Designers/Artists/Illustrators Design Companies Stories
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1 | The Legendary George Nelson On Creating A Design-Driven Company
In 1984, Herman Miller asked George Nelson to write an essay on the nature of his design relationship with Herman Miller. This is an edited version the result. Here, he reflects on unfaltering trust the company’s owner, D.J. DePree, had in his designers, which resulted not only in superior products but a never-before-used marketing tactic.
Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing
Michael Graves & Associates A freehand sketch of the south facade of the Denver Central Library, which the writer designed. More Photos » IT has become fashionable in many architectural circles to declare the death of drawing. What has happened to our profession, and our art, to cause the supposed end of our most powerful means of conceptualizing and representing architecture?
Sometimes you have to ignore the brief, says renowned designer and artist Paula Scher. With a dry wit, Scher takes us behind-the-scenes on four landmark projects — from revamping MoMA’s identity to reinvigorating a Pittsburgh neighborhood through design — to illustrate how asking questions, pushing into uncharted territory, and doing something you’ve never done before leads to great work. For four decades Paula Scher has been at the forefront of graphic design. Iconic, smart and unabashedly populist, her images have entered into the American vernacular. Scher has been a principal in the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991.She began her career as an art director in the 1970′s and early 80′s, when her eclectic approach to typography became highly influential. In the mid-1990s, her landmark identity for The Public Theater fused high and low into a wholly new symbology for cultural institutions.
Paula Scher: Do What You've Never Done Before :: Videos :: 99U
Central St Martins has a reputation from producing graphic design and illustration graduates who are brilliant, artsy and pretentious – with work to match. But from this year's grad show – the first at architecturally wonderful new campus behind King's Cross Station – we saw work that was incredibly good but often conceptually clear and even *gulp* commercial. Illustration graduates seem to have fallen in love with Victoriana or hipster comics. There's much delicately beautiful 3D collages, alongside narrative work that wouldn't look out of place on the shelves of Nobrow. The overarching influence of Apple's approach to product design permeated the graphic design section – and not just in the iPads and MacBook being used to display the work. Neat type and the glossiest black were everywhere – though much good work took a less traditional approach.
Grad shows 2012 review: Central St Martins
See the best graphic design and illustration work from this year's Free Range grad shows, featuring work from Middlesex University, Havering College and University of the Creative Arts, Maidstone. On Friday night, Digital Arts strolled down to Brick Lane to check out design and illustration from this year's Free Range group grad show. No longer incorporating the D&AD's New Blood exhibition – which takes place across Commercial Street at Old Spitalfields Market June 27-28 – Free Range still includes the must-see grad show for Middlesex University's creative courses, plus great work from Havering College and the University of the Creative Arts, Maidstone. Here's our pick of the best work on show.
Free Range grad show report: Middlesex University, Havering College, UCA Maidstone
Designer: Barton Damer; AlreadyBeenChewed.tv Specialty: design for new media, interactive, print and broadcast Location: Dallas, TX Under his studio moniker Already Been Chewed , Barton Damer designs in a variety of mediums for print, web, live productions and broadcast television. His digital illustrations are influenced heavily by his motion work.
Q&A With Motion Designer Barton Damer
Daniel Clowes, Krazy Kat, and Rory Hayes: New Books on Comics Masters
Not very long ago, a dedicated comics library might have looked less like a rare books room and more like a semi-coherent junk store, containing a three-dimensional scrapbook of out-of-print books, half-completed reprint series, miscellaneous small press magazines, bound photocopies, and endless clippings . But the rise of the graphic novel category over the past decade has yielded a rich vein of previously rare or inaccessible archival material in well-designed, library-ready formats: complete comic strip collections, surveys of mid-century comic book genres, art books dedicated to historical and contemporary artists, and other rare pleasures. The cover of United Dead Artists/PictureBox's new Rory Hayes collection Today, a dedicated reader could fill several bookshelves with volumes compiled from this thoroughgoing history of comics, and a more casual reader or researcher can easily find the same at a well-stocked library.The Bottle’s the Thing: The Branding Evolution of Soda Pop
A Pepsi-Cola serving tray circa 1940s My fascination with brand design started with the soda-pop realm . I'd always loved leafing through old magazines and usually paid more attention to the advertising in them than the articles.
On the Relationship Between Ego and Design
If I were to ask, I'd bet that most people would anticipate that technical difficulties—such things as programming and server-level configuration—would be the greatest challenge of web development. Those things are certainly difficult, but they are rarely the greatest challenge. This is because the expertise required to do that work—even to understand it—is held by few, and those that do not have it tend to recognize that fact and be okay with it. Design, however, has no such clarity. In my experience, the design process always presents unanticipated difficulty to everyone, delaying production and introducing interpersonal stresses that had been absent from the project before the design process started. In fact, almost every delay or drama that I can recall in the past several years of projects can be traced, ultimately, to matters of design.
There's this comic-book story about space aliens who try to save our planet from self-annihilation. But they arrive too late: We'd already destroyed ourselves in an atomic war. They land their rocket ship on a chunk of a devastated earth and discover a science-fiction comic book amid the rubble.
A Fanzine Editor’s 60-Year Love Affair with 1950s Comics
What would you do with d'em extra shin bones, knee bones, bone bones? The designer and photographer Francois Robert , who is known for capturing invisible alphabets on film (and digital matter), made them into a typeface. He gave me a preview of his most recent skeleton project. And I asked him a few questions about what's rattling around in his skull. Why bones?
D’em Bones
Michael Harvey’s Life of Letters
I have known Michael Harvey, the British book jacket designer / lettercutter / type designer, for nearly thirty years. And I have known his work for far longer, having first discovered it in Erik Lindegren’s ABC of Lettering and Printing Types (Askim, Sweden: Erik Lindegren Grafisk Studio, 1964–1965, 3 vols.) when I was a teenager. There his typeface Zephyr, done for Ludlow at the dusk of the metal era, was displayed along with a hand lettered greeting card. In the early 1980s I stumbled upon a number of Michael’s handlettered book jackets while preparing an anthology of such things (which never came to pass). We became friends around that time as I helped arrange his first professional visit to New York City. Now Michael has allowed me an advance look at his autobiography, a book not yet published (and with a title that is still unsettled)."Animated Cartoons - How They Are Made Their Origin And Development" by E.G. Lutz 1920 (U.S. printing Charles Scribner's Sons) When the word "Disney" is mentioned, it's almost impossible to separate it from the craft of motion picture cartoons. Whether it's used to describe a multinational entertainment corporation, or it alludes to Walt Disney the man, it's easily synonymus with the technique of film animation.