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Tag: steven heller

PRINT’s Next Chapter

This animation by creative agency Pearlfisher for the relaunch of PRINT is fun.

When PRINT launched in June 1940 (!), its first issue was a technical powerhouse from the foremost minds of the graphic arts. Then, in 2019, something remarkable happened: PRINT died. The company that owned it declared bankruptcy, and PRINT suddenly disappeared into the publishing ether from which it came.⁠

⁠And then, later that year, something even more remarkable happened: Debbie Millman, Steven Heller, Andrew Gibbs, Jessica Deseo, Laura Des Enfants, and Deb Aldrich banded together and formed an independent enterprise to save PRINT from its demise and former besuited overlords. ⁠

⁠Now, in 2021, PRINT has moved on to its next chapter. So, yes, PRINT is dead. But it’s also more alive than ever.

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While I am glad that PRINT is back from the dead (congratulations to all involved!), it is a bit disheartening that their first book cover design article is on a trend that has been widely written about elsewhere (as recently as last month!). :-(

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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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Elaine Lustig Cohen, Pioneer

Elaine in 1964, photographed by Naomi Savage (1964)
Elaine Lustig Cohen, photographed by Naomi Savage

I was sad to hear that designer Elaine Lustig Cohen had died aged 89 last week. She will forever be associated with her more famous husband Alvin Lustig, but she was a remarkable designer in her own right and her influence, as Steven Heller notes at Design Observer, extended far beyond her studio:

Elaine’s professional standing far outlasted her years of practice because beyond being a pioneer, she was also the benefactor in so many ways for graphic design history, and an advocate for so many other historians, practitioners—and especially women. It is this enduring integrity and generosity that ultimately defined her highly treasured life.

Following Alvin Lustig’s death, Elaine specialized for some time in designing book covers and jackets, initially following her late husband’s aesthetic, until finding her own style and vision. For over a decade she earned commissions from museums, architects, and book publishers—including Noonday Press, whose publisher, Arthur Cohen, would become her second husband. Her own studio closed in 1967, although Elaine continued to design catalog covers for Ex Libris (the antiquarian bookstore she and Cohen ran together) focusing on avant-garde modernist books and documents. She turned instead to making art—inspired in part, by Constructivism, Dada, and the Bauhaus—and continued to do so until the end of her life.

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In a profile of the designer for Eye magazine in 1995, Ellen Lupton noted what made ELC’s book covers so distinctive…

In her covers for Meridian Books and New Directions, designed from 1955 through 1961, Elaine Lustig Cohen used abstract structural elements, expressive typography, and conceptual photographs to interpret the books’ contents. Working at a time when most book covers employed literal pictorial illustrations, Cohen visualized titles in contemporary literature and philosophy through a rich variety of approaches, from stark abstractions and concept-driven solutions to obtuse evocations that bring to mind the recent work of Chip Kidd and Barbara de Wild for Knopf.

Elaine Lustig Cohen’s cover for the journal ‘The Noble Savage’ 4 (1960) features a time-worn classical statue festooned with a typographic moustache and blasted with a star-burst pull-out quote from Darwin. For Yvor Winter‘s ‘On Modern Poets’ (1959), Cohen photographed a loose arrangement of plastic letters, while she used a field of pebbles to obliquely represent ‘The Varieties of History’ (1957). If such solutions are suggestively poetic, Cohen could also be brilliantly blunt, as in her choice of oversized, cello-wrapped bonbons for Tennessee Williams’s ‘Hard Candy’ (1959).

…A point echoed in the New York Times obituary:

She designed museum catalogs and furniture. As a book-cover designer, she followed in Mr. Lustig’s precisionist footsteps but eventually established her own, more free-form style.

“I tried to reflect the spirit of the books,” she said in a video made by AIGA, the graphic arts organization, when she was awarded its medal in 2012.

Her jacket for “Yvor Winters On Modern Poets” looked as if plastic letters had been placed on a tabletop, then jostled by a passing child. A book about St. Augustine featured his name twice, as the arms of a cross. The jacket for Tennessee Williams’s short-story collection “Hard Candy” showed extreme close-ups of cellophane-wrapped sweets, seeming to fall through the air.

You can see a selection of ELC’s book covers on her website, and the video referenced above is here:

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Steven Heller and 100 Classic Graphic Design Journals on Design Matters


In his annual visit to Design Matters, Steven Heller talks to Debbie Millman about design journals, his new book 100 Classic Graphic Design Journals (co-authored with Jason Godfrey), and the future of design magazines in print:

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You can also read a short interview with Heller about the book at publisher Laurence King’s website.

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100 Classic Graphic Design Journals

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A copy of 100 Classic Graphic Design Journals by Steven Heller and Jason Godfrey just landed on my desk. The book will be in stores in the US and Canada later this month, and it looks fantastic:

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It doesn’t seem that long since I talked to Jason Godfrey about his previous book Bibliographic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books, but apparently it was four years ago!

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(100 Classic Graphic Design Journals and Bibliographic are published by Laurence King whose books are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)

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Q & A with Steven Heller, Shadow Type

“Dimensional typefaces toy with human perception, challenging the limits of cognition. Whether framed by a subtle tint or a bold silhouette, in color or in black and white, a shadow adds bulk, enabling the words to rise voluminously from otherwise flat and unmonumental surfaces. Shadow faces are typographic trompes l’œil, fascimiles of real three-dimensional letters and inscriptions in sculpture and architecture… This sculptural essence of shadow type adds not only to the letters’ visibility, but also to their continuing allure.”

Just thinking about how much Steven Heller writes makes me a little giddy. The renowned art director, educator, design historian, and critic provides a steady stream of design commentary in newspaper, magazine and journal articles (not to mention his blog for Print magazine, The Daily Heller). He has authored, co-authored, or edited over 100 books on design, illustration and typography, including the recent Shadow Type: Classic Three-Dimensional Lettering, co-authored with his partner Louise Fili.

Shadow letters started to make an appearance on merchants’ signs in the 18th-century, and were introduced as metal typefaces as early as 1815, but they did not become common in printed text until later in the 19th-century. After a surge in popularity among printers and their clients, type foundries began to provide a wide selection of styles and sizes, and by the late 19th-century shadow wood type was also in demand, coming in extra-large sizes so it could be used outdoors. “Whether custom drawn, or as metal or wood type, shadow letters animated newspaper and magazine mastheads, product labels, and, indeed, all kinds of signs and posters.”

Published in September last year by Princeton Architectural Press, and distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books, I had the opportunity to ask Steven about Shadow Type, his interest in design ephemera, and how he finds time to write.

Do you remember when you first became interested in design?

I was interested in pictures at an early age. I wanted to be like Jules Feiffer, a comics artist. Design came later. I was studying the work of some German satirists, who were also designers.

Did you grow up in a creative household?
Not especially.

Where did you begin your design career?
At 14 I worked for an ad agency doing RussssTogs. Didn’t go well. It took another 3 years before I was hired by an underground paper to do layouts.

When did you first start writing about design history?

When I was at the NY Times as OpEd art director, I did a little bit of writing on those Germans I mentioned. Then it accelerated to writing about publications and other historical themes.

How do you find the time write?

There’s always time.

Do you still get excited when you hold one of your own books in your hands for the first time?
Yes, the thrill is still there. But the high lasts shorter. An addict gets used to the fix and needs another and another. These days, I don’t rip the envelope right open. I let it sit for hours, so I have something to look forward to. Weird, I guess.

Why did you and Louise decide to write a book on classic three-dimensional lettering?

We did the first one on Scripts. We’ve done series before, they didn’t start out that way, but evolved. This evolved into Shadow Type. I have long loved the dimensional, colourful, sculptural letters.

When was the heyday of ‘shadow type’?
19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Its never gone out of style. But the golden age was late 1880s to 1940s.

Why did it become popular?
Dimensionality on flat surface. Our eyes love to be fooled.

Why do you think there is a renewed interest in ornate typography and lettering?
It comes and goes. I see a shift away again. But it has to do with the joy we get from ornament and I think it parallels what goes on in clothing.

Has Louise’s work contributed the revival of decorative type?
Possibly. But she’s not decorative per se. Her type choices are elegant. She’s about precision and aesthetic pleasure.


Do all the examples in the book come from your own collection?

For Scripts and Shadow yes. And for the next one too, that’s Stencil Type.


Why does design ephemera hold such a fascination for you?
I’ve come up with all sorts of reasons, but the all seem bogus. I feel the stuff somehow represents who I am. But I also love being a repository of history. More than that, I cannot say.

Your son, Nicolas Heller, recently made a film about your den called “The Cave.” What was that experience like?
He’s a great talent. I just set him loose. And he made his film. The stuff in that place should be interpreted by others. The juxtapositions of objects and books are at times wonderful.

What’s Nicolas working on now? 
He’s doing a series of documentaries on eccentric New Yorkers called NO YOUR CITY, he’s also filming designers for documentaries produced by Brian Collins.

Do you have a favourite book?
Of my own? I’ve done over 165, but I love Iron Fists. Of other people? There are too many to say.

What books are in your ‘to read’ pile?
I just finished Deborah Solomon’s biography of Norman Rockwell – smartly done. And I finished Year Zero by Ian Buruma about the year 1945, makes the blood chill and boil. On the pile is a thick book about the Beatles. Not sure I’ll get to that.

Is there one book you think all designers should read?

I love Ben Shahn’s The Shape of Content. I also love The Hare with Amber Eyes, but for me, nothing is so essential that I’d stand on the mount and scream that they should read the tablets.

Thank you, Steven!

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Shadow Type and The Designers & Books Online Book Fair


Steven Heller and Louise Fili talk about their beautiful new book Shadow Type in a new video for Designers & Books:

The video is part of the Designers & Books Online Book Fair, a wonderful directory of design books that you can browse in all sorts of interesting ways.

(Shadow Type is published by Princeton Architectural Press in the United States, and distributed by my employer Raincoast Books in Canada)

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Paul Rand’s Book Jackets and Covers

Steven Heller’s fascinating School of Visual Arts lecture on the book covers of Paul Rand:

(via David Pearson)

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Inside Steven Heller’s Cave

Since I was an infant, I have feared my father’s den. Based on its ancient relics and mass clutter, I have since referred to the location as “Steven Heller’s Cave.”

Steven Heller’s son Nicolas (A.K.A. Ricky Shabazz) has made short video about the apartment where his father stores some of his more controversial design artifacts and ephemera:

Bonkers.

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Midweek Miscellany

Steven Heller shares a few pages from Effective Type-use for Advertising, self-published by Benjamin Sherbow in 1922, at Imprint.

Lost in the Shuffle — Brian Appleyard profiles the writer and critic Clive James:

James’s television work, brilliant as it was, has tended to blur his identity as one of the most influential writers of his time. At one level every newspaper is still packed with James wannabes, his prose tricks and tropes are imitated everywhere; at another level, the whole 1980s wave of new British fiction, especially Martin Amis, showed signs of having learnt from James. Most important was his invention of a way of writing seriously about popular culture.

Listed — Phil Patton on the age of the list, for the New York Times:

We’re living in the era of the list, maybe even its golden age. The Web click has led to the wholesale repackaging of information into lists, which can be complex and wonderful pieces of information architecture. Our technology has imperceptibly infected us with “list thinking.”

Lists are the simplest way to organize information. They are also a symptom of our short attention spans.

And finally…

Swallowing Up the Past — John Gray on J. G. Ballard and memory, for BBC Magazine:

Through a kind of inner alchemy, the Shanghai of his childhood became the London of his first major novel The Drowned World, also published in 1962.

Irreversibly altered by climate change so that it has become a region of tropical lagoons and advancing jungle, the city is almost unrecognisable, though the weed-choked streets remain intact in the depths of the lagoons and the upper floors of a few crumbling hotels continue to be habitable.

Like many of Ballard’s characters, the novel’s central protagonist – a biologist who shares many of Ballard’s own preoccupations with time and memory – doesn’t regret the passing of the old world. At the end of the novel he finds fulfilment in the sun-filled wilderness that is swallowing up the past.

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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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