Feature
Reputations: John Plunkett
‘We wanted to avoid the unspoken design taboo: Good design = subtle, tasteful, elegant, restrained. My feeling about that is: maybe so . . . depends on the context. We felt it was more important that Wired be alive than subtle . . .’
Design is advertising #2: Nomadic resistance
Faced by oppressive visual pollution, many designers feel powerless. Yet the visual realm can be turned into a vital site of political and cultural action
In the beginning was the picture
How are publishers coping with the advent of new media? Two ambitious series expand the format of the illustrated book.
Clarity and contradiction
Irma Boom’s work is lucid yet challenging. It upsets her colleagues, while pleasing her clients.
Reputations: Anthon Beeke
‘I don’t think I could have come out on the streets with these posters in Berlin, Paris, or London – not to mention America’
Look away
‘The South’, Seymour Chwast’s special civil rights issue of Push Pin Graphic, was a virtuoso display of graphic design authorship
Schism and reunification
Where there was once discord, there is now harmony, as design zealously embraces the made image. Adrian Shaughnessy analyses ‘this new hybrid – type-based yet infused with fluid and expressive qualities’
Political clout: Australian posters
Screenprints gave both activists and artists a means of direct expression
Art directing the opposition
Daniel Walsh, former US Marine, founder of Liberation Graphics and self-styled ‘communications therapist,’ uses the poster to argue for alternative points of view
Dr Leslie's type clinic
Through its publications and gallery, the Composing Room promoted the new American design