Feature: Design history
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.
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
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
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.
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’
Quiet spirit of joy
By championing pattern-making, art and ephemera, the Curwen Press brought a new ‘Comfy Modernism’ to commercial printing
Permanent innovation
With his ‘livre objets’ for the French book clubs, Pierre Faucheux invented a new genre
Reputations: Josef Müller-Brockmann
‘I would advise young people to look at everything they encounter in a critical light … Then I would urge them at all times to be self-critical.’
Total design
In its all too brief life, Alexey Brodovitch’s Portfolio magazine achieved perfection
Your system sucks!
The flight from Modernism left a yearning for graphics that were rough, real, unaffected and believable. At some point, though, the downtown poster hardened into a convention