Books tagged "design"
  1. Schwitters Arp Gottfried Boehm

    Schwitters Arp

    Gottfried Boehm
  2. Every Thing Design Glenn Adamson The great Dutch book designer Irma Boom designed this handsome, hefty gem, which features 700 prints, posters and other objects from the collection of Zurich’s Gestaltung Museum. It is a collection renowned worldwide for its unsurpassed holdings of design masterpieces: Ettore Sottsass’s iconic red “Valentine” typewriter from 1969, Paul Rand’s 1950 poster for the film No Way Out, as well as graphic works by Toulouse-Lautrec and El Lissitzky, and a range of works by Richard Paul Lohse, Harry Bertoia, Willy Guhl, Makoto Saito, FHK Henrion and many other great designers. Founded in 1875, the museum’s collection focuses on twentieth-century mass-manufactured products, comprising over 10,000 objects and 20,000 examples of packaging, from famous designs to anonymous everyday objects; a graphics collection containing over 100,000 items from around the world, dating from the fifteenth century to the present; a collection of 300,000 posters and an applied arts collection, showcasing work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that covers the overlap between industrial manufacturing, design and art. With beautiful, full-page spreads, Every Thing Design, like the Gestaltung Museum itself, expands our conceptions of what design is, unpacking how a designed object is perceived and how this perception changes over time. It examines the criteria museums use for acquisition, and how the objects’ significance and value are established. The result is a surprising reconsideration of trends, production techniques and public reception.

    Every Thing Design

    Glenn Adamson

    The great Dutch book designer Irma Boom designed this handsome, hefty gem, which features 700 prints, posters and other objects from the collection of Zurich’s Gestaltung Museum. It is a collection renowned worldwide for its unsurpassed holdings of design masterpieces: Ettore Sottsass’s iconic red “Valentine” typewriter from 1969, Paul Rand’s 1950 poster for the film No Way Out, as well as graphic works by Toulouse-Lautrec and El Lissitzky, and a range of works by Richard Paul Lohse, Harry Bertoia, Willy Guhl, Makoto Saito, FHK Henrion and many other great designers. Founded in 1875, the museum’s collection focuses on twentieth-century mass-manufactured products, comprising over 10,000 objects and 20,000 examples of packaging, from famous designs to anonymous everyday objects; a graphics collection containing over 100,000 items from around the world, dating from the fifteenth century to the present; a collection of 300,000 posters and an applied arts collection, showcasing work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that covers the overlap between industrial manufacturing, design and art. With beautiful, full-page spreads, Every Thing Design, like the Gestaltung Museum itself, expands our conceptions of what design is, unpacking how a designed object is perceived and how this perception changes over time. It examines the criteria museums use for acquisition, and how the objects’ significance and value are established. The result is a surprising reconsideration of trends, production techniques and public reception.
  3. Design Research Unit: 1942-72 Michelle Cotton In the same way that the Helvetica font graphically defined the New York City subway system, the Design Research Unit visually branded the London we know today in everything from its street signs to such corporate identities as British Rail. Design Research Unit: 1942-72 details the history of the Unit and includes contemporary perspectives by artists, designers and critics.

    Design Research Unit: 1942-72

    Michelle Cotton

    In the same way that the Helvetica font graphically defined the New York City subway system, the Design Research Unit visually branded the London we know today in everything from its street signs to such corporate identities as British Rail. Design Research Unit: 1942-72 details the history of the Unit and includes contemporary perspectives by artists, designers and critics.
  4. Guy de Cointet Marie de Brugerolle Mentor to a generation of Californian Conceptualists and performance artists, Guy de Cointet (1934-1983) took language as a material from which to generate drawings, plays and performances. De Cointet collected phrases, words and even single letters culled from popular culture and literary sources, and scripted them as dialogues or props for plays inspired by the writings and homonymic compositional methods of Raymond Roussel: in the 1976 play At Sunrise… A Cry Was Heard, for example, a large painting depicting letters bisected by a white sash provides the dialogue of the lead actress, who recites its jumble of letters as if it were ordinary conversation. His drawings were often generated by geometric erasures of found text, leaving behind Concrete-style abstract patterns. A formative figure for Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy during his tenure at the Otis Art institute, de Cointet is today in the process of being rediscovered; this timely monograph is the first overview of his enigmatic and influential oeuvre.

    Guy de Cointet

    Marie de Brugerolle

    Mentor to a generation of Californian Conceptualists and performance artists, Guy de Cointet (1934-1983) took language as a material from which to generate drawings, plays and performances. De Cointet collected phrases, words and even single letters culled from popular culture and literary sources, and scripted them as dialogues or props for plays inspired by the writings and homonymic compositional methods of Raymond Roussel: in the 1976 play At Sunrise… A Cry Was Heard, for example, a large painting depicting letters bisected by a white sash provides the dialogue of the lead actress, who recites its jumble of letters as if it were ordinary conversation. His drawings were often generated by geometric erasures of found text, leaving behind Concrete-style abstract patterns. A formative figure for Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy during his tenure at the Otis Art institute, de Cointet is today in the process of being rediscovered; this timely monograph is the first overview of his enigmatic and influential oeuvre.
  5. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks Rem Koolhaas Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism—the first non-western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan’s postwar miracle. Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images—master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions—telling the 20th century history of Japan through its architecture, from the tabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s to a devastated Japan after the war, the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokoy, to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, to the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo ’70 in Osaka and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair.

    Project Japan: Metabolism Talks

    Rem Koolhaas

    Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism—the first non-western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan’s postwar miracle. Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images—master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions—telling the 20th century history of Japan through its architecture, from the tabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s to a devastated Japan after the war, the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokoy, to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, to the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo ’70 in Osaka and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair.
  6. Experience: Challenging Visual Indifference Through New Sensory Experience Sean Perkins Experience documents dialogue between over 100 organisations, marketeers, designers and artists around the world — from the creators of Japanese fog parks to the creatives behind Nike Town — exploring the possibilities of a radically progressive approach to marketing.

    Experience: Challenging Visual Indifference Through New Sensory Experience

    Sean Perkins

    Experience documents dialogue between over 100 organisations, marketeers, designers and artists around the world — from the creators of Japanese fog parks to the creatives behind Nike Town — exploring the possibilities of a radically progressive approach to marketing.
  7. The Books, 1968-2010 Peter Downsbrough Like his contemporaries Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry and Sol LeWitt, American Conceptualist Peter Downsbrough (born 1940) combines a fondness for geometric art and typography with the possibilities of the artist’s book. Since the late 1960s he has worked across media (video, film and photography), but the artist’s book has proved an enduring format, a place in which to incorporate other projects and compose with text, line drawings, maps and photographs. In 1993 the publisher, book collector and curator Guy Schraenen wrote of his work: “One might call it the absolute zero of the book, since it presents itself in the simplest form.” This catalogue provides a comprehensive overview of the 85 artist’s books that Downsbrough has published from 1972 to the present, including such classics of Conceptualist book art as And, A Place—New York, Beside, Notes on Location 2 and Two Pipes Fourteen Locations.

    The Books, 1968-2010

    Peter Downsbrough

    Like his contemporaries Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry and Sol LeWitt, American Conceptualist Peter Downsbrough (born 1940) combines a fondness for geometric art and typography with the possibilities of the artist’s book. Since the late 1960s he has worked across media (video, film and photography), but the artist’s book has proved an enduring format, a place in which to incorporate other projects and compose with text, line drawings, maps and photographs. In 1993 the publisher, book collector and curator Guy Schraenen wrote of his work: “One might call it the absolute zero of the book, since it presents itself in the simplest form.” This catalogue provides a comprehensive overview of the 85 artist’s books that Downsbrough has published from 1972 to the present, including such classics of Conceptualist book art as And, A Place—New York, Beside, Notes on Location 2 and Two Pipes Fourteen Locations.
  8. I’m Thinking of a Number Micah Lexier Canadian artist Micah Lexier has built an international reputation working in a variety of media, often making work with numerical themes, such as 1995’s “Self-portrait as a Lucite Cube Divided Proportionally a (Red) Volume Representing Life Lived and a (Clear) Volume Representing Life to Come, Based on Statistical Life Expectancy.” Over the past three decades, he has also produced a significant body of multiple materials to be distributed to viewers, including prize ribbons, printed balloons, custom-minted coins and individually numbered cards. Micah Lexier: I’m Thinking of a Number is a survey of the artist’s invitations, posters, book works, T-shirts, boxed sets and other multiples produced between 1980 and 2010. It includes a multiple created by the artist for this publication—a letterpress sheet of four stickers tipped in as the final work itemized by the monograph.

    I’m Thinking of a Number

    Micah Lexier

    Canadian artist Micah Lexier has built an international reputation working in a variety of media, often making work with numerical themes, such as 1995’s “Self-portrait as a Lucite Cube Divided Proportionally a (Red) Volume Representing Life Lived and a (Clear) Volume Representing Life to Come, Based on Statistical Life Expectancy.” Over the past three decades, he has also produced a significant body of multiple materials to be distributed to viewers, including prize ribbons, printed balloons, custom-minted coins and individually numbered cards. Micah Lexier: I’m Thinking of a Number is a survey of the artist’s invitations, posters, book works, T-shirts, boxed sets and other multiples produced between 1980 and 2010. It includes a multiple created by the artist for this publication—a letterpress sheet of four stickers tipped in as the final work itemized by the monograph.
  9. The Electric Information Age Book Jeffrey T. Schnapp & Adam Michaels The Electric Information Age Book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players designers, graphic artists, editors stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the “Electronic Information Age,” these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon.

    The Electric Information Age Book

    Jeffrey T. Schnapp & Adam Michaels

    The Electric Information Age Book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players designers, graphic artists, editors stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the “Electronic Information Age,” these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon.
  10. Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary Naoto Fukasawa The designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa have compiled 204 everyday objects in search of “super normal design”: alongside examples of anonymous design like the Swiss Rex vegetable peeler or a simple plastic bag, there are design classics like Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel side table, Dieter Ram’s 606 shelving system, or Joe Colombo’s Optic alarm clock of 1970. With products by Newson, Grcic, the Azumis, and the Bouroullec brothers, it also represents the generation to which Morrison and Fukasawa belong. The phenomenon of the super normal is located, as it were, beyond space and time; the past and present of product design both point to a future that has long since begun. The super normal is already lying exposed before us; it exists in the here and now; it is real and available: we need only open our eyes; Fukasawa and Morrison make it visible for us.

    Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary

    Naoto Fukasawa

    The designers Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa have compiled 204 everyday objects in search of “super normal design”: alongside examples of anonymous design like the Swiss Rex vegetable peeler or a simple plastic bag, there are design classics like Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel side table, Dieter Ram’s 606 shelving system, or Joe Colombo’s Optic alarm clock of 1970. With products by Newson, Grcic, the Azumis, and the Bouroullec brothers, it also represents the generation to which Morrison and Fukasawa belong. The phenomenon of the super normal is located, as it were, beyond space and time; the past and present of product design both point to a future that has long since begun. The super normal is already lying exposed before us; it exists in the here and now; it is real and available: we need only open our eyes; Fukasawa and Morrison make it visible for us.
  11. Graphic Design: Now In Production Andrew Blauvelt & Ellen Lupton Graphic design has broadened its reach dramatically over the past decade, expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed skill. The rise of user-generated content, new methods of publishing and systems of distribution, and the wide dissemination of creative software have opened up new opportunities for design. More designers are becoming producers—authors, publishers, instigators and entrepreneurs—actively employing their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences. Featuring work produced since 2000, Graphic Design: Now in Production explores the worlds of design-driven magazines, newspapers, books and posters; the entrepreneurial spirit of designer-produced goods; the renaissance in digital typeface design; the storytelling potential of film and television titling sequences; and the transformation of raw data into compelling information narratives. The catalogue features important original essays by leading designers that tackle themes such as the changing roles of reading and writing within the context of new technologies and self-publishing; the nature of design labor and production, from blue-collar handcraft and making to white-collar design thinking and strategy; and the impact and influence design programs and schools have had on shaping the direction of contemporary graphic design. Co-organized by Walker Art Center and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Graphic Design: Now in Production is conceived as a visual compendium in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalogue. It features posters, info graphics, fonts, books, magazines, film titles, logos and more, interspersed with a variety of small texts delving into specific project details, excerpted artists’ statements, interviews and published manifestos, technical details, and new and old technologies and tools.

    Graphic Design: Now In Production

    Andrew Blauvelt & Ellen Lupton

    Graphic design has broadened its reach dramatically over the past decade, expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed skill. The rise of user-generated content, new methods of publishing and systems of distribution, and the wide dissemination of creative software have opened up new opportunities for design. More designers are becoming producers—authors, publishers, instigators and entrepreneurs—actively employing their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences. Featuring work produced since 2000, Graphic Design: Now in Production explores the worlds of design-driven magazines, newspapers, books and posters; the entrepreneurial spirit of designer-produced goods; the renaissance in digital typeface design; the storytelling potential of film and television titling sequences; and the transformation of raw data into compelling information narratives. The catalogue features important original essays by leading designers that tackle themes such as the changing roles of reading and writing within the context of new technologies and self-publishing; the nature of design labor and production, from blue-collar handcraft and making to white-collar design thinking and strategy; and the impact and influence design programs and schools have had on shaping the direction of contemporary graphic design. Co-organized by Walker Art Center and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Graphic Design: Now in Production is conceived as a visual compendium in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalogue. It features posters, info graphics, fonts, books, magazines, film titles, logos and more, interspersed with a variety of small texts delving into specific project details, excerpted artists’ statements, interviews and published manifestos, technical details, and new and old technologies and tools.
  12. Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design Walter Tracy The revolution in typesetting - a revolution that over the past two decades has eliminated a five-hundred-year-old system of hot metal production and replaced it with one of photo-generated and computer-driven composition - shows no sign of winding down. This book, more than any other we know, traces the steps that went into that revolution and simultaneously makes the argument that the letter forms themselves are in process of evolution. Tracy argues that, whether they are of the sixteenth or the twentieth century, the forms that comprise our alphabet are subject to the same rules of good taste, proportion, and clarity that have always obtained. But what we face today is vastly different from fifty years ago. For the first time, new technology has made the proliferation (and, as some would maintain, debasement) of letter forms fast and easy (or quick and dirty.) With fifty years of professional experience on both sides of the Atlantic (including thirty years as head of type design for the British Linotype Company), Tracy is in a unique position to make this argument and arrive at his sad conclusion: the design of distinguished, contemporary typefaces is far outnumbered by the mediocre and downright bad. Part of the reason for this deplorable deterioration is a lack of critical analysis of the particular esthetics involved. This step-by-step examination of type-design esthetics is precisely what Tracy provides here, while avoiding both the promoter’s hype and the manufacturer’s claims. Here are the gut issues of what makes type good or bad, legible or unreadable. Extensively illustrated with both typefaces and line drawings, this book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in thehistory of letters or in the artistry and peculiar problems that lie behind their production.

    Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design

    Walter Tracy

    The revolution in typesetting - a revolution that over the past two decades has eliminated a five-hundred-year-old system of hot metal production and replaced it with one of photo-generated and computer-driven composition - shows no sign of winding down. This book, more than any other we know, traces the steps that went into that revolution and simultaneously makes the argument that the letter forms themselves are in process of evolution. Tracy argues that, whether they are of the sixteenth or the twentieth century, the forms that comprise our alphabet are subject to the same rules of good taste, proportion, and clarity that have always obtained. But what we face today is vastly different from fifty years ago. For the first time, new technology has made the proliferation (and, as some would maintain, debasement) of letter forms fast and easy (or quick and dirty.)

    With fifty years of professional experience on both sides of the Atlantic (including thirty years as head of type design for the British Linotype Company), Tracy is in a unique position to make this argument and arrive at his sad conclusion: the design of distinguished, contemporary typefaces is far outnumbered by the mediocre and downright bad. Part of the reason for this deplorable deterioration is a lack of critical analysis of the particular esthetics involved. This step-by-step examination of type-design esthetics is precisely what Tracy provides here, while avoiding both the promoter’s hype and the manufacturer’s claims. Here are the gut issues of what makes type good or bad, legible or unreadable. Extensively illustrated with both typefaces and line drawings, this book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in thehistory of letters or in the artistry and peculiar problems that lie behind their production.
  13. Shaker Design June Sprigg The Shaker movement in America began in 1774 when Mother Ann Lee emigrated from Manchester, England, with a small group of followers, and settled in New York State. Despite impoverished beginnings, the Shakers flourished in the early nineteenth century, and by 1840 there were four to six thousand members living in eighteen principle communities from Maine to Kentucky. Turning away from society, they lived in large families that were both celibate and communal. In striving for heaven on earth, they created a visual environment of such harmony and quiet power that it continues to impress observers today, when the Shakers have all but passed from the American scene. The many works presented in this beautiful volume reveal the Shaker commitment to excellence in all matters. The chairs, cases of drawers, work stands, baskets, oval boxes, wheelbarrows, stoves, looms, and even tailoring tools have a purity of form that transcends mere utility and elevates our appreciation beyond a sense of function. This volume draws objects from forty collections, including extant Shaker villages, the work of some thirty known individuals, and as many artists who remain anonymous.

    Shaker Design

    June Sprigg

    The Shaker movement in America began in 1774 when Mother Ann Lee emigrated from Manchester, England, with a small group of followers, and settled in New York State. Despite impoverished beginnings, the Shakers flourished in the early nineteenth century, and by 1840 there were four to six thousand members living in eighteen principle communities from Maine to Kentucky. Turning away from society, they lived in large families that were both celibate and communal. In striving for heaven on earth, they created a visual environment of such harmony and quiet power that it continues to impress observers today, when the Shakers have all but passed from the American scene.

    The many works presented in this beautiful volume reveal the Shaker commitment to excellence in all matters. The chairs, cases of drawers, work stands, baskets, oval boxes, wheelbarrows, stoves, looms, and even tailoring tools have a purity of form that transcends mere utility and elevates our appreciation beyond a sense of function. This volume draws objects from forty collections, including extant Shaker villages, the work of some thirty known individuals, and as many artists who remain anonymous.
  14. Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter Margaret Re In a career that has spanned more than forty years, Matthew Carter has designed many of the typefaces that we see every day in and on publications, books, signs, and screens. Carter’s celebrated typefaces include such stalwarts as Galliard, Mantinia, and Verdana. In 1975, he created the now-pervasive Bell Centennial specifically for use in phone books. Publications including Sports Illustrated, the Daily News, Wired, and the Washington Post, along with cultural institutions such as the Walker Arts Center and The Victoria & Albert Museum, have all commissioned Carter fonts. Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter entered the field in the days of hand-cut punches and hot-metal type, and has continued to innovate through the eras of photocomposition and digital design. Essays discuss the form of his work, his position and use of typographic history, and his technological innovation. All of his fonts are reproduced in full for reference, and illustrations place his designs in context.

    Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter

    Margaret Re

    In a career that has spanned more than forty years, Matthew Carter has designed many of the typefaces that we see every day in and on publications, books, signs, and screens. Carter’s celebrated typefaces include such stalwarts as Galliard, Mantinia, and Verdana. In 1975, he created the now-pervasive Bell Centennial specifically for use in phone books. Publications including Sports Illustrated, the Daily News, Wired, and the Washington Post, along with cultural institutions such as the Walker Arts Center and The Victoria & Albert Museum, have all commissioned Carter fonts.

    Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter entered the field in the days of hand-cut punches and hot-metal type, and has continued to innovate through the eras of photocomposition and digital design. Essays discuss the form of his work, his position and use of typographic history, and his technological innovation. All of his fonts are reproduced in full for reference, and illustrations place his designs in context.
  15. Donald Judd: A Good Chair Is a Good Chair Donald Judd

    Donald Judd: A Good Chair Is a Good Chair

    Donald Judd
Page 1 of 4