Eye Magazine

The letterpress printed concrete poem designed by Dom Sylvester Houédard first caught my interest because of its use of the Flaxman typeface, designed by Edward Wright (1912-88) for the International Concrete Poetry Festival in 1967, writes Fraser Muggeridge.

The ‘Pencil to Pixel’ exhibition, which opens this Friday at Metropolitan Wharf in London, gives visitors is a chance to see some of Monotype’s extensive archive of original artwork, type drawings, arcane artefacts (including justification drums and ships’ curves) and publications.

Letterpress is everywhere, writes Catherine Dixon (co-organiser of ‘Letterpress: Something to Say’).

At what point does the ephemera that is graphic design become collectable? When does a piece of paper become an artefact? These are questions Ian Anderson of TDR makes us think about as he holds a retrospective exhibition of the studio’s work in the form of a car boot sale at the ‘Month of Sundays’ gallery in Sheffield.

In the wake of the Christie’s sale of London Transport posters (see ‘The purpose of posters’), the 19th and 20th Century poster department at Christie’s South Kensington returns to normal with a sale of vintage posters at their Old Brompton Road saleroom tomorrow (1 November 2012), writes Graham Twemlow.

   Quentin Newark writes:   As I was designing the catalogue for the Tate Modern exhibition ‘Albers and Moholy-Nagy’ (2006), a book hefty with designs for adverts, glass paintings, books, chairs, exhibitions, logos, films and colour studies, I thought: we don’t make them like that any more. Creative minds that can flit between disciplines without inhibition.

To read an edition of Aspen magazine is to flip through a booklet, unfurl a concertina, shuffle some postcards or to unfold a poster, writes Elizabeth Glickfeld. Copies of the cult 1960s artists’ magazine are now so prized that the tactile experience of reading any one edition is necessarily denied the viewer of the exhibition ‘Aspen Magazine: 1965–1971’ (in the Pat Matthews Gallery at the Whitechapel Gallery in London).

‘Of course it's not about graphic design,’ said my friend, glancing at the high proportion of besuited viewers. ‘It’s about money!’

For the final Saturday of Cooper-Hewitt’s ‘Graphic Design: Now in Production’ exhibition in New York, a student and professional crowd massed for ‘The Final Hours’, writes Liz Farrelly. The temporary location (while the Carnegie Mansion is closed for renovation) was Governors Island, a breezy six-minute ferry ride from Lower Manhattan.

Type design and lettering today stands atop of a pile of historical information collected over many centuries. Much of this is still visible if we look hard enough.