The Ubiquitous Paula Scher

I wonder how many people walk around New York City, saying "hey! that there is a Paula Scher," identifying her work in the same way people would say "hey, did you see that Van Gogh the other day?"

I googled Paula Scher, and it turns out she is everywhere. Now, I know just because you have a large portfolio does not necessarily mean that you can be easily identifiable anywhere, but Paula Scher has a certain hidden-in-plain-sight kind of presence in New York, at least to those who are or were not aware of her involvement. One of my favorites out of her logos is her design for the New York Philharmonic:

The New York Philharmonic's new graphic identity designed by Paula Scher.

It was also pretty fascinating to find out that Paula Scher was involved in these everyday package designs too:

        

So. iPhones.

Personally, I do not own an iPhone or an iPod touch. Do you? Well, frankly I'm tired of seeing hundreds (if not millions) of cases, accessories, and generally unnecessary add-ons for the iPhone when all I am looking for is something simple and practical for my perfectly functional alternative brand gadget. Maybe that's a bit harsh; I mean, it has its quirks, and if it weren't for the iPhone, this tactile silicone skin might never have been designed:

INViSUAL

"Used along with an app, [and] designed in mind for the Blind and the Visually Impaired with the need for special accessibility functions…This simple silicon case covers all the Apple iOS iPhone mobile devices with the help of the engraved bas-relief icons, keyboard and multi-touch scrolls that gives full access to the interface beneath." 

- Bruno Fosi, designer of the INViSUAL project 

If you look closely, there are icons on the surface of the silicone case. Essentially, the tactile quality of the case transforms what was initially a primarily visual form of communication into a tactile one people can use in combination with the latest technology, which kind of makes me secretly want an iPhone or iPod touch.

Pluralistic Design: A Collaborative Effort

Fairly recently, the New York Times published an article on authors and how much influence they have when it comes to the designing their books' covers. Although the cover may suit the book's content really well, the reality is: not much. Many authors have their own website or blog to promote their books, and it often sounds like they have very little or no control at all. In "Cover Stories," which was published on August 10, 2008, Steven Heller says of authors and the degree of control they possess over the appearance of their books:

Most authors have no control over their book covers. The designs are chosen by an art director and approved by a committee; usually the author doesn't even see the cover until the process is completed. But some writers, by virtue of either their renown or contractual caveat, not only get to accept or reject designs, but also choose the designer. Although rare, prolonged designer/author relationships contribute personality to an author's books, even when the individual designs are decidedly different. The following are three cases of enduring chemistry. 

The discussed authors and designers include Milton Glaser + Philip Roth, Rodrigo Corral + Chuck Palahniuk, and John Gall + Haruki Murakami. Maybe it was because I had just finished defining key terms, but when I saw John Gall's cover designs for Murakami's novels, I was immediately reminded of the global presence of design, and of learning about Japan's emergence as a design-oriented nation in particular.

"Cover Stories," An Essay by Steven Heller

Words To Include In Normal Conversation

So far, my favorite is Bandersnatch.The most recent remake of Alice in Wonderland, directed in 2010 by Tim Burton, includes creatures that did not get to make an appearance in Disney's animated version of Alice in Wonderland created in 1951. For example, take the Jabberwocky: it is a creature that appears in Tim Burton's 2010 movie and is actually based on one of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poems.

Recently I came across this book design for Lewis Carroll's poem, which is often referred to as "Jabberwocky": 

Book design by Raphael Urwiller

 I was really attracted to the color scheme used for this design, it reminded me of the bright colors used in poster designs (I can't remember the exact name of the poster, but I will update this post as soon as I find out.  Although I don't know the name, I did some research and found this painting by Lester Beall using a similar color scheme.)

Retro Pix(els)

With all of the value people place on high-resolution photographs and pictures, not to mention high-definition plasma television screens, it's no wonder pixelated icons or typefaces that look like this are often called retro or outdated:

Animated gif by TopherChris on Tumblr

Conan Iotacon in Fortune Magazine

Andy Rash has created some interestingly humorous low-resolution portraits he calls "Iotacons." They've even appeared in Fortune magazine, where Rash's portrait of Conan O'Brien can be seen:

The iotacons' blocky, geometrically constructed forms makes them look as if they were created and published during the same time period Susan Kare developed the original Macintosh icons.

Macintosh Icons by Susan Kare

Here are some more iotacons (since I'm not a huge fan of Conan O'Brien; I just thought it was cool that Rash's iotacons style was published in a magazine): 

The Breakfast Club! (by Andy Rash)

And...

The Scooby-Doo gang! (without the Mystery Machine - and again, by Andy Rash)

Milton Glaser (Reverse?) Deja Vu

After we reviewed Milton Glaser's record album cover for The Sound of Harlem from 1964 and his Bob Dylan poster from 1967, I tried to figure out where I could have previously seen such bright, yet dimensionally flat color planes.

Milton Glaser's The Sound of Harlem, 1964.

Then I remembered that I had seen similar color planes in the animation style of the movie with the Beatles, The Yellow Submarine. Through some researching, I found out that the movie was produced in 1968, not very long after Milton Glaser designed the record cover for The Sound of Harlem. Heinz Edelmann, the art director known for his illustrations in The Yellow Submarine, was in fact, a friend of Milton Glaser, so influence or collaboration is not unlikely at all.

The Beatles by Heinz Edelmann
in The Yellow Submarine

Running Man

If you don't already watch Chuck, you should. It's a television show about a guy who accidentally uploads a computer into his head; the problem is that this computer contains all of the CIA's intel. The show airs every Monday at 8:00 pm on NBC, and when I was watching the opening credits, I noticed that they use an animated pictograph of a man holding a briefcase, looking like he had just jumped out of Roger Cook and Don Shanosky's Symbol Signs designed for the U. S. Department of Transportation in 1974.





Chuck Titles from parsons amt on Vimeo.

Good Busy Design

In 1924, the President of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) , Thomas J. Watson Sr. changed the name of the company to International Business Machines, or IBM, the abbreviation we know today.

The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company was established on June 16, 1911. This January, IBM started celebrating its one hundredth year and anticipation of its centennial birthday this summer with a plethora of articles on icons, playing on the word's definition as a representative symbol while acknowledging the company's iconic innovations. Each of the company's innovations, listed under "Icons of Progress" is represented by their own pictorial interpretation, which takes the shape of the number 100:

IBM Logo Design for its Centennial Birthday

In their "Icons of Progress" section they also celebrate IBM's belief that "good design is good business" by paying tribute to the company's original design consultant, Eliot Noyes, and artists who worked on his corporate design program. These artists included Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Paul Rand and Isamu Noguchi. 

Figurative Typography, Anyone?

The Raw Shark Texts is a book written by Steven Hall, which includes figurative typography along with its normal storytelling text format. I highly recommend reading this book; it's a compelling, fast paced read, and there's more figurative uses of typography within the book than what I am posting here, but I'm not saying you should read the book just because of its creative use of typography. The video below is from their marketing campaign for the book on Youtube.

Robert Massin created unprecedented figurative typography in Eugene Ionesco's La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) in 1964 with the photographer Henry Cohen by printing typography via letterpress onto sheets of rubber and then manipulating and photographing it (Meggs 443).

Poster Design + Technology = Motion Poster!

Wow, the poster sure has evolved since the posters we first started studying way back at the beginning of the semester. 

Poster by Ruby Soho, at sohoruby.tk

"Australian denim collection Denim & Thread is planning to release a motion poster that ties in directly with their print campaign. “The motion poster picks up the story, where the still ends,” a campaign advantage owner Alex Lambousis is very excited about. Although only a few samples and a quick behind the scenes video has been released, it will be very interesting to see how the motion poster develops and enhances their print campaign."

Denim & Thread - Motion Poster [samples] from Sidat de Silva on Vimeo.

Who are you?

Remember my Doctor Who themed Art Nouveau post from February? Well, recently the BBC decided to redesign the television show's logo.

One major characteristic of the show is that the character of the Doctor can regenerate every cell in his body if mortally wounded, resulting in a drastic (but not too entirely different) change of appearance and personality. This ability helps the Doctor to "escape death" in a way, although he has said that regenerating is almost like dying since the person he becomes as a result of the regeneration is often distinctly different from the previous Doctor.

Lost yet?  Here's how it is related to the visual identification systems we've been studying in chapter twenty of Meggs' History:  so far the Doctor has regenerated a total of eleven times, and each time the show has aired with a different Doctor, it has been introduced with the appearance of a revised logo in the opening credits. The latest logo is composed of the letters DW, which come together to take the shape of the Doctor's time traveling box, the TARDIS.


In 1960, Norman Ives stated that a symbol's function as a logo should:

convey with a clear statement or by suggestion, the activity it represents...The symbol, besides being memorable and legible, must be designed so that it can be used in many sizes and situations without losing its identity (Meggs 403-4).

This is particularly important in an extremely visually engaged culture, since symbols are practically competing against millions of other symbols for the dominance and permanence that William Goldman achieved with his pictographic CBS eye trademark from 1951.

How Not To Revise Your Identity

On the television show Community, which takes place at a community college called Greendale, the dean tries to promote an environmental initiative for the school's green week by changing the college's name and logo.

Geometry and Typography

Here's the official poster for this year's 64th Festival de Cannes, a film festival which celebrates international cinema:

What first struck me about this poster was the simple elegance of its design. Of course, while the elegance can be partly attributed to the use of a photo depicting the actress Faye Dunaway (photomontage, anyone?), it is the geometric '64' which becomes a main focal point. It actually reminded me of Rudolf Koch's Kabel light typeface from 1928. 

Fuuuturist Pattern Poetry

The picture you see below is the book cover designed by gray318 for The Mayor's Tongue, a novel written by Nathaniel Rich. 

“‘The Mayor’s Tongue’ begins when two guys who work for a moving company in New York form an unlikely friendship...Alvaro speaks only Cibaeño, “virtually incomprehensible to natives of the other Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean”; Eugene speaks English and Italian. The friends are unable to communicate, and yet they converse feelingly, or at least they think they do. Alvaro is writing a novel that he asks Eugene to translate, and Eugene believes that he is able to capture the essence of the story, even without knowing the language.” 

—Sophie Gee, author of the New York Times' Sunday Book Review for The Mayor's Tongue. 

I really enjoyed following the words across the cover; I think it goes well with the subject of communication that appears in The Mayor's Tongue. When I first saw the cover design, its animated quality reminded me of Filippo Marinetti's pattern poetry in his Les mots en liberté futuristes (Futurist Words-in-Freedom) of 1919:

On a side note, this is also a great book whose cover text takes the shape of a hand: 

It's Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

The Colors of Russian Suprematism

Okay, so initially this image may not look like a poster from the Russian suprematist style, but what they both have in common is color: specifically, the combination of black, red, and white. The first image is a Japan Relief poster designed by Adam Chang; if you buy one of his prints, the profits support the Doctors Without Borders earthquake relief efforts in Japan.

Earthquake relief poster for Japan by Adam Chang

El Lissitzky's Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919).

Suprematism is a painting style that was founded by Kasimir Malevich that utilized a combination of basic forms, pure color, and geometric, nonobjective abstraction (Meggs' History of Graphic Design, Fourth Edition).

William Morris and Book Cover Design

William Morris, leader of the Arts and Crafts movement in the nineteenth century (way back in chapter 10 of Meggs' History!) is the first person I think of when I look at these textile-inspired book designs:

From Penguin by Design, by David Pearson Design.

Hardcover Penguin Classics, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Photography: Construction or Composition?

Okay, so I'm on a photography kick this week, what can I say?
Although I think the more familiar and widely used term is composition, I couldn't help but notice the presence of characteristically bold, geometr elements in these black and white photographs:

Photograph by Damian Riehl

Both the Russian constructivist and the De Stijl movement explored abstraction with a distinct emphasis on geometric shapes and patterns, despite the fact that the intention behind these works was quite contradictory. This opposition can be attributed to Russian constructivism's association with propaganda and the needs of the state while the De Stijl movement was produced as a result of the desire to alleviate or counteract the chaotic effects of war.

Transfixed by Billy Barraclough

The London Underground

Harry (also referred to as Henry) Beck and Edward Johnston: both of these men have worked on graphics for the London Underground. Harry Beck was the designer of the map for the Underground, and Edward Johnston was hired by Frank Pick to create a typeface and symbol for the transportation system.

London Transportation Logos

This was one of the original maps of the Underground from 1933:

Harry Beck's design for the London Underground Map in 1933.

And this is a much more recent and modern interpretation of the London Underground system as of this year, 2011:

Chromaroma from Mudlark on Vimeo.

Futurism and Photography

Artists in the Futurist movement were fascinated by the expression of concepts such as continuous movement, simultaneity, speed and energy. They also attempted to express motion, energy, and cinematic sequence in their work, such as in Giacomo Balla's painting titled Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Meggs 255).

Giacomo Balla's Dynamism of a Dog
on a Leash was painted in 1912.

The year 1912 is also around the same time Francis Bruguiere began experimenting with multiple exposures in photography. Advances in photography provided another way for artists to capture or represent dynamic movement in space through a two-dimensional medium.

Shadow Knows by vishstudio

O by David

Design Travels Far

ou know that phrase, the one that is all about location? Well, when I went to Garth Walker's artist talk on Wednesday, March 2, it was clear that his designs were very evidently based in Durban, South America. His location is especially important since one of the most prominent themes he explores through his designs is identity, which is very closely interrelated to a person's sense of place: "What makes me African – and what does that look like?" 

View more of Garth Walker's work here:

• Garth Walker's Design Studio, Mister Walker Design
• The Confessions of a Design Thief exhibition at St. John's University's Dr. M. T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery
• Design Indaba Magazine's "Graphic Revelations" article and online gallery

P.S. Thanks again to Jessica Hische for her Daily Drop Cap!

Circular Logic

Wow, talking about typography has made me realize how mistaken I was about graphic design when I started this blog. Typography is one of the most straight forward methods of visual communication, so I've been looking at various designers' typefaces.

Albrecht Dürer's studies in the formation of capitals influenced how letters are constructed in typefaces today, and this focus on geometric proportions can be seen in Herbert Bayer's sans-serif Bauhaus typeface called Universal, designed in 1925.

Universal, a typeface focusing on lowercase letters made of circles and lines.

Here is another variation of Herbert Bayer's Universal typeface:

Harry Potter and The Order of the Bauhaus

See the symbol using a triangle and square inside a circle?

Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919-1923, 
László Moholy-Nagy (American, born Hungary. 1895-1946)

Shapes and primary colors. The combination of form and function. These were the primary tenets of the Bauhaus  art period. This idea to unify aesthetics or decoration with practicality originated in the Arts and Crafts Movement, and while nineteenth century artists did consider the function of an object, it seems they still placed more value on the beauty of an object's appearance. Literally meaning "building house," the basics of Bauhaus reminded me of the time when houses were made out of construction paper squares and triangles, instead of wood and insulation. That's not to say that it is a juvenile art style, though; many refer to it as one of the greatest influences in the development of modernist art and modern design. The Bauhaus' emphasis on shapes also reminded me of this symbol from the Harry Potter books, known as the Deathly Hallows.