Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
When Faust released its debut album in 1971, it pushed the limits of the avant-garde in pop. For the record industry, the limits of what could be done with the packaging were also expanded, with the record pressed on clear vinyl for the first time and presented in transparent casing. It wasn’t, as Jean-Hervé Peron is at pains to point...
At the Taft Hotel in Manhattan, just a block from Radio City Music Hall, a band plays during lunch and dinner in a restaurant lounge named the Grill Room. The menu lists the music, and the roster of rotating house bands is printed on the cover. It’s 1964 and lunch is served at noon. Enoch Light and His Orchestra are...
At the end of last year, Nigel Cottier, Principal Designer of London-based graphic design studio Accept & Proceed, released Letterform Variations, a personal project that looks at letterform construction using basic grid and shape-based systems. The project includes a 692-page book containing 19,840 letters, all derived from one simple framework, ten variable fonts (with 16 alternatives for each roman symbol)...
In the vast, ever-expanding canon of graphic design publishing, one title stands in a league of its own. Forget All the Rules You Ever Learned About Graphic Design—Including the Ones in This Book is essentially a sparsely worded how-to design book. Published in 1981, the unpretentious message on the jacket announces the author’s unequivocal declaration of intent. Its core tenet...
What are you seeing? Layered, type-driven design inspired by 1980s advertising is on the rise, and along with it, a worthy opponent (finally) for the sleek, buttoned-up visual world of the last decade. In its purest iteration, the throwback ’80s editorial trend is text-heavy, with layouts comprised of a single, often silhouetted or gradient-backed image, a punchy headline, and supporting...
The first email I received from Ritesh Gupta was at 4:30AM. This could mean one of two things—he’s one of those founders who gets up early to start his day (a habit I’ve always coveted, but never been able to execute), or he’s pulling an all nighter due to the sheer volume of work on his plate. Gupta confirms it’s...
Name: Pangea Afrikan Designer: Christoph Koeberlin Distributor: Fontwerk Release Date: December 20, 2021 Back Story: In 2016, designer Christoph Koeberlin began work on Pangea—an inclusive typeface designed to feature a treasure trove of writing systems. At the outset, Koeberlin asked himself: “Can a typeface do any good?” He knew the answer: a resounding yes. After all, he says, a typeface...
For the last few years, it seemed a new article, Twitter thread, or video essay would pop up on the internet every few months analyzing the style that has been called “Corporate Memphis.” This style, heavily used by Big Tech companies and start-ups, has been described as flat, colorful, minimalist, depicting energetic, and gangly-armed characters with long legs and small...
Name: Fernhout Designers: Wim Crouwel, David Quay, and Stuart de Rozario in collaboration with Amsterdam design agency Thonik Foundry: The Foundry Types Release Date: November 2021 Back Story: Fernhout is based on a modular geometric lettering system created in 1963 by the legendary Dutch designer Wim Crouwel for Amsterdam’s Van Abbemuseum Edgar Fernhout exhibition poster and catalog. The 2021 type...
I first encountered The Fence in a small store stuffed with magazines of every variety. The corner of Issue 1 peeked out from the bottom of a stack, its white paper glaring against the surrounding photographic covers. I went home with probably the only magazine in the entire store devoid of a single photograph. Legendary London-based fashion and culture magazine...
Gustavo Piqueira will make you wholly rethink book design—and, well, books at large. After all, the enigmatic proprietor of Casa Rex in São Paulo, Brazil, once created a book in the form of a dining set—the story told in text across napkins, placemats, and coasters, all silkscreened in-house—and once reimagined the Medieval bible for the modern consumerist era, complete with...
In 1971, a film called Shaft—a breakthrough for Black cinema—was released. It was what Junius Griffin, then president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the NAACP, called “Blaxploitation,” a term he derisively coined by combining “Black” with the “exploitation” genre of film. Blaxploitation films have since been reappraised for elevating Black characters into heroes, rather than sidekicks or criminals, as...
