Issue 82

Opinion

Editorial, John L. Walters
After several special issues – on Berlin, music design, the designer-client relationship and our regular…
Regeneration X
Book design, Illustration, Reviews, Visual culture, Rick Poynor
Laura Oldfield Ford’s grainy Savage Messiah brings new urgency to an updated punk aesthetic. Critique by Rick Poynor

Features

Reputations: Commercial Type
John L. Walters, Simon Esterson
‘There has been typography on the Web for its entire existence, because there are words, and where there are words there is typography … Some people believe that there is going to be a radical change in the process of reading because of webfonts. Actually, no.’
A circle that moved the earth
Alexander Ecob
Copernicus’s diagram of the planets 1543
Charts change minds
Anne-Marie Conway
Description of the slave ship Brookes 1788
Taught from a new angle
Alexander Ecob
Oliver Byrne’s element of Euclid 1847
Lady with the diagram
Anne-Marie Conway
Florence Nightingale on Crimean War mortality, 1858
The art of illumination
Robert Fripp
Will Burtin, the man who invented infodesign 1940s
Big business, big world
Peter Brawne
Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas, 1953
Training the big guns
Max Gadney
Peter Sullivan’s newspaper war visuals 1970s & 80s
Crashing through the type
Nigel Holmes
Time magazine infographics by Nigel Holmes 1970s
Max Gadney
Information designers are ideally placed to make the most of the new digital era.
Show and tell
Karla Hammer
From great apes and pop fans to real children’s spaces, James Mollison’s photographs invite the viewer to look beyond face values.
Flights of fancy
Liz Farrelly
Si Scott made his name with baroque combinations of type and image, but his 3D paper insects are taking his work in new directions.
The new breed
Mike Dempsey
Alex Bec and Will Hudson, of It’s Nice That, unveil their agency INT Works, grown directly from their roles as editors and curators.
Naked words
Jason Godfrey
Type-only book covers – whether deliberately austere, functional … or shouting loud from the shelves – have always had a place in publication design.
7 types of design inquiry
John O'Reilly
From folklore theory, via shamanism and the ‘magpie instinct’ for shiny things, graphic design’s quest to understand itself takes many different forms.
Old school layout
John L. Walters
Every fortnight, art director Tony Rushton and editor Ian Hislop lay out Private Eye in a way that’s hardly changed in 50 years
Publish and be damned
Andrew Billen
As Private Eye celebrates its best sales figures for 25 years, lifelong subscriber Andrew Billen describes its winning mix of gossip, serious exposés, parodies, cartoons and attention-grabbing covers
Carter’s battered stat
Matthew Carter
Shock tactics
Robert Newman
America’s funky ‘altweeklies’ are a hotbed of zero-budget, attention-grabbing cover art direction.
Lessons from an abandoned fish factory
Anne Odling-Smee
This project showed MA students at Central Saint Martins how design can work in the ‘real world’