Eye Magazine

Great British Editorial (Barcelona: Index Book, €40), writes Simon Esterson, is a simple idea carried off with confidence: ask lots of studios to send in work, photograph the envelopes it comes in to make the opening spread of each section, and then place the projects as simply as possible on the pages . . . all 648 of them.

In Eye no. 67, Steven Heller reviewed Paper Tigers (Chronicle) the Cushing and Tompkins book about Chinese posters from 1966-76, the period known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. You can read his review here, and see below for some images we didn’t have room to show in the published issue.

Graphic design heroes might be, as Martha Scotford noted, Western white men, but they’re a particular kind of Western, white, man: there are few Finns, Greeks or Irish in the canon. As a 1992 article in Graphis asked: ‘Where are the Paul O’Rands, the Milton McGlasers?’

By selecting Jacqueline Casey as her most underappreciated graphic designer in Eye’s ‘Beyond the canon’ issue (‘Woman at the edge of technology’), Elizabeth Resnick gave a shout-out to my own candidate, writes Kenneth FitzGerald.

Jennifer Campbell-Colquhoun and Selina Swayne want to know what you think about graphic design and designers. Their project Stock aims ‘to take a snapshot

Artists are often reluctant to be labelled, except perhaps when it comes to seeing their work on a beer label.

The Summer 2008 issue of Eye, no. 68, goes ‘Beyond the canon’ to question and to enlarge the accepted pantheon of graphic design history; here Steven Heller reminds us of a forgotten ‘modernistic gem’.

When I asked a member of Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery staff where I’d find the Advanced Beauty exhibition of digital video art, he politely confessed to having no idea what I was talking about, writes David Thompson.

Nearly two decades ago, historian Martha Scotford analysed five key books (including Meggs’ History) to discover what the canon of graphic design history might be.

During the 1965-73 Vietnam war, writes David Barringer, American soldiers etched slogans and images on to the metal of the Zippo lighters they carried with them, and which, notoriously, were on occasion used to set huts on fire.