Feature: Design history

 

The image as evidence

The career of Germano Facetti is exceptional in its range. As art director of Penguin Book covers in the 1960s and as a designer, he was a powerful influence on book and information design, throwing a special light on Modern Movement aspirations and on attitudes to illustration. Facetti has maintained the concept of “documentary” and diagrammatic illustration to induce understanding, to express emotion, or to accumulate information in a more memorable way.
 

Political clout: Australian posters

Screenprints gave both activists and artists a means of direct expression
 

The work must be read

Lawrence Weiner’s art is a kind of sculpture made of language, free from excess or embellishment and strangely familiar from its far-reaching influence on graphic designers
 

Revolutionary language

“A revolutionary graphic language must seek to expose the meaning by presenting a chain of ideas, images, structures in as much of their complexity as is economically feasible.” Robin Fior in The Designer, journal of the society of industrial artists and designers, London, May 1972.
 
Punk uncovered: an unofficial history of provincial opposition

Punk uncovered: an unofficial history of provincial opposition

British punk gave a sound, a voice and a visual currency to the disenfranchised and remote. Overlooked, uncelebrated and difficult – the output of the anonymous artworkers who packaged the vinyl spewed out by punk’s first waves captured the oppositional (and occasionally political) spirit of the time. By Russell Bestley and Ian Noble.
 

Reputations: Roman Cieslewicz

‘Posters are dying out. They need strong themes, which at present they lack. As a form of communication, they belong to another age’
 

Visual prose

A Wealth Of caRefully flaggeD pages, the books collected by Peter Mayer contain a panoply of visual and verbal tricks, conjured by the authors themselves, playing eccentric games with space, structure and meaning, then painstakingly typeset to exPress fLux, sound, extrAvagant imagerY and the passage of time.
 
23 Envelope: ambience and inner space

23 Envelope: ambience and inner space

Operating undercover, using the enigmatic title of 23 Envelope, Nigel Grierson and his partner Vaughan Oliver created designs of exceptional power. Their work inspired the next generation of image-makers. By Rick Poynor
 

Concrete poems just are

Concrete poetry never won full acceptance, despite the efforts of exponents all over the world. In the digital era its innovations are ripe for reassessment
 
Quiet spirit of joy

Quiet spirit of joy

By championing pattern-making, art and ephemera, the Curwen Press brought a new ‘Comfy Modernism’ to commercial printing
 
< First  < 3 4 5 6 >