library? It’s clear that for many people it is not a problem at all, only a kind of obsolescence. At the extreme pole of this view is the technocrat’s total faith: with every book in the world online, what need could there be for the physical reality? This kind of argument thinks of the library as a function rather than a plurality of individual spaces. But each library is a different kind of problem and “the Internet” is no more a solution for all of them than it is their universal death knell.

And on a sort of related note…

The Disease-Carrying Book — John Sutherland reviews How To Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain by Leah Price for the Literary Review:

The public library, introduced in Manchester with much municipal self-congratulation in the early 1850s, was ‘free’, unlike ‘leviathan’ circulating libraries such as Mudie’s and W H Smith’s that catered to the middle classes. The lower classes lick their index fingers to turn the page. A quaint ‘fumigator’ in which Victorian public libraries could decontaminate their stock is illustrated in Leah Price’s discussion of the disease-carrying book. Victorians were wedded to the ‘miasmic’ theory of disease. Yet it wasn’t air but spittle that was the vector of the dreaded consumption.

Reality is Elsewhere — Steve Wasserman on Amazon at The Nation:

For many of us, the notion that bricks-and-mortar bookstores might one day disappear was unthinkable. Jason Epstein put it best in Book Business, his incisive 2001 book on publishing’s past, present and future, when he offered what now looks to be, given his characteristic unsentimental sobriety, an atypical dollop of unwarranted optimism: “A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.” That sentiment is likely to strike today’s younger readers as nostalgia bordering on fetish. Reality is elsewhere.

Also at The Nation Michael Naumann on Germany’s bookstores and literary culture:

Since the late 1840s in Germany, the ambiguous character of books—simultaneously a commodity and a cultural work—has defined internal discussions in the publishing business. Putting aside the implicit hubris of German nationalism, the country’s self-aggrandizement as a veritable Kulturnation, the fact remains that in Germany the cultural definition of the “book” as a major source of intellectual, scientific, economic and aesthetic self-improvement has carried the day over the capitalist notion that a book is a commodity and therefore deserving of no special considerations. The book as such is sacred. One does not throw books away.

And finally…

The Graphic Modern: USA, Italy and Switzerland 1934–66 exhibition curated by Patricia Belen and Greg D’Onofrio of Kind Co. is on display at Fordham University at Lincoln Center, should you happen to be in New York between now and July 26th.

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Something for the Weekend

Chris Ware’s astonishing cover for Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature by Philip Nel. See the full thing in detail here.

A free interactive e-book about British artist Francis Bacon created by the estate of the artist and Katharina Günther is available from iTunes (via A Piece of Monologue).

Page 1: Great Expectations, the first book by GraphicDesign&, “collects the responses of 70 international graphic designers when posed with the same brief – to design and lay out the first page of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.” The Creative Review and We Made This have more on the project.

And finally…

Jon Contino’s beautiful cover  illustration for The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber. You can’t really tell from the image above, but the apple is actually brown foil, the grub and stalk in are in gold on finished book. You can see better in these pictures Contino posted to Instagram:

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Design Matters with Steven Heller

In a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, design historian Steven Heller talks about design and his recent book 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design with Debbie Millman on Design Matters:

Design Matters: Steven Heller mp3

Heller really is an astonishingly prolific author.

(Full disclosure: 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design is published by Laurence King and is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)

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