This is the year of Alvin Lustig (1915-1955). Two publications have just been published and the Lustig website is still going strong.
I co-authored Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig with Elaine Lustig Cohen (above right), designed by Tamar Cohen. This professional biography, based on interviews, letters, and documents, with a generous helping of graphics and photographs (from book covers and jackets to architecture, and a helicopter too) is the first monograph about this pioneer modernist. The other, Purity of Aim: The Book Jacket Designs of Alvin Lustig by Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger, is the fourth in the R.I.T. / Cary Graphic Arts Press Chapbook Series of documentary booklets on graphic design form-givers.
Lustig is the extensive website produced by Kind Company, featuring an array of graphics, articles and essays by and about Alvin Lustig. The three venues are a well deserved monument to this Modern pioneer of graphic and 3D design. From an essay I wrote in 1993:
“Lustig created monuments of ingenuity and objects of aesthetic pleasure. Whereas graphic design history is replete with artifacts that define certain disciplines and are also works of art, for a design to be so considered it must overcome the vicissitudes of fashion and be accepted as an integral part of the visual language.”
