David King

Recent articles about David King

Unfinished business

Issue 103, Summer 2022

Opinion

Scott King’s rallying call for creative freedom takes a satirical swipe at cultural gatekeepers. By Rick Poynor

Cinematic storyteller

Issue 101, Summer 2021

Review

David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian is an enthralling visual document of King’s work from his student experiments to the groundbreaking visual histories of his later years …

My friend David King

Issue 101, Summer 2021

Feature

The book David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian is a comprehensive account of the work of a unique figure in graphic design history. Here Richard Hollis, witness to King’s development as designer, artist, collector and pioneering author-designer of dazzling books of social and political history, recalls his friend and fellow designer. By Richard Hollis

Exposing the menace

Issue 95, Winter 2017

Feature

David King’s posters integrated type and image with power and uncompromising political commitment. By Rick Poynor

Scissor action

Issue 91, Spring 2016

Review

John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon (David King and Ernst Volland, Tate Publishing, £29.9…

The retoucher’s accidental art

Issue 88, Summer 2014

Feature

The reworked press photos now being discarded are unique objects and compellingly strange images. Raynal Pellicer has a collection

Strikethrough

Issue 69, Autumn 2008

Feature

The act of erasure, or striking out, can add new, unintended meanings to the images and information that lie below

One week in pictures

Issue 73, Autumn 2009

Feature

Now we are deluged with more images than ever, we have lost faith in the power of the photo to express anything other than our personal reality. We don’t take the production of meaning seriously and we use pictures with less fluency and purpose than earlier generations of photographers, designers and editors. We don’t know what we’re trying to say and we don’t know who we are saying it for. We don’t value expertise and commitment and we don’t believe in the photographer’s mission – nor do we think it is likely to have any effect. Rick Poynor looks at one week’s magazine journalism, and finds that this ocean of pictures tells uncomfortable truths about who we are now

Union of Soviet socialist images

Issue 71, Spring 2009

Review

Cover design for Red Star Over Russia (Tate). In 1970 David King was in Moscow…

Reputations: David King

Issue 48, Summer 2003

Feature

‘You develop a visual style as you would a handwriting one … The content is what you concentrate on’

Right and wrong ways to borrow

Issue 10, Autumn 1993

Review

Borrowed Design analyses the field of graphic design as a history of credits and debits…

Club-runner graphics

Issue 5, Winter 1991

Review

In the mid to late 1980s we would be out every night at some club…

Recent blog posts about David King

Graphic design live #6

3 October 2022
Graphic design, Events and exhibitions, Motion graphics

David King in London; Weltformat in Switzerland; Jeremy Deller in Barnsley; spy fever in New York; and experimental type online

Here is a selection of current and upcoming events that piqued the interest of our editorial team.

From analogue to activism

11 November 2020
Design education, Design history, Graphic design, Magazines, Visual culture, Events and exhibitions

magCulture Live goes digital next week, for a two-day conference that celebrates the creative and social powers of magazines
Dividing its focus between ‘activism’ and ‘analogue’, magCulture 2020 shows that even in difficult, disruptive…

David King: Ranged Left!

1 September 2020
Book design, Design history, Graphic design, Magazines, Posters, Type Tuesday

Eye’s next Type Tuesday, ‘David King: Ranged Left!’ will celebrate the life and work of David King (1943-2016)
Please join us for the next Type Tuesday at 6pm (British Summer Time) on…

David King: Books of blood and laughter

25 May 2016
Book design, Critical path, Graphic design, Photography, Visual culture

Rick Poynor meets David King, a genuine designer-author driven by an overriding need to lock horns with meaningful subject matter
Stepping across the threshold of David King’s North London house is like plunging into a…

David King, 1943-2016

22 May 2016
Graphic design, Magazines, Posters, Typography, Visual culture

‘It was always my idea to get across complex or difficult subjects to a wider audience. That’s what visual people like us can do.’
British designer, author and archivist David King died on 11 May 2016. Here are a…

Getting away with murder

2 February 2012
Design history, Graphic design, Illustration, Music design, Photography, Reviews, Typography, Visual culture

Good, bad and ugly cover ‘tributes’: a new spin on the death of music design.
The album cover may have lost its mojo as far as contemporary culture is concerned…

Xerox factor

25 August 2010
Magazines, Music design, Posters, Visual culture

The short-lived graphic energy of punk fanzines and posters
In ‘Scribble and strum’, just published in Eye 76, Andrew Losowsky took us through the…

Jan van Toorn at the Mermaid

29 March 2009
Design education, Design history, Graphic design, Visual culture

‘Collecting images is not enough. How democratic is it?’
In a very polite, and very Dutch way, writes Simon Esterson, Jan van Toorn used…