Christian Annyas has a great gallery of the evolution of the Chevrolet speedometer design. They had some great ones during the sixties.
I remember watching Thunderball a few months ago and loving the speedometer on the car Bond was driving.
“The worst design writer is one who doesn’t tell a story. Facts are nice, but it’d be better to have the facts telling you some tale of highs, lows, and woes.”
“The teaching of art is the teaching of all things.”
I’ve been going back and listening to some old episodes of BBC’s wonder In Our Time podcast. I really enjoyed this one on the famous Victorian art critic John Ruskin and this quote from Ruskin’s writing stopped me dead in my tracks.
I took four art history courses in school (two general art, and two design-specific) and found that the best art history courses always teach you more than expected. I think learning about art also teaches you about cultures and people and religion and politics. I’ve found the more I learn about art, the more I want to learn about everything surrounding it.
One of my favorite professors in school was my first design history professor and the reason he was my favorite was because I found the most interesting things I was learning were not the things inside my design text book. He had an uncanny ability to make connections between cultures and images making for a more holistic history course that guided by design movements. Think James Burke or John Berger. Learning about art is learning about the world.
The Story of Times New Roman
Katherine Eastland, for The Daily:
It’s in State Department memos, vintage pages of Woman’s Home Companion and your inbox: Times New Roman, the most widely used typeface in the world — and one of the most controversial. For more than half a century, it was attributed to a titan in the field of typography, Stanley Morison. But in the late 1980s, a Canadian printer discovered that Morison might have plagiarized the classic font.
A puzzling history for one of the most common typefaces.
You could say Bill Bernbach was one of the original mad men. As a co-founder of advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, he directed countless breakthrough campaigns but he is perhaps most known for the man behind the now-iconic Volkswagen campaign.
He would have been 100 today. Creative Review has a great round-up of some of his most memorable ads.
Great feature from Eye on Sister Corita Kent:
Charismatic nun, artist and activist – in 1960s America the combination was irresistible, guaranteeing Sister Corita Kent a place in popular culture, if only as the woman who spawned “nun art” and made the Love stamp. Her public persona and artistic output were hugely influential, but although her picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine, Corita was never part of the mainstream, being too radical for the Church, too Catholic (and priced too low) for the art world and too much of a maverick to be pigeonholed in the broader contexts of social and political conflicts of the 1960s.
I’ve always wondered why her work is not discussed more in graphic design (and general art) history courses. The things she did with typography and shape were groundbreaking even though she continually referred to herself as an “artist” and never a “designer.”
“The best professionals understand their medium at a deep level. They embrace its history to shape its future. They’re pioneers not of originality, but of progress, breathing modernity into the very bones of their subject, re-envisioning it in a new light. To truly understand something, you should never stop learning from it, as it’s this very process that allows us to grow as a professional, and in turn shape future generations of what you do today.”
—Peter Coles, You’re not Mr. Purple. Some guy on some other job is Mr. Purple. You’re Mr. Pink
I think the most valuable class I’ve ever taken that has made me a better designer was not a Photoshop class or HTML class or even a typography, it was a design history course. By looking at the history of this craft, from Sumerians writing on stone tablets to Gutenberg’s printing press to Saul Bass making film titles to Carson throwing away the rules, I could see how it’s all connected, how it all builds on what came before, expanding it and pushing it forward.
By looking back, you can see how how to move forward. I can jump into this long, twisting history and add something meaningful, pushing the craft into the future.
Vignelli Week!
In honor of the opening of the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at RIT, Design Observer is dedicating the week to all things Massimo and Lella. To kick things off, they posted a great interview with Massimo conducted by Debbie Millman that was originally published in her great book, How To Think Like A Graphic Designer. It’s a great interview and a great insight into one of my design heroes. I always keep his thoughts on elegance and vulgarity in the back of my mind when designing:
Vulgarity is something underneath culture and education. Anything that is not refined. There are manifestations of primitive cultures or ethnic cultures that could be extremely refined and elegant, but don’t belong to our kind of refinery or culture. Culture is the accumulation of at least 10,000. You can really say that intellectual elegance is the by-product of refinement. One of the greatest things about vulgarity is that it tends to continuously disappear.
And then Michael Beirut, who many consider the Vignelli’s protégé and an equally successful designer in his own right, has written a lovely piece on Lella, often the invisible partner in the Vignelli’s working relationship. Massimo has been my favorite designer for years now but up until now, I haven’t read much on Lella:
I quickly came to understand the relationship between these two brilliant designers. Massimo would tend to play the role of idea generator. Lella served as the critic, editing the ideas and shaping the best ones to fit the solution. Massimo was the dreamer, focusing on the impossible. Lella was ruthlessly practical, never losing sight of the budgets, the deadlines, the politics, the real world. It was Massimo’s worldview that had defined my studies in design school. Lella’s concerns were entirely foreign to me. So I may as well say it right now: I learned an enormous amount from Massimo about how to be a good designer. But I learned how to be a successful designer from Lella.
If these first two posts are any indication of what’s to come, I’m looking forward to the rest the week and extremely excited to see these two designers get the praise they deserve.
This is such a fantastic video tribute to the great Paul Rand:
For Paul Rand’s posthumous induction into The One Club Hall of Fame, Imaginary Forces created this short film, combining original animation with a videotaped interview of Rand himself, that encapsulated his unique and timeless contribution to the design community.
I’m not sure it’s possible for him to not be included in everyone’s favorite designer list. What a brilliant guy.
Have you seen Things Magazine’s collection of book covers from Pelican, called The Pelican Project?
You haven’t? Oh, well you should probably go sneak a peek. It’s a bottomless well of design inspiration, fine tuning your spidey-senses of clarity, concept, and conciseness. And, if you have visited, I’d go take a look again, even just to witness that beautiful, dusty, distressed blue.
Welp. There goes my afternoon. Seriously. This is a goldmine.
Design is History
Design is History is a great resource of the history of graphic design from early communication to the 2000s. It’s not comprehensive by any means but definitely highlights the major players who have shaped the field over the years. Think of it as SparkNotes for Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. Whether you are familiar with design history and want a refresher or are interested in learning it for the first time, it’s a good read.
