Vitamin D: New Perspectives in DrawingPhaidon’s survey of 109 emerging artists who work primarily in drawing won the jury’s admiration for its understated design and its subdued typography, which Earls called “elegant.” “It’s elegant as hell,” Heller agreed. “I love how the colors of the drawings blend with the paper choice,” he said, referring to how creamy uncoated stock with a rough deckle edge replicates the tactile quality of an original drawing. “It’s a very simple device that’s very successful,” Blatter said. “Less book than exhibition,” as the designer describes it, Vitamin D is arranged alphabetically. A less conventional layout, Blatter argued, might have suited the young artists’ work better, but she praised the book for its utility as a resource and for the refinement of its materials. Retrospectives of this sort can be dull, the jury agreed, but this one stood out for its unpretentiousness: “It’s a highly respectful way of making both an object and a record,” Heller said.—DESIGN/CLIENT Phaidon Press (New York): Julia Hasting, art directorMATERIALS Wood-free uncoated paper with a deckle edgeFONTS Modified Everson MonoSOFTWARE QuarkXPress
2wice Gold and 2wice Armitage Alphabet2wice, published biannually by the nonprofit 2wice Arts Foundation in New York, is a perennial favorite in this competition, and this year’s entries were no exception. Designed by Abbott Miller and Jeremy Hoffmann of Pentagram Design in New York and edited by Patsy Tarr, the two themed issues won unanimous praise from the jury. 2wice Gold, a series of individually bound booklets encased in a larger portfolio, is devoted to the poetry of Charles Simic as interpreted in dance by New York City Ballet soloist Tom Gold and was photographed by Christian Witkin, Baerbel Schmidt, Jens Umbach, and Philip Toledano. 2wice Armitage Alphabet, also dedicated to dance, is a collaboration with the choreographer Karole Armitage, whose company created for the issue “a vocabulary of movement” based on Asian calligraphy. “The compositions and the page layout are beautiful,” Earls said. “I think they’re incredibly executed,” Blatter agreed. “They’re sort of like little art pieces in themselves.”—DESIGN Pentagram Design (New York): Abbott Miller, designer and art director; Jeremy Hoffmann, designerCLIENT 2wice Arts Foundation (New York)MATERIALS Mohawk Options (Gold), Mohawk Navajo (Armitage Alphabet)FONTS Nobel (Gold), Corporate S (Armitage Alphabet)SOFTWARE QuarkXPress, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator
Chaumont PosterThere are designers who indulge in typographical experimentation, and then there’s Stefan Sagmeister, whose large-scale entry to the International Poster and Graphic Arts Festival in Chaumont, France, spells out the designer’s surname in human intestines. “This is a poster,” Heller said with appreciation as he inspected the cutaway of a human form silhouetted against a black background. “I didn’t realize it was Sagmeister at first.” The poster presents a collage of the designer’s most significant influences—from designers and artists such as Tibor Kalman and Jenny Holzer, to Sagmeister’s family members, to bits of food that form a crumby satellite around the mouth—all hand-painted by amateur portrait artists Sagmeister found in Central Park. “It functions well as a poster because he manages to create an overall image,” Blatter said. “But when you come closer you discover all these mini-stories.” “What’s not to like about it?” Earls asked. “What’s not to like about it is when you really figure out what those letters are,” Heller joked.—DESIGN Sagmeister Inc. (New York): Stefan Sagmeister, art director;Matthias Ernstberger, designerCLIENT Festival International de L’Affiche et Des Arts Graphiques de Chaumont (Chaumont, France)MATERIALS Silk screen on paperSOFTWARE Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop
Below the Fold: Vol. 1, No. 2Like the other magazines recognized by this year’s graphics jury, each occasional issue of Below the Fold:—a two-color publication produced, designed, and financed by Winterhouse Studio, a design firm and publisher—focuses on a single theme. This edition tells the narrative of disaster and fear: “From poison labels to warning tapes to staged disasters to computer viruses,” the designers wrote, “we dwell in a world of elevated suspicion.” Exploring “the visual language of caution, prevention and security,” each tabloid-style page is filled with “artifacts of modern anxiety”: biohazard symbols, Agatha Christie stories in which poison figures prominently, a transcript of President Bush’s post-9/11 speech on national security, needle-pointed images of disaster. “It’s beautifully done,” Blatter remarked. The jurors were particularly impressed by the rigor of what was clearly a labor of love. “They have a real passion for what they do,” Earls said of the Winterhouse designers. “Rather than buying a new hot tub, they’re putting their money where their mouth is. This is the kind of thing you can really celebrate.”—DESIGN/CLIENT Winterhouse (Falls Village, CT): William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand, Geoff Halber, designersMATERIALS Carnival Ice Vellum 60# paperFONTS Fedra MonoSOFTWARE Adobe InDesign and Photoshop
Masterworks of Modern American ArchitectureIt’s hard to show architectural scale in the one-inch-square space allotted a postage stamp, so for these 12 mini-documents of America’s most famous works of modern architecture, art director Derry Noyes chose to zoom in on just the right detail: the Art Deco cap of the Chrysler Building, the vertiginous grid of Chicago’s Hancock Center, the curve of Frank Gehry’s recently completed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. “It captures the essence of each particular building,” Blatter said of the striking photography. “This is really a miniature poster,” Heller said. “The type layout is nice, and you can see the abstract quality, the functional quality, and the formal elegance of the buildings.” “We should encourage the Postal Service to do more things like this,” Blatter concluded.—DESIGN/CLIENT United States Postal Service (Arlington, VA): Derry Noyes, art director; Margaret Bauer, designer and typographerFONTS Fago Condensed
SOFTWARE QuarkXPress, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator