Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
Michael Gericke’s storied career could be seen as the result of a combination of skill, enthusiasm, and a series of fortuitous chance meetings. Had things turned out differently, he may well have become a potter; or an art teacher; or in his own words, a “ski bum.” Gericke grew up in a “tiny farming town” in the Midwest near Madison,...
Name: KyotoTW Designer: Martin Aleith Foundry: PFA Typefaces Release Date: May 2021 Back Story: Berlin-based PFA Studios collective (former known as Pfadfinderei) recently formed its dedicated type branch, PFA Typefaces. Its designer, Martin Aleith, had been designing fonts for around 20 years in his role as a graphic designer. He’d long been creating unique type for music artwork projects, and wanted to start...
Thomas H. E. Miller was among the pioneers of African American designers celebrated at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago in 2000. To a full auditorium, he recounted his career with an efficiency and focus that also characterized his work as one of the leading graphic artists of his time: “I came out of World War II....
Depending on the day, the past year and a half feels like it’s been either a long summer or a long winter. This month’s picks have a proclivity towards the former — all three brands have recent Instagram posts that hit the core visuals of warm-weather marketing: picnics and pools. Sometimes I wonder, what will happen to summer-inspired beverage brands...
Name: NaN Jaune Designer: Jérémy Landes Foundry: NaN.xyz Release Date: May 2021 Back Story: Back in 2016, NaN Jaune began as custom lettering for the musician Jaune (though he ended up not using it). Its inspiration comes from midcentury type design legend Roger Excoffon’s Antique Olive, released in 1962. Landes became fixated upon drawing a compact sans serif with the shortest possible ascenders and...
In April 2020, A/D/O—the design incubator-meets-community center-meets-café-meets-design shop—announced its impending closure ostensibly due to the pandemic. Since opening in 2017, the space, an initiative of BMW Mini, had become a community hub in North Brooklyn where you could find local moms having breakfast with their toddlers, writers using the open lobby as an informal coworking area, designers sitting at their...
There’s a quote, perhaps apocryphal, from Massimo Vignelli that you’ll sometimes hear from alumni of Cranbrook Academy of Art’s design department. “Cranbrook”, he supposedly said, sometime in the ’80s or ’90s, “is the most dangerous design school in America.” They recite this like a badge of honor, though no one I spoke with is quite sure when or where he...
What are you seeing? The ’90s are back. The 1890s, that is. Turn of the century inspired typefaces (we’re calling them “Jugend-ish”) are suddenly everywhere, bringing an often overlooked era into a new light. The trend is named for the similarity of these contemporary typefaces to the fonts that emerged from the German art magazine Jugend and the Jugendstil movement,...
On first sight, Mantar is a jovial typeface family. High-contrast, serif-forward, wide-faced, with details that seem to jump from letter to letter. I’m struck by the exaggerated serifs and tightness in the capital M, W and R. The numbers, particularly the 2 and 3, swirl into themselves in a playful game with the punctuation. A newly-released font family distributed by...
The day before Juneteenth was commemorated as a national holiday, recognizing for the first time, as a country, the day in June 1865 when the Black folk in Galveston, Texas, were told of their emancipation, I had the honor of sitting down with designers Dr. Cheryl D. Miller, Maurice Cherry, and Mitzi Okou to discuss a question that has been...
Social media has changed the way creators and visual artists think about representing their work. For many, Instagram, Behance, and Twitter have replaced or profoundly augmented how they can showcase their designs, gain a new audience and, ultimately, get more work. With Covid-19 bringing most of the world into the online space as a powerful mode of communication and interaction,...
In August 2014, a month before I became chair of the graphic design program at California College of the Arts, I was invited to a mysterious event: an evening with the celebrated Google Glass designer Isabelle Olsson at the Battery, a members-only club in San Francisco for tech elites. According to the invitation, the gathering was part of “Facebook’s Women...
