graphic design example 12

communication arts
september/october 2010
inside back cover
avant-garde? gah, are you kidding me? what's so avant-garde about a skull? or a toilet? or boobs? seriously. y'all need to be learnt about fluxus, maya deren, and scott walker. this ain't no avant-garde. rant over.

graphic design example 11

 communication arts
september/october 2010
inside back cover
wow! another awesome penguin cover, masterminded by the penguin art group. i love how the cover doesn't explicitly show short girls (standing next to tall men, next to a measuring tape, etc.). with one small touch—the girl's leg situated on the balls of her feet, seemingly stretching—you get the idea.

graphic design example 10

communication arts
september/october 2010
p. 30
i like these fonts that berton hasebe designed. i also like that he named them in honor of art-rock genius brian eno. did hasebe come up with those names to establish some sort of cult-rock cred? or is there something more to it? is it reminiscent of eno's work? does it stylistically capture the era of some of eno's best solo stuff? how do fonts get named, anyway?

graphic design example 9

print
august 2010
p. 66–67
at first glance, these cool pieces (shown on barbara glauber's section of print's "rant and rave" feature) look some type with funky patterns. but look more closely! "don't call from the stall" shows the ever-familiar restroom icons with four classic circle-with-slash symbols indicating "no phone." "discard gum properly" is surrounded by directions to put said gum in the trash! and the "keep emotional calls private" actually shows sideways, upset emoticons talking on the phone!

graphic design example 8

from print
august 2010
p. 10
paul buckley, penguin's art director, recently curated the series penguin classics deluxe editions: "masterworks whose covers have been reinterpreted by the world's best-known graphic novelists and artists." that's the power of good design. it makes me actually want to read white noise.

graphic design example 7

my husband is a bibliophile to the extreme. seriously. from our massive collection of books alone, the producers of hoarders have us on their shortlist. along with scores of graphic novels, he also collects books about designers and artists. scanning our shelves one day, i found sagmeister: made you look by peter hall (with commentary by the designer himself).

stefan sagmeister's stuff is pretty provocative, but this rather tame david byrne cd package stood out to me. maybe it's because i'd recently read up on tibor kalman, who designed the talking heads' remain in light. (i've never been into david byrne, but i'm intrigued by his association with top designers.)

according to the book, byrne had a lot of input on the project. sometimes in a client-designer relationship,  client bossiness can backfire, but in this case, it worked beautifully—likely because byrne is an artist and seems to have a good eye for design.

anyway, the album's called feelings, and depicts byrne as a florian-from-kraftwerk-meets-ken-doll robot. the inside of the package (shown here) features a color wheel of emotions. i like how what we humans perceive to be cold and unfeeling—a robot—is juxtaposed with a complicated array of universal human feelings.

graphic design example 6

although i wouldn't consider myself a big tech-head, i do love wired magazine. my boss lets me have all the office's old issues, which i promptly take home and devour. one of my favorite things about wired is the illustration (often in the form of charts and graphs) featured throughout the magazine.

this illustration by matias vigliano in the august 2010 issue is so loaded with imagery it's almost overwhelming. but it is for good reason: the theme is "overkill: the pop culture excesses, indulgences, and redundancies we cover this month, by type." as you can see, it's a table of contents highlighting pure information overload: 86-proof beer, extreme multitools, titanic televisions, and the return of max headroom. punctuated with spiky graphics, sprarkly curves, an overabundance of colors, animal appendages, and metal machinery, it's messy and overblown, yes, but captures the era well.