Boulder bookstore owner David Bolduc said of artist and graphic designer Tina Collen’s “artobiography,” titled Storm of the i (2009) and published by Art Review Press, “I’ve been in the book business for thirty years and have seen a lot of books. But I’ve never seen anything like Storm of the i.”
I agree with Bolduc that Storm of the i doesn’t look like other books, but Storm’s uniqueness is also what hinders it most. The book defies traditional design and layout, like a watered down, less haunting version of American author Mark Z. Danielewski’s popular House of Leaves (2000), and it’s a confusing book formally and conceptually. It vacillates throughout all three hundred pages between various different styles—photo album, scrapbook, self-help, personal memoir, maudlin diary, autobiography—and none of them seem to help its author’s intent.
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Last week, I visited MoMA’s new exhibition, Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Object and spoke to the institution’s senior curator of design and architecture, Paola Antonelli, about the show, some poignant objects, the American insecurity towards design, her online habits … among other things.
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In 2008, not only did Obama and the Democrats win the US Presidential race but they hands down won the unofficial graphic design competition that vies for the hearts and minds of voters (even if on a subconscious level). As things are gearing up for 2012, the question is … did the GOP learn anything about graphic design?
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The Tony Shafrazi Gallery is currently showing a rare collection of 95 rare Soviet Constructivist film posters, circa 1920-33, and a model of Vladimir Tatlin’s influential “Monument for the Third International” (1920/1967). These gems of early 20th C. graphic design were cutting edge for their time and they still look fantastic today. The visual imagination of the designers synched up quite well with the heady films during an era when the Soviet Union was still a major center of cinematic production and innovation.
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Designer Andrea Gallo has created a series of six posters that boil iconic works of architecture down to their minimalist details. The stark, black and white posters cut out silhouettes of the buildings and zoom in, with an eye towards the key elements of famous buildings.
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Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s latest book, 1Q84, has become a blockbuster hit in the author’s native country, but the English edition is still forthcoming. As a preview, Knopf has released images of the book’s cover, by famous graphic designer Chip Kidd. Using transparent vellum as a jacket, the cover represents the book’s engagement with alternate realities.
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A cornerstone of what was designed to be New York’s equivalent of Baltimore’s Harbor Place and Boston’s Quincy Market, the South Street Seaport Museum in lower Manhattan is in trouble. The museum has put 32 members of its staff on unpaid furloughs and closed the Bowne & Company Stationers letterpress studio.
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Global coffee retailer Starbucks is turning 40 this year and they’ve announced a new logo to coincide with the occasion. Looking at the sweep of logos from the original topless two-tailed mermaid — though the company often calls it a siren — that appeared on cups at their first store in Seattle’s Pike Place Market to the more modern version, I can’t help but notice the march towards abstraction and a less coffee-centric brand. Gone is the word “coffee” and the color brown, and in its place is an almost Holiday Inn-like bland greenness that zooms in even closer on the increasingly de-nuded mermaid. What this redesign suggests is that Starbucks will continue to look beyond coffee and go more downmarket as it continues to grow.
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This chart may be all you need to decide what font, I mean typeface, to use for a current or upcoming project.
Design historian Steven Heller reminded me a few weeks ago that I use the terms font and typeface interchangeably, point taken (even though my mom was a graphic designer and I should know better), but I have to admit to not being so concerned with the usage since I usually get blank stares when I use typeface with non-design people. Did desktop publishing ruin design terminology? Is the term typeface destined to be labeled arcane in the dictionaries of the near future? My guess is yes.
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Gap definitely knows how to make it viral. The question is, was the Internet scandal caused by its new logo actually worth the publicity? When the historically consistent clothing brand switched the logo on its website from the old three-letters-in-a-square to the new monstrosity, the web reaction was immediate and decisive: the logo sucks. Not only does it suck on the level of the 2012 London Olympic Games logo, unlike London, the re-design doesn’t even have the balls to be interesting.
The logo isn’t anything revolutionary. At this point, a switch to Helvetica — or Corporate A Pro Demi Condensed, News Gothic Demi or whatever it is — is about the oldest trick in the book. But what’s more surprising is that the design doesn’t seem to have anything to redeem it at all. It’s a masterpiece of ambiguity.
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