Blog | Print Magazine

May 25, 2018
5 min

William Stout: More Than Just Dinosaurs

Register today for the free course “5 Skills Every Design Needs to Know.” William Stout has done it all. Comic books. Movie posters. Fine art. Museum murals. Theme park design. Art books. Film production. Stout has mastered them all and then some. “I call it the pinball school of career planning,” he jokes. “I’ve just bounced all over the place.” Despite the varied paths his career has taken over the past five decades, Stout remains best known as one of the premiere dinosaur

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Oct 28, 2017
4 min

Designer Garland Kirkpatrick: Keeping Social Issues Alive

Recent interest in a century-old series of infographics has been providing a ray of hope amidst our country’s current muddy quagmire of racial hatred and violence. I’m referring, of course, to renewed interest in the hand-drawn charts that civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois produced for the international Paris Exhibition in 1900. Designed as part of “The Exhibit of American Negroes,” the work is an investigation into the lives of black Americans. That fanned interest in his

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Nov 3, 2016
14 min

Picturing Famous Comics Artists and Animators, at Ease

By: Michael Dooley Photographer Greg Preston is a good-natured, low-key guy. There’s an ease about him that enhances his subjects’ comfort amidst their already-familiar surroundings. It’s visible enough in The Artist Within, a handsome, generously-sized hardcover from 2007 with roughly a hundred “portraits of cartoonists, comic book artists, animators, and others,” as the book’s subtitle has it. He’s captured a broad spectrum of extraordinary talents, from Al Hirschfeld, Jule

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Jun 21, 2016
6 min

Flash Gordon, the Grid, and the Midcentury West Coast Art Scene

Subscribe to Print Magazine for intelligent insights into design history and the state of the industry. Sign up today and get a free download—Typography Today. American art had been drawing from Sunday newspaper funnies in various ways long before Roy Lichtenstein’s painted comic books panels Popped onto the gallery scene. In 1950s New York, Robert Rauschenberg affixed Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and Terry and the Pirates onto his paintings and assemblages, recontextualizin

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Apr 1, 2015
5 min

Off the Richter Scale: Earthquakes, Mudslides & California Design

Her publisher calls it “dah monstah.” As books go, it is a monster—7 3/4″ x 10 1/4″, 1 5/8″ thick, weighing more than three pounds. But what a wonderful monster it is. Inside its metallic-stamped, day-glow, yellow-to-magenta gradient covers are 416 eclectic pages stuffed with colorful, exuberant, influential, sometimes weird and wacky examples of graphic design created in California between 1936 and 1986. The book opens—after its slightly psychedelic California-palm-icon-patt

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Dec 23, 2014
5 min

7 Outstanding Comics and Cartoon Books of 2014

Alice’s admonition “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?” is particularly true during semester break/holiday vacation season. So let’s kick back and look at some of the year’s more noteworthy cartoon, comics, and graphic novel publications. Our good friend the Daily Heller has already covered some high-profile releases, like Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream and Richard McGuire’s Here. And I’ve been chronicling several as well; in one column I recommend

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Jul 30, 2014
15 min

Arabic and Iranian Typography Show Unites Middle East

A woman who grew up in Syria and a man with Persian roots walk into CalArts. Jump ahead six years: They’re now passionately united in their goal to inspire a widespread design movement. Maece Seirafi is a Los Angeles-based graphic designer with an avid interest in both Latin and non-Latin type. She developed her love of letterforms in Damascus, at an early age. In her sophomore year of her MFA program, she connected with fellow student Pouya Jahanshahi, currently a designer,

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Jun 11, 2014
8 min

LACMA’s New Graphic Design Collection Plans

The West Coast became the center of America’s graphic design universe in the mid-1980s. Naturally, it began with April Greiman and Emigre and a ripe California Apple. And it expanded with Katherine McCoy’s Cranbrook vision invading CalArts. This fact’s not that apparent from examining entrenched attitudes, and even advisor lists, of prominent East Coast museums: It’s as if they’re still peering out from Saul Steinberg’s 1976 “View from 9th Avenue.” But the Los Angeles County

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Dec 14, 2012
7 min

Los Angeles Views "Graphic Design: Now in Production"

At a Hammer Museum panel last month, Willem Henri Lucas introduced himself, Gail Swanlund, and Brian Roettinger as three L.A.-based designers who were about to discuss a current exhibition of contemporary graphic design in which none of them were included. Asking the audience to keep that perspective in mind, Roettinger, SCI-Arc’s former design director, observed that, with its East Coast and European emphasis, the show was missing—ahem!—a big chunk of the field. Swanlund als

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Sep 14, 2012
3 min

Eliza Frye: How to Succeed in Comics, Online and Off

When Eliza Frye used Kickstarter to fund her first hardcover collection of graphic stories, she raised more than double her goal amount. In this, the conclusion of our two-part talk, she discusses a variety of topics, including online comics, comics conventions, and other projects. You’ll find part one here. And you’ll find Eliza this weekend, September 15 and 16, at Comikaze Expo in Los Angeles—which will also host Camilla d’Errico, whom I interviewed here. What are the pros

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Sep 7, 2012
4 min

The Comics of Eliza Frye: A Gateway to the Sequential Arts

A lady is murdered. She was a Parisian prostitute. We meet some people who knew her. A bloody butcher. A flower merchant. A client. A painter for whom she modeled. A few others. We attend her burial. The murderer is revealed, the story ends. With a minimum of dialogue, the dark, tense eroticism of this graphic narrative is masterfully conveyed through its layout, line work, and color. It was Eliza Frye’s first webcomic, and it earned her an Eisner Award nomination in 2009. Si

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William Stout: More Than Just Dinosaurs

Designer Garland Kirkpatrick: Keeping Social Issues Alive

Picturing Famous Comics Artists and Animators, at Ease

Flash Gordon, the Grid, and the Midcentury West Coast Art Scene

Off the Richter Scale: Earthquakes, Mudslides & California Design

7 Outstanding Comics and Cartoon Books of 2014

Arabic and Iranian Typography Show Unites Middle East

LACMA’s New Graphic Design Collection Plans

Los Angeles Views "Graphic Design: Now in Production"

Eliza Frye: How to Succeed in Comics, Online and Off

The Comics of Eliza Frye: A Gateway to the Sequential Arts

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