Feature: Visual culture
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
Video to go
Video packaging is an area of graphics both marginal and ubiquitous. Who decides how it looks?
Prints of Islam
In Syria and Beirut, craftsmen make inexpensive devotional images for the workplace and home
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?
Tokyo Salamander
Vaughan Oliver’s collaboration with Shinro Ohtake is an oblique diary of dreams
BJ
Robert Brownjohn wanted to eliminate the boundaries between experience and design. In an explosively short career of remarkable promise, he pushed graphics, advertising and film to their conceptual limits
Maps and dreams
No printing method is too basic for Jake Tilson. Created with photocopiers, his books, magazines and objects are crammed with offbeat invention.