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Tag: swiss design

Close Not Touching: Penguin Designer Gerald Cinamon

Close Not Touching is a beautiful short film by DILLONROSE.COM about the work of designer and typographer Gerald Cinamon.

Born in Boston in 1930, Cinamon moved to England in 1960, eventually becoming chief designer at Penguin Books. Strongly influenced by Swiss design, Cinamon utilized a combination of bold colour, clean lines and sans serif typography that was unique in British book design at the time. Now an influence on a new generation of type-inspired designers, the film includes a conversation between Cinamon and David Pearson:


An exhibition of Cinamon’s work, Gerald Cinamon: Collected Work Since 1958, opened at the ICA in London this week, and new book Graphic Design Gerald Cinamon, designed by Danny McNeil at SEA design, is available here.

Although a live appearance by Cinamon has had to be cancelled, Pearson will be discussing text design at Penguin at the institute on September 13.

A full-length feature documentary about Cinamon by DILLONROSE.COM will be available to download from iTunes in February 2014.

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TM Covers Designed by Yves Zimmermann

The good folks at Kind Company have posted some beautiful images of Yves Zimmerman’s vintage black and white, text-only covers for the typographic periodical TM at their wonderful website Display:

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Midweek Miscellany, July 15th, 2009

Vintage Camus — Seen at Bente Miltenburg‘s Flickr photostream (via A Journey Around My Skull).

An Intricate Dance — Author Sonya Chung describes her experience of the cover design process (and the weird — slightly tortured — anxieties that accompany it) for her debut novel Long For This World at The Millions blog (via Duke University Press on Twitter):

I am still a little nervous – having no control over the final printing process, color-correcting, etc. – about what this cover will look like. But I also realized that as each response piled on one after the other in my inbox, I was beginning to delight in the wackiness of the whole thing.

And on a related note, writer Neelanjana Banerjee looks at stereotypical images of Asian Americans on book covers in Hyphen Magazine (issuu document). Henry Sene Yee, creative director of Picador, makes an interesting general point — which I think is often forgotten — about ‘recognizable codes’:

“Russian constructivist font for Russian books; torn paper and beige for Westerns; italics, diamond rings and legs for women’s fiction… The writer is tapping into this culture; so is the designer, and so is the reader.”

GroupThink — After a bit of a hiatus, designer Christopher Tobias is back blogging with a series of discussions on book design:

Beginning today, I plan to post an ongoing series of questions aimed at book designers as a way of opening discussion about various topics related to our industry… Others outside of book design are certainly free to field the questions or give input. I hope that together we can compile a nice collection of discussions for the benefit of those in the profession now and in the future.

Swiss — A bilingual, expandable book designed for the UK art and design gallery Blanka by Dylan Mulvaney: “It honors Josef Müller-Brockmann as well as conveys the principles of Swiss Graphic Design as exemplified by the leader of the revolutionary Swiss Style.” (via SwissMiss and Swiss Legacy).

Good — Christopher Simmons has a quick chat about The Good Design Book project with Grain Edit:

I frequently come back to the definition of design proffered by Charles Eames: “Design is a plan for arranging elements to achieve a particular purpose.” If you break that down, it contains 5 equal parts: the plan (strategy), the arrangement (layout or formalism), the elements (content), the achievement (result) and the purpose (the goal). Good design can therefore be thought of as design based on a good strategy and which features a good arrangement of good content for a good purpose. And of course it needs to yield good results.

And lastly… Following the survey of Mick Wiggins work (mentioned previously here),  Caustic Cover Critic discusses those rather lovely Steinbeck covers with the illustrator:

The Steinbeck gig was about as dreamy a gig as an illustrator can hope to land: 24 covers to date, I think. It was not difficult in the sense of inspiration—he’s so good at evoking mood, and his settings are described so beautifully—but the flop-sweat for me was intense. Steinbeck’s such a classic figure in the literary landscape and bookshelves, delivering art that disappointed was not an option.

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