Panóptico de Actualidad Gráfica y Visual
Name: Avenir Next World Foundry: Monotype Designers: Adrian Frutiger, Akira Kobayashi, Yanek Iontef, Nadine Chahine, Toshi Omagari, Akaki Razmadze, Elena Papassissa and Anuthin Wongsunkakon. Release Date: January 2021 Monotype, Avenir New World Back Story: Essentially, Avenir Next World is an expansion of Avenir, a system font that needs little in the way of introduction. Adrian Frutiger designed the original in 1988,...
Imagine, if you will, that you’re in a grocery aisle looking for flour. Your eyes scan bags upon bags for something familiar, but the brand you normally buy is out of stock. There’s this other one, though…lowest price (that’s good). Nice packaging, too. Chunky serif lettering, rich colors (that’s unexpected). Less expected: it’s Target brand? Add to cart. This is...
The past year has felt like the highest-budget sci-fi movie ever made: rioting mobs swarmed the US Capitol, a deadly virus is still sweeping through the planet, and the Earth is nearing a critical climate threshold after 2020 rivaled the hottest year on record. It’s been stranger than fiction and yet all too real. So I escaped from our dystopia...
Briar Levit is an Assistant Professor at Portland State University and graduate of Central St. Martins College of Art & Design. Originally from the California Bay Area, she was previously the Art Director of Bitch magazine as well as an independent book designer. Levit’s feature-length film, Graphic Means, is a documentary about graphic design production methods between the eras of...
Name: Gikit Designer: Benoît Bodhuin Foundry: BB Bureau Release Date: December 2020 Back Story: Benoît Bodhuin, founder of BB Bureau, started working on what eventually became Gikit in August last year, when he was briefed by a client to create “very raw and quirky glyphs” for a typeface. That aspect of the client project fell through in the end, and so...
At first glance, you might think the Maoist era artwork at the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre in Shanghai, China, was a collection of mid-20th-century travel posters. Vibrant colors, seemingly happy people, and almost aggressively cheerful backdrops offer a vision of an ostensibly functioning, even thriving, China, but look a little closer—literally and historically—and it’s clear the picture is often...
“Cae Sal” started with a video. It was 2018, and Molly Baz’s husband had gifted her a pair of Nike sneakers customized with a misspelled abbreviation of the Bon Appetit chef’s favorite food—caesar salad. In the clip, Baz is seen standing in Bon Appetit’s airy downtown New York City test kitchen, showing off a pair of black sneakers that featured...
The French artists Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier drive for about 10 hours every day, looking for reasons to stop the car. They don’t typically break for lunch, instead pausing only when they encounter a subject worth photographing. Tabuchi is partial to triangular façades, construction sites, and the solitary plastic chairs that discreetly advertise sex work. Monnier likes anonymous landscapes,...
If there’s one thing that unites most of Sparks’ cover art over the last 50 years, it’s situations. Still scenes that stick in the memory over the course of 25 albums include Ronald and Russell Mael tied up and gagged on a moving speedboat for Propaganda (1974), the brothers Mael getting married on the cover of Angst in My Pants...
What does it mean to design for social change? For decades designers have tried to push the profession into more humanitarian causes with varying success. In 1964, for example, the designer Ken Garland along with 20 other designers, critics, and students, published First Things First, a manifesto calling on graphic designers to abandon their obsession with commercial work in favor...
Beatriz González eschews labels like “pop artist” and “political artist,” which must be tiresome since most people’s first reaction to her brightly colored work and images of political figures is to call her both. Born in 1938 in Bucaramanga, Colombia, the painter and printmaker has spent her 60-year career employing a biting sense of humor in her eye-catching images. Some...
For some people, January is a moment to press pause on drinking. Bottles get hidden away in the bar cabinet. Seltzers replace the beers in the fridge. We are all for embracing a socially mandated booze break, but everything in moderation, including moderation. In that spirit, we’ve found some low or no ABV drinks whose labels might convince us to...
