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Published September 19, 2013

Wyatt Mitchell on The New Yorker Redesign


The New Yorker‘s creative director, Wyatt Mitchell, discusses the magazine’s update of  their whimsical font Irvin, and some of the other recent design changes at the magazine:

You can read more about the magazine’s subtle redesign at The New York Times:

Many of these changes are subtle enough that David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, said that if the magazine fell on the floor and were three feet away, it would still be identifiable to longtime readers… “We’ve kept the DNA and added some modern elements,” Mr. Remnick said… “It’s a living thing. It should also have a sense of fun and improvisation and experiment,” Mr. Remnick said about the magazine.

(via It’s Nice That)

UPDATE:

Apparently House Industries type designer Ben Kiel and Christian Schwartz worked with Mitchell to make a custom version of Schwartz’s Neutraface for the magazine. House Industries also worked on two different versions of the original Irvin typeface. Read more here.

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Published September 18, 2013

Holy Sh*t, Batman

Colin Burrows reviews Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr for the London Review of Books:

Really good swearing relies on formulaic elements, but needs to be precisely adapted to the moment. In this respect dear old Robin in the 1960s Batman TV series was one of the best swearers, though his lips were never soiled with a common-or-garden profanity. He could combine ‘Holy’ with more or less anything in order to create his trademark ejaculations, which were always to the point. Number two in my list of all-time favourites is ‘Holy chocolate éclair!’ Number one has to be ‘Holy uncanny photographic mental processes!’…

…The chances are that even the young audiences of the 1960s Batman TV series knew that there was something Robin was not saying every time he uttered a variant of his catchphrase. (I was there. It felt naughty.) A formula for generating euphemisms can be as creative as a formula for generating swear words: ‘frog’s knickers’ was my mother’s favoured way of flirting with the ‘f’ word, but we also have ‘effing’ and ‘frigging’ and (on Battlestar Galactica) ‘frakking’ too, though that particular euphemism may have had its day now that ‘fracking’ means frakking up the landscape in order to squirt gas out of it. One thing Robin never dared say, bless his little golden rayon cape, was ‘Holy Shit’, the uttering of which would certainly have KAPOWED him right off prime-time TV in those tender-eared days.

The book cover was designed by Lisa Force.

(Yes, it is quite possible that any review in which repeatedly references the Batman TV show  in a somewhat relevant way will be linked to on this blog)

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Published September 16, 2013

Remembering Kim Thompson

Kim Thompson, co-publisher of Fantagraphics, passed away on June 19th at the age of 56. Even though I briefly worked with the folks from Fantagraphics 5 or 6 years ago, I am sad to say that I never had the opportunity to meet him in person. I’m sure I would have learned a lot.

I recently linked to Seattle Weekly article about the future of Fantagraphics after Kim’s death, and so I also wanted to link to Robert Boyd‘s remembrances of Thompson in The Stranger:

I realize that readers might not understand why Kim Thompson was an important person—not just to me, but to art… [Fantagraphics] published Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Peter Bagge, Ivan Brunetti, Carol Tyler, and so many other great cartoonists, and are still doing it today. When you compare the publishing achievements of the underground comics generation (a brief brilliant flame) to Fantagraphics (and its peers, like Drawn & Quarterly), it’s hardly a contest. Fantagraphics is one of the greatest publishers of comics in any language of all time and one of the strongest promulgators of the art of comics in existence. And Kim Thompson was crucial to that 30-plus years of artistic success.

Sometime ago, the indefatigable Tom Spurgeon posted a long and comprehensive obituary of Thompson at The Comics Reporter that also serves as a potted history of Fantagraphics if you are interested in this particular corner of comics culture. There is a somewhat shorter obituary at The Comics Journal.


Ben Schwartz also posted about Thompson and the importance of The Comics Journal at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Kim Thompson was born in 1956 to American citizens living abroad in Denmark, and arrived here in the US in 1977. That same year, Kim joined Gary Groth to help put out The Comics Journal, begun in 1976. The Comics Journal was the first forum for nothing but discussion, criticism, and journalism about comics to rise above the level of the zine (not to discount those incredibly vital fan networks). There would be no comics section here at the Los Angeles Review of Books, or anywhere else, without The Comics Journal. They were not the only comics-oriented publication, but they were the only one with actual journalistic standards that hired writers of depth and knowledge… Critical magazines have a way of stimulating creativity. From the heated, hyper-talkative culture of the 1940s and 50s Partisan Review, a Saul Bellow emerged to embody its aesthetic. From Cahiers du Cinema and its attempt to create a new critical language for film, the French New Wave filmmakers appeared. In a similar way, from the Comics Journal intelligentsia, a literary comics… movement began.

Finally, Tom Spurgeon posted (re-posted?) this 2008 interview with Thompson, again at The Comics Reporter. It is striking how much he still believed there was to be done:

“The industry has changed far more radically, and for the better, than I ever could have imagined, in terms of the respect accorded to comics, the level of work being produced, comics’ place in the market, the whole ball of wax. (You have to bear in mind that when we started cartoonists were literally wondering whether Americans would ever be willing to read comic books that ran beyond the length of an issue of Giant-Size Fantastic Four.)

The weird thing is that the idea of “graphic novels” and comics for adults has had so very little penetration into the general literate populace. Most regular people are, in my experience, still utterly stunned and confused at the very idea, New York Times Book Review reviews notwithstanding. There is a weird disconnect between the press’s enthusiastic embrace and promotion of the medium and its effect on actual “mainstream” readers… It remains an uphill battle, and if I’d known how much of an uphill battle it would continue to be, even with all of these victories, I might have become an advertising copywriter circa 1979″

He will surely be missed.

(pictured above: a portrait of Kim Thompson by Jim Blanchard; Eric Reynolds, Gary Groth, and Kim Thompson by Daniel Clowes commissioned for the (as yet) unpublished Comics As Art)

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Published September 13, 2013

Françoise Mouly: In Love With Art

Jeet Heer discusses the work Françoise Mouly and his new book, In Love With Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman, with Dave Berry at The National Post:

She’s open to the wider world in a way that was very rare for North American comics, which was a very provincial scene. But combined with that is not just the European comics themselves, but the European fine art tradition, which she had been educated in and made her very responsive to certain types of art. That’s very distinct from North America, even in the undergrounds, which were much more rooted in satire and lowbrow comedy and pulpishness. The other thing that she brought to the table is a sense of design, which is very rare in comics to that point. There was no one designing magazines and books in that format. Even people who believed in mature comics, they didn’t have that. Fantagraphics, their comics in the ’80s, even though the content is great, when they put it together in a book, they have no idea how to design that kind of product.

In a lot of ways, that sense of design really made the whole idea of the graphic novel possible. The distinguishing thing of the graphic novel isn’t just the length, but that it’s conceived of as a book. In the ’70s and ’80s, people thought that if you had a 64-page Hulk story, that’s a graphic novel – better paper, but all the same design elements as the regular comic… what made Maus and the other books that she did seem like bookstore material, library material was her book design sensibility. Everybody who’s doing interesting comics since then has learned from that.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic ran an excerpt from the book about the now iconic 9/11 New Yorker cover created by Mouly and Spiegelman:

It was a true example of collaborative art. Many of the hallmarks of Mouly’s tenure as New Yorker art editor can be seen in the 9/11 cover, including a direct engagement with current events—an enormous tonal shift in New Yorker cover history. But the cover doesn’t deal with this tragedy in the didactic manner of, say, a political cartoon, but rather through artful means: using subtlety and ambiguity, strong design, a compelling use of color (or in this case, a memorable absence of color) and the distillation of experience (rather than ideas or ideologies) into an iconic image. The dialogue between Mouly and Spiegelman was also typical of the strongly collaborative way she always has worked with, and continues to work with, her artists.

In Love With Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman is published by Toronto’s Coach House Press, and if you are in Toronto this evening, Françoise Mouly and Sean Rogers will be in conversation Jeet Heer at Revival on College Street, starting at 7:30pm

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Published September 13, 2013

TateShots: Ed Ruscha’s Photography Books

In this new TateShots video, artist Ed Ruscha talks about the “cultural curiosities” — the gas stations, swimming pools and parking lots of Los Angeles — that he photographed for his books:

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Published September 12, 2013

Sarah McNally in The Lab Magazine

The Lab Magazine interviews Sarah McNally, owner of McNally Jackson Books in New York:

From Winnipeg, Canada, McNally was born to a bookselling family, but made her way New York-wards after college, eventually working as an editor at Basic Books – “I loved editing because I had never done anything deeply collaborative before, and to be trusted inside a writer’s vision of his or her art 
is a profound and moving privilege.” She then branched out on her own, and whether 
by nature or nurture, she’s clearly found where she’s meant to be. “I love bookselling because I can run around thinking about a million things, from the mundane to the transcendent, and it all matters… The dirt in the corner 
is my problem. What Proust’s birthday means in downtown New York is my problem. I have to walk through the store allowing every book 
I see, even if I haven’t read it, to resonate deeply within me, and if it saddens or irritates even the most inconsequential part of my soul, 
I have to take it off display.”

I miss being a bookseller. I really do.

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Published September 10, 2013

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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Published September 10, 2013

Frame By Frame: The Art of Stop Motion

The latest episode of the PBS documentary short series Off Book takes a look at the painstaking art of stop-motion animation:

I’ve always loved stop-motion so it’s nice to know that it’s undergoing something of a resurgence in the digital age.

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Published September 9, 2013

Jonathan Lethem: The Author Looks Inward

Jonathan Lethem talks about writing his new novel, Dissident Gardens, with Brian Gresko at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Of course, in the writing, Dissident Gardens couldn’t bear much of what I’d learned. Novels don’t want to be crammed with factual stuff. I mostly left it aside, including some astonishing truths, which when you first come across them, you think, holy shit, I’ve learned this crazy thing and now I’ll blow people away by revealing this knowledge in the book! But at the juncture where you’d insert such a thing, you flinch, seeing the cost is too high. The facts will intrude — either on the reader’s experience, or my own relationship to the page, to the dream. You’ve heard of killing your darlings? You’ve got to kill plenty of the world’s darling’s too

Dissident Gardens is out this week in the US & Canada (I believe you have a bit longer to wait in the UK). The book was reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.

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Published September 6, 2013

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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Published September 5, 2013

Robert Walser: The Monotony of Things

Colors fill up your mind too much with all sorts of muddled stuff. Colors are too sweet a muddle, nothing more. I love things in one color, monotonous things. Snow is such a monotonous song. Why shouldn’t a color be able to make the same impression as singing? White is like a murmuring, whispering, praying. Fiery colors, like for instance Autumn colors, are a shriek. Green in midsummer is a many-voiced song with all the highest notes. Is that true? I don’t know if that is right. Well, the teacher will surely be so kind as to correct it.

At The New Yorker, Ben Lerner considers the writing of Robert Walser:

There is the typically Walserian statement “I love things in one color, monotonous things.” Praise for the monotonous, the uniform, the mundane, the insignificant—such sentiments are everywhere in Walser’s work, and maintain a crucial ambiguity. On the one hand, they are expressions of poetic attunement to those aspects of the world we too readily overlook, and for which writers concerned with heroic exploits often have no time. On the other hand, Walser’s celebration of the monotonous or uniform returns us to his fascination with subservience, with relinquishing all personality to imposed order: “Modestly stepping aside can never be recommended as a continual practice in strong enough terms.”

The force of Walser’s writing derives from this simultaneous valorization of irreducible individuality and of sameness, smallness, interchangeability.

Lerner has written the introduction to a new NYRB collection of Walser short stories, A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories, translated by Damion Searls.

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Published September 4, 2013

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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