Feature
Picture books: luxury and meaning
The design of lavish illustrated tomes often shows a lack of confidence, or perhaps a confident lack of understanding, in the marriage of words and images. Yet the best books are poetic: a minimum of means produces a maximum of meaning
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
Controlled passion: the art of Fernando Gutiérrez
In post-Franco Spain, a cool Catalan breeze blows through the often humid, overheated world of professional magazine design and art direction
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
Reputations: Milton Glaser
‘I am nervous about ideologies, whether it’s the ideology of business or the ideology of Bolshevism. I get nervous in the presence of absolute certainty’
Play-centre of the avant-garde
At the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, design reflects a developing sense of identity and purpose
The space between the letters
Matthew Carter's new identity for the Walker Art Centre is a typeface family with 'snap-on' serifs
Permanent innovation
With his ‘livre objets’ for the French book clubs, Pierre Faucheux invented a new genre
Signs of trouble
British designer David Crow uses his personal projects to question the authority of the graphic image. By Julia Thrift
Type play for kids
It has taken decades for expressive typography to win acceptance in the world of the children's book