Feature: Design history
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
Quentin Fiore: Massaging the message
The man who gave form to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ designed books that were both for and ahead of their time
Max Bittrof: visual engineer
Max Bittrof was one of the leading German designers of the 1920s. Unlike many exponents of the New Typography, he was able to apply the aesthetic to a major commercial client
Cult of the ugly
Designers used to stand for beauty and order. Now beauty is passé and ugliness is smart. How did we get here and is there any way out?