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In a post on Design Observer, Michael Bierut shows his undergraduate portfolio, including his entry to PRINT's annual student cover competition. (Learn more about entering next year's competition here.)
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Norman Ives, Ionic Study, 1965
“Construction and Reconstructions by Norman Ives” opened this week at the AIGA National Design Center, and is on view through November 21. This exhibit in the mezzanine space shows a small, but beautiful, collection of Ives’s work. In his striking collages, letters from printed matter are cut, bisected, and then glued back into a grid, with serifs transforming into frames, abstractions, and angles. His paintings and sculptures take these alphabetic motifs and simplify them further into sharp triangles and curves.
His work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1967 exhibition “Three Graphic Designers,” along with pieces by Almir Mavignier and Massimo Vignelli. Ives's books covers were twice selected for AIGA’s annual 50 Books/50 Covers exhibition, which, incidentally, is also showing downstairs in the Design Center. John T. Hill writes in his introduction to the 2008 Architects and Designers Diary (devoted this year to the work of Ives) that Norman Ives had “a reticent nature” and a “self-promotion phobia.” As
such, his paintings and designs have rarely been exhibited in recent
years—this show is a good reason to become acquainted, or reacquainted,
with Ives’s work.
Visit our calendar for more exhibits.
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Watch Paula Scher chat with Monocle's editor-in-chief Tyler Brule about how the U.S. needs to change Brand America.
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Getty Images has officially launched its website after two years of feedback-usability studies, solicited feedback, and focus groups. It's good to see that the site is astronomically better—and it should be given that it's taken 18 months to get it going. Although most early reviews are touting the improved search function (which is indeed improved, with spelling suggestions if you misspell a word, a highly-visible search path, and intelligent functionality) what’s most interesting is to see the company getting involved in the creative process as well. On the section under "creative,” click "catalyst" for a new feature which places a Flickr-like tag cloud on the left-hand side and an image bank on the right-hand side. In between is a middle ground for adding and deleting and narrowing down the exact images you're looking for. Getty has never really had a shortage of image possibilities; maybe now, you'll be able to find them all and know how you want to use them before you pay.
[Go here for PRINT's look at the Getty's influence on design, appearing in our Sept/Oct 2007 issue.]
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"The Art of the Print" exhibition in the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center at University of Pennsylvania, on view through October 10, is designed to show techniques of print production. It’s gently didactic exhibition, illustrating the primary methods of traditional printmaking—intaglio, relief, planographic, and screen print—and using magnified details to tell how line, color, and tone are created in different media. The result is that we end up seeing how cutting, drawing, using mezzotint and drypoint each contribute a definable quality to image production. The distinct advantage of an exhibition like this one is that it has no adherence to a particular historical or artistic sensibility, debunking the notion that technique determines style, and the individual examples speak volumes about the highly developed skills that were fostered by industries now vanished: Thomas Goff Lupton’s 1833 mezzotint, Kean as Sir Giles Overreach is a masterpiece whose production values far outstrip its conceptual purpose. If only the curators had extended their range to include the many methods of photomechanical and digital production that are more common among studio practitioners and illustrators today. JOHANNA DRUCKER
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