Blog: Visual culture
10 December 2012
Sun-cheese wheel-ode
Dom Sylvester Houédard’s 1968 concrete poetry tribute to fellow poet Ken Cox is a double spiral of hand-set type, mysteriously linked by the sport of cheese rolling. Fraser Muggeridge explains.
The letterpress printed concrete poem designed by Dom Sylvester Houédard first caught my interest because…
21 November 2012
Hand-made in Cambodia
Painted signs enliven the streetscapes of Kratie, a sleepy provincial capital in North East Cambodia.
Cambodia is a country awash with hand-painted signs, writes Sam Roberts. They form an integral…
19 November 2012
Broadway the art way
Tate Modern’s two-part retrospective juxtaposes two artist-photographers: William Klein and Daido Moriyama.
The Tate Modern’s exhibition ‘William Klein + Daido Moriyama’ is introduced with projections of primary…
15 November 2012
Back of the net
Give a big hand for Howler, a confident, upmarket print magazine for US soccer fans.
Howler is a ‘a print quarterly for North American soccer enthusiasts’ edited by George Quraishi…
13 November 2012
Type in Wapping
Pencil to Pixel opens up Monotype’s archive of typographic history, from artwork to artefacts
The ‘Pencil to Pixel’ exhibition, which opens this Friday at Metropolitan Wharf in London, gives…
9 November 2012
Freeze!
An exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London looks hard at the eyes of sharpshooters (from artists and anonymous punters to movie stars and Simone de Beauvoir)
The recently re-opened Photographers Gallery is right on target with its current show, writes Liz…
5 November 2012
What are they thinking?
politics, vernacular
These unique, plebeian graphic executions – ephemeral, often questionable lawn signs – embody the US Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of free speech, says Mike Kippenhan.
In the United States, automobile bumper stickers and lawn signs are the preferred way of…
2 November 2012
Graphic design history to boot
Everything must go when Ian Anderson sells off the contents of The Designers Republic (TDR) archive in its Car Booty Affair in Sheffield.
At what point does the ephemera that is graphic design become collectable? When does a…
1 November 2012
Common ground: a designer’s letter from Venice
stencils
John Morgan explains the thinking behind his visual identity for the 13th Architecture Biennale in Venice (director David Chipperfield).
The Venetian stencil street signs or nizioletti don’t prevent you from getting lost in the…
29 October 2012
Giants of the visual imagination
While others struggle with ‘personal expression’, the Vignellis prove that a simple approach and focus makes great design, writes Quentin Newark.
Quentin Newark writes: As I was designing the catalogue for the Tate Modern exhibition ‘Albers…