Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
So much of Sylvia Abernathy’s life and work is lost to history. An activist and graphic designer, Abernathy first appears in the annals of design history in late 1960s Chicago, only to be seen for a few years before she’s gone again, her life and career cloaked by a shroud of mystery. Throughout the four short, brilliant years when her...
Fall has fallen upon us. As the tempo and temperature of social gatherings change, the snap of a pull tab gives way to the satisfying pop of a stopper or screwing of a cap. This month we’re staying in (or maybe pulling on a sweater and sitting on the stoop/patio/porch) and pouring a glass of something from a bottle....
Name: Compact Black Designer: Yevgeniy Anfalov Foundry: Kyiv Type Foundry (KTF) Release Date: July 2021 Back Story: KTF, a new foundry based in Kyiv and Hannover, was envisioned by founders Yevgeniy Anfalov and Oleś Gergun as a typographic playground at the intersection of Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Their design mission ranges from hunting ghost fonts from the behind-the-Iron-Curtain-past to collaborations...
Herbert Bayer’s name is perhaps most closely associated with the Bauhaus—he was a student at the school and later a teacher of advertising and typography until it closed in 1928—but he had a prolific and diverse career up until he died. He worked as a commercial advertising designer in Berlin for nearly ten years, where applications of Bauhaus theory are...
During a quick scene in The French Dispatch, Hermès Jones, a magazine illustrator played by Jason Schwartzman, gets an earful from Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the editor-in-chief played by Bill Murray. Pasted on the wall next to Jones’ desk are 12 past covers of The French Dispatch, showing an assortment of imagined stories; in one, the Statue of Liberty in Paris...
If you’re over 25, your experience with handwriting is probably very different from what is being taught in schools today. Forty-six out of 50 states have adopted the Common Core Standards, which do not mention handwriting or cursive in their requirements. Cursive has been wiped out from nearly all curricula in the U.S., and there is discussion to stop teaching...
Name: Nautila Designer: Daytona Mess Foundry: Type Department Release Date: September 2021 Back Story: French type designer Daytona Mess (Anne-Dauphine to the tax man) started working on the font that was to become Nautila in spring 2019, with two projects in mind: one was her own take on a record cover for Cardi B’s track “Bodak Yellow;” the other was...
One fine morning, a king and a queen arrive for a tour of Dalhousie—a quaint Himalayan hill town located in the Chamba region in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. The royal couple’s charioteer, locally known as the saarthi, doubles as their tour guide and takes them through the narrow winding roads of the town. Each turn opens to breathtaking...
There’s little doubt you’ve heard of Push Pin Studio — the legendary collective of designers whose collective work revolutionized the field of commercial illustration. But there’s more to Push Pin than its most famous contributors like Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast. In a new exhibition at Poster House called The Push Pin Legacy, Poster House’s chief curator, Angelina Lippert, explores...
A couple weeks ago, we hosted a workshop at the AIGA Design Conference called Design Writing 101: How Writing Is a Lot More Like Designing Than You Think. When we started planning for the event, we had lots of ideas around what that statement meant. At their core, both writing and design are about storytelling — they are about forming...
Name: Halisa Designer: Jan Estrada-Osmycki Foundry: The Designers Foundry Release Date: September 2021 Back Story: The inspiration for Halisa was a single cut, uppercase-only hand-painted type seen on some old factory signage. Estrada-Osmycki was also influenced by Swiss neo-grotesque fonts but wanted to make something fresh. The designer says, “At the start, the letters were looking too much like a Microgramma/Eurostile...
Tomorrow Today is more than a bookstore. The shop, located in downtown Los Angeles, sells books, magazines, and other printed material, but it’s also home to a rapid response press that community members can access. We asked the shop’s founders to recommend five books that they’re currently excited about. “We (Geoff KixMiller, Gus Depenbrock, and Zoe Axelrod) opened Tomorrow Today...
