The End of the Glue Pot Era
by Steven Heller
How technology has remade graphic design. Plus: Sagmeister, Helfand, Blechman, and four more on why their work has (and hasn’t) changed....
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Dialogue: Arachne for the Digital Age
by Steven Heller
The New York–based textiles company Maharam is a fourth-generation, family-run business. It has been reinvented by each successive generation, which probably accounts for its unusual longevity in the dysfunctional realm of family businesses....
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From Cows to Cartons
by Steven Heller
Udder-to-pail is the most natural, though not always most efficient, way to transport milk from cow to consumer. Science has not found a good substitute for the udder, but it has triumphed in making milk packaging more sanitary and utilitarian.
Until the end of the 19th century, milk was brought to the market in cans or crocks....
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Breaking Through Boundaries — Dialogue with Paola Antonelli
by Steven Heller
She is the best friend that graphic design and typography have in the museum world. Conceiver of such exhibitions as “Safe: Design takes on Risk,” “Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design,” and “Design and the Elastic Mind,” Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the Architecture and Design department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, seamlessly integrates 2-D and 3-D design in a standard-setting manner....
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If You Don't Read This, I'll Kill The Dog
by Steven Heller
"Making people laugh is the lowest form of humor," said Michael O'Donoghue, one of the wits behind The National Lampoon (and a substitute English teacher at my high school). But making people laugh hysterically was the goal and success of The National Lampoon, which picked up for Baby Boomers where MAD magazine left off. Now a insightful and entertaining new book chronicling the Lampoon titled Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the Lampoon Insanely Great by Rick Meyerowitz provides the first in depth look at the art of Lampoon art and art direction....
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Gastrotypographicalassemblage
by Steven Heller
The Gastrotypographicalassemblage (a real mouthful) was the 11 metre wide handmade wooden typographic wall that hung in the CBS cafeteria in New York designed by Lou Dorfsman, with custom type created by Herb LubalinTom Carnase and containing almost 1500 individual characters. "There are few pieces that represent the typographic and design spirit that illuminated that moment of history, and certainly none on a scale as ambitious," said Milton Glaser....
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Let the Rally Wars Begin
by Steven Heller
Rally round the rallies boys, rally round the rallies. Shouting the battle cry of freedom. What else can we say? Here's the latest salvo in the battle of wits and rally provocateurs (in their own words) from the left and right, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (see them here): "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
Who among us has not wanted to open their window and shout that at the top of their lungs?
Seriously, who?...
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A Helluva Dante
by Steven Heller
Dante’s hell is Chwast’s heaven. Imagery flows from him like blood from a freshly opened vein. Chwast's deceivingly child-like scrawls are packed with inherent wit. In this adaptation, a noir-ish Dick Tracyesque, trench-coat wearing, pipe smoking Dante treks through the Inferno, Purgatory and ultimately Paradise, led by the mustachioed Virgil in a bowler hat, spats and carrying a walking stick. Along the way he encounters the evil minotaur (in a wrestling suit) guarding the ravine of broken rocks; the well endowed centaurs guarding the Boiling Blood River; and the teeming masses of serpents attacking the sinners....
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The School of Rap
by Steven Heller
MTV-U is the best place to see and hear the latest hip hop music videos. In fact, it is like the AIGA of hip hop. Really, Mr. Koolpants? Yes Really, Mr. and Mrs. America! Because videos have become the 21st century graphic design (in a way). And music vidz, which have gotten less air time on the main, game and reality besotted MTV, are still featured content on MTV2 and this website. It just so happens that my son, a music video director, has a piece competing on the Freshmen MTV-U....
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59 Posters That Shook The World
by Steven Heller
English-born David King is an artist, designer, editor, photographer, photo historian and archivist, who has been described as “one of the most significant artistic-intellectual personalities of our time.” He also has a gallery dedicated to his rotating collection of Russian revolutionary and avant garde posters at the Tate Modern, London. Its good to be King. This October, Cleveland-based Productive Arts gallery will exhibit (and sell) King’s graphic art and designs, primarily the political and cultural posters and graphics he produced in the late 1970s and mid 1980s...
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Up Against the Wall
by Steven Heller
Paula Scher’s recent mural, large-scale typographic map paintings, examines ideas of location and ways of seeing the world. Her pair of murals at Queens Metropolitan Campus, a new public middle school and high school in Forest Hills, were completed last week as a commission for the Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art program, in partnership with the NYC School Construction Authority Public Art for Public Schools program. Pentagram notes: “The two murals are located in an atrium and commons at the Metropolitan Campus and each cover approximately 2,430 square feet."...
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Sock It To Me!
by Steven Heller
There is nothing (well, almost nothing) more pleasurable than a fine pair of socks. I am a sucker for striped multi-colored socks (or shall I say socker). So whenever I find a pair I like I wear them until they wear out, and then wear them some more. I was recently presented with a few pair of socks by Office Weiderholt (OW), which describes itself as follows: OW is a seamless Ameba-Unit which started spreading all over the world in 2007. Phototgrapher/Filmmaker Sven Wiederholt is Czar of this unit. His members are located all over the world, places such as Germany, Japan, Nigeria, Finland, US and are ready for the next project....
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