Feature: Visual culture
Laptop aesthetics
A crackly, digital approach informs one of three current design trends.
Look away
‘The South’, Seymour Chwast’s special civil rights issue of Push Pin Graphic, was a virtuoso display of graphic design authorship
Reputations: Maira Kalman
‘I was out walking the dear dog and I saw 500 things that made me want to make art.’
Cute culture
The Japanese obsession with cute icons is rooted in cultural tradition
A terrible beauty
The atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud has become the logo of annihilation
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.
Word art
In post-war art the visual and the literary have blurred. Typography is the point at which they meet
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
Kicking complacency in the ass
In the late 1960s, the underground press was a spontaneous and primitive rebellion against the status quo, with visual and verbal obsecnity as its most potent weapons. Sex stimulated sales, but ultimately sapped its creative radical energy
A design (to sign roads by)
As an exemplary rational design programme, the road signs of Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert demand careful study. Despite poor application, inconsistent additions and muddle over the past four decades, their robust, flexible system – with its humane typeface and quirky pictograms – still functions throughout the length and breadth of Britain