Editor’s Note: Over the years, Steven Heller has written thousands of installments of his blog, The Daily Heller. With Vintage Heller, we’re exploring entries from the archives. This post first appeared in 2014. To celebrate turkey day, let’s look at some other, non-edible fowl. These birds of a letter, representing indigenous oiseaux of France, introduced children to their ABCs but also to the aviary of la belle France. Printed on porous newsprint, these Epinal illustrations

Editor’s Note: Over the years, Steven Heller has written thousands of installments of his blog, The Daily Heller. With Vintage Heller, we’re exploring entries from the archives. This post first appeared in 2017. In a world where many innocent people are incarcerated without parole, other guilty ones are pardoned and set free, and animals are routinely killed as trophies, it's good to know that there is some justice in the fowl world. Thank you, Mr. Presidents, for your mercy

Vintage Heller: The time Margaret and Walter Keane settled who created the “big eyes” artwork by drawing big-eyed artwork in a courtroom.

Vintage Heller: Exploring some of the historical ephemera of Labor Arts for Labor Day.

Stephen Alcorn’s dedication to drawing has been a recurring story on The Daily Heller. Through his work on “Reflections on the Revelatory and Unifying Power of Interactive Portraiture in the Classroom” he discusses his unique program at Virginia Commonwealth University where each of his students are subject to his gaze and rendering. Stephen Alcorn on The Face Since I was invited to teach in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University I have made it my practice

We all wear some great designs that people rarely see (except in the jeans department). I’m talking about clothing labels, those embroidered pieces of fabric that are endowed often with beautiful lettering and graphic devices. Label-making is a big business (and it was, even when it comes to vintage clothing labels) within a big business, so never take it for granted. The vintage clothing labels here are from Spain c. 1930s (hopefully before the murderous civil war). They wer

Graphic Matters (formerly known as Graphic Design Festival Breda) is a biannual festival about present developments in (typo)graphic visual culture. The festival largely takes place in the public space of Breda, the Netherlands. Surprising graphic interventions create awareness about the audience’s personal relation to visual culture. Recently I wrote about GM’s connection to COVID-19 graphics. Exhibitions, lectures and workshops offer insight in current developments to a pro

Last week, President Trump got a typographic surprise near the White House. Democrat Mayor Muriel Bowser took to the streets to send a message to the president, ordering a giant two-block sign reading “Black Lives Matter” to be painted on 16th Street Northwest between H and K streets. It underscores the street’s new name: Black Lives Matter Plaza. “We want to call attention today to making sure our nation is more fair and more just, and that black lives and that black humanit

A few weeks ago, during self-isolation, I was rereading a delightful article that Ralph Caplan had written for me in 1995 when I was editor of the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design. “Zoned For Weird” was a feature in the second of two special issues devoted to eccentricity. Ralph, whose business card read “Director, Center for Peripheral Studies”—which we used as the illustration in the article—was the perfect choice for this subject, since, as stated in his bio, “Ralph Caplan’s

The long-term impact that COVID-19 will have on culture in general, and art and design specifically, is an interesting question. We’ve already seen dozens, hundreds and thousands of graphic, visual and performance artists and designers as well as curators, directors and interaction conceptualists who have variously overcome, bypassed and hacked the limits, protocols and restrictions. I’m not just referring to the multitudes of cautionary, advocacy and protest images that have

Today, Merrill C. Berman, whose Weimar catalog of art and politics was covered last week in The Daily Heller, brings another slice of early twentieth century design history to the public feast: “American Posters of the WPA Era, 1935–1943.” Richard Floethe (1901–1988) President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s massive stimulus initiative designed to lift the United States out of the Great Depression, known as the New Deal, spawned the WPA (originally “Works Progress Administration,” an

The year has not been going well. As if today’s global crises are not enough pain, this year’s graphic design losses include the UK-based Romek Marber, who recently passed away at 95 (Nov. 25, 1925–March 30, 2020). He did, however, build a long and exemplary career producing work with a timeless yet modern aesthetic and enviable style. The Economist magazine hired the Polish-born Holocaust survivor in 1961 to produce a series of covers. As The Guardian described Marber and hi

Nostalgia be damned! What’s not to love about Art Deco? It’s elegant yet not overly froufrou. It is Moderne (with an e), without the austerity of Modernism without the e. It is an aspirational yet mass-embracing design that spanned the world and continues to suggest both opulence and invention (not that the two are mutually exclusive). And what better way to celebrate Art Deco (also known as l’Art Moderne) than to be part of a society that embraces its many manifestations in

Merrill C. Berman, the master graphic design connoisseur/collector/archivist, has joined the ranks of the generous in making available the fruits of his acquisitions during these COVID-shut-in times. In 2018–2019, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums presented a gallery rotation titled “Who Owns the World? Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic,” combining Berman’s incredible collection with their own. That installation, organized by cities in Germany that were ho

Introducing a new “occasional” Daily Heller series devoted to type, lettering and imagery in the public domain—found or orphaned graphic material that has no particular provenance, lives homeless on the street yet has a certain je ne sais quoi that suggests skill, craft and intelligence were responsible for its being. The first is “clink!” a sign for, well, you name it: a soft drink, perhaps; or a hip new bar; or something even more arcane, like an inmate’s lounge in a minimu

I will wholeheartedly grant that humankind has made a mess of nature and despoiled its beautiful designs. But must it take such severe revenge? This year alone we’ve been attacked by COVID-19, Murder Hornets and (soon) cicadas in the millions. What’s next? Locusts, frogs, boils, hail, pestilence and a second term for Trump? #cicadas #DailyHeller #plagues #MurderHornets #StevenHeller #COVID19

Anne M. Giangiulio is an associate professor of design at University of Texas at El Paso. For the end of this most unusually difficult of semesters she gave her intro students a final assignment with a really tight deadline “so they intentionally wouldn’t overthink it,” she told me. “I basically wanted them to design a poster that would help them process this semester and this pandemic visually in a way that would bring them catharsis—be that serious or silly, or that reflect

He has been “consumed by that for last few days,” Tom Bodkin, chief creative officer of The New York Times, told me in an email early this morning: “It references 19 century newspaper design,” he adds. “I kept picturing the Lincoln Dead page [bottom]. For a moment, considered ‘printing the backs of the column rule slugs,’ the thick rules between columns on that historic paper.” Can any design be more poignant that this? #COVID #DailyHeller #NYTimes #StevenHeller

Jeffrey Ladd is a self-described photo nerd and proprietor of Errata Editions, a prodigious publisher of reprinted vintage photography books. He is producing 5B4, a new blog/bookshelf to showcase exceptionally designed photobooks. Among other sources he has access to an large archive of artist books ]and is photographing many of them for future articles. The blog is on Patreon to cover some of the bills, and he leaves the donation tier up to subscribers. I asked him to pitch

There are many overlooked design gems that are woefully ignored because they are so ubiquitous and quotidian (my favorite multisyllabic words). Although I am a stationery store maven, I focus mainly on pens and pencils, paperclips and binders—even staples and staplers—but have neglected rubber bands. According to Gizmodo, vulcanized rubber gave way to various common uses for the remarkable material. “In 1819, Englishmen Thomas Hancock was in the stagecoach business with his b