Helvetica: David Carson

From Wikipedia:

"David Carson is an American graphic designer. He is best known for his innovative magazine design, and use of experimental typography. He was the art director for the magazine Ray Gun. Carson was perhaps the most influential graphic designer of the nineties. In particular, his widely-imitated aesthetic defined the so-called "grunge" era."

These images were taken from his website, and he doesn't include any information about them. 

1. Suicide Girls Brochure

2. Mastercard Advertisement

This work is brilliant (duh). The Suicide Girls is like an alternative nudie site that stressed the alt-look, but I get that they pride themselves on not being smutty, but classy. This brochure emphasizes both the alt look of the girl and the sites classy-ness. There's a brilliant tease with the small window showing the girl, with a nice victorian-looking wallpaper design covering the rest. It's both intriguing and interesting. 

I can imagine the marketing department of Mastercard wanting to target young people that like to travel and do awesome stuff where they go. So they went to Carson and gave him that spiel, which he then nails perfectly. I don't know travelers that like to max out their credit cards, but I know the type, and this seems like its aimed right at them. The layout as snazzy, but it's really all about the off color choices and the hand written text, which looks like it was written in a "fuck yeah! this is where we're going and this is what we're doing" sort of way. Very animated and exciting. 

Marcel Janco

1. Untitled (Mask, Portrait of Tzara), 1919

2. Don Quihote and Sancho Pansha, year unknown

3. Nude, Ink and Panda, year unknown

Marcel Janco was a prominent Dada-ist at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Throughout his life he was an architect and painter. 

I've always liked the Dada aesthetic. Mostly chaotic, sometimes minimal, sometimes completely absurd, but always with utmost taste and skill. The mask of Tristan Tzara looks to me like a Dada-Cubist mix. That is, the angular, multi-angle look of cubism with the absurd humor of Dada. 

Don Quihote and Sancho Pansha looks like where Ralph Steadman drew inspiration. Very quick, loose ink/brushwork, light use of color washes, dark, kind of brooding, but you can still make out the artist's humor. 

Nudes, a to an extent the Don Quihote piece, remind me again of Ralph Steadman's ink work (albeit much simpler, less worked), but also some Sunday Cartoons like Marmaduke or Dennis the Menace. Here though he is displaying a minimum of information, but you get a solid feel for the moment of the piece, when it was actually drawn. You get a feel for the personality of the models, and the air about the place being depicted. Lightheard, humorous. 

Helvetica: Neville Brody

1. Depeche Mode "Just Can't Get Enough" Album Cover 1982

2. The Bongos, "Zebra Club" Album Cover 1981

3. Cabaret Voltaire "Red Mecca" Album Cover 1981

4. Nike Ad, year unknown

Ahhh, a good album cover designer. Granted, I was born in 1982, but the following 8 years is definitely visually imprinted on my memory, and these all have an underground-ish 80's look to them. All three do what album covers should do: describe the music visually and provide an image that is striking, that'll stick with you. The Depeche Mode and The Bongos definitely score in the latter, and the Cabaret Voltaire leans more to the former.  I like how these three images are very different, but Brody's calling card in this instance is the rectangles around the text, which is a good unifying factor in these three examples.  He plays much more with this technique in The Bongos cover, using the rectangles more as a balancing element. 

I included the Nike ad because it seemed a thorough example of the type exercise we had where the text had to characterize what the words meant. Obviously if you use Nike products you have a variety of ways to "Just Do It", and each example is a simple, straightforward expression of the word's meaning. 

Ah Pook Is Here

William S. Burroughs and Malcom McNeill

Granted, this isn't from the list, but I came across it and couldn't resist. It's a never-realized graphic novel from the combined forces of two super geniuses. Apparently McNeill produced a lot of art for this project, and it's now touring the country. 

Absolutely face-melting stuff. 

William Morris

1. Snakeshead, 1876. 

2. Brer Rabbit, 1882

3. Tree of Life tapestry

William Morris was a real heavy hitter. He wrote poetry, prose,  tranlated medieval texts, did embroidery, textile design (and emphasized hand-craftsmanship), and later on, was into calligraphy and illuminated manuscript. 

I'm a huge sucker for good textile/tapestry/wallpaper designs (I think my next post will be on CFA Voysey), and Morris is the real deal. I like that he thought hand-craftsmanship was important. All the stuff you see is hand block-printed. In today's terms, it'd be the difference between say, a mass-produced, off-set litho of some image, and a lovingly printed silk screen print. They may be the same image, but one will breathe, and the other won't. 

And the designs themselves set themselves apart from the mass-appeal Victorian wallpaper I'm generally familiar with. The focus on direct observation from nature combined with a patient, dilligent hand really make for striking decorative art. 

Hannah Hoch

1. Cut with the Dada Kitchen knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919, collage 

2. The Beautiful Girl, 1919, collage

3. Grotesque, 1963, Collage

Hoch was one of the only female members of the Dada movement, working with collage/photomontage as her medium. As with the Dadaists, she used a lot of absurd collaged images collaged together to promote various ideas, like anti-war, feminism, and racial discrimination. 

Her eye for collage is of the highest order, and her use of absurd imagery really emphasizes the absurdity of war, or the subdued, faceless role of women in Germany at the time.  The first two images are pretty busy, and lead you around the page quite a bit, giving you lots of information to take in, making the images real knockouts visually. The third she manages to give the same visual punch but with much less information. Same drama, but she is much more succinct. 

Lucian Berhard

These pics didn't come with any information, but the Manoli cigarettes are, of course, from 1914.

Berhard is famous not only for his overall simplistic, heavily graphic (bold outlines around everything) style, but created the Plakastil style, which just advertised the object. He utilizes color contrast, line and form to give the shapes dimensionality. As advertising goes, this is about as simple as it gets, but it is extremely graceful.

Herbert Bayer

Bayer's 1925 experimental universal typeface and polychrome warm and cool, 1970

Herbert Bayer is mostly known as a typographer, graphic designer, and architect. He started out in the Bauhaus school and worked for Vogue in Berlin. After Hitler came to power, he left for NY, where he prospered in the Graphic Design field. He finished out his career in Aspen, Colorado, designing for Walter Paepcke. There he made skiing look glamorous, and designed the Aspen Institute. As a typographer, he created an all lowercase set that is simple, effective, and aesthetically pleasing. I chose the polychrome warm and cool for the obvious skill with color theory. The idea is easy -- juxtapose cool and warm colors, but the grid makes it more complicated, as each square has to relate to all the ones around it.

Herbert Spencer

'Consider Her Ways and Others' (1961) by John Wyndham; 1965 Penguin Books edition. Cover design by Herbert Spencer.

'Who?' (1958) by Algis Budrys; 1964 Penguin edition.

As far as a description of Spencer, his obituary written by Rick Poynor is fantastic:

This guy's got a lot of fantastic graphic design work, a lot of which looks like it was made recently, which says a lot about his influence today. These covers though, strike me because they are exceedingly simple, peculiar, and macabre, particularly the one of the left. The one on the right these days looks like a dime a dozen, but it is executed well. I wish I knew for sure what the novels were about, but I get a sense that these images were meant to evoke a sense of mystery and curiosity that would draw one to these books. I know if I saw them in a store I would pick them up.

Peter Behrens

1. Peter Behrens Ad for AEG metallic filament lightbulb. Colour lithograph. 67 x 52 cm.
2. Ceiling of the Peter Behrens Verwaltungsgebäude central hall


Behrens started out moving around the bohemian circles of Munich, working in the Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) style, until he met up with Grand-duke Ernst-Ludwig of Hesse who invited him to be a part of Darmstadt Artist Colony, where Behrens conceptualized and built his own house. This took his work in a much more austere, geometric but still elegant style.

The first image is probably the most effective and at the same time most beautiful way to advertise a lightbulb I've seen or could imagine. Simple in the layout, with an elegant focal point. He influenced architectural reforms in Germany, and looking at that ceiling, I can see why. Both the ceiling and the lightbulb ad strike a serious balance between simple and complex geometric designs that complement eachother perfectly.

James Montgomery Flagg

James Montgomery Flagg is best known for the uber-iconic WWI/II poster of Uncle Sam "Wanting YOU" to enlist in the army. That was enough to send him into the stratosphere of fame, but he had built his reputation on solid, prolific illustrating work for books, magazines, political and humorous cartoons, and wartime propaganda posters. His was a household name, and he got to hobnob with celebrities, politicians, the upper eschelon, until movies started to make America's imagery for him. Then came his decline.

I wasn't so much drawn to all that due to overexposure of his work, but i came across his pen and ink work. I'm a pen and ink guy, and I like the scratchy, sketchy look his work. The images I chose look very period, almost if Norman Rockwell had a sketchy pen and ink style, or I'm also reminded of old Dennis the Menace comic strips. Lastly I'm a big fan of using tons of linework to describe both texture and form -- specifically all the surfaces of the clothes and jackets the people are wearing.

Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley was a British Art Nouveau artist whose work is characterized by large swaths of black contrasted with large swaths of white, and areas of intense detail contrasted with areas that are blank. The imagery is generally pretty dark, and can get grotesque and erotic. 

I dig it because he's influenced a lot of my favorite artists (who in turn influence my workand aesthetic). And while I like the majority of Art Nouveau as it is pretty, elegant, graceful, lots of swooping, curving lines, etc, really dark Art Nouveau is extremely refreshing. 

Saul Bass

"Symbolize and Summarize"

Saul Bass is the design genius behind movie posters and title sequences for such famous film makers as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorcese. He came up with THE iconic corporate logos for AT&T, United Airlines, United Way, Girl Scouts, Quaker, and also was an academy award winning film maker.

This guy seems like the uber-genius of design. The idea behind a lot of his work is simple, and is probably a popular exercise these days: distill down the idea of an entire movie/album/company into one image. The crazy thing though is his images, for being so simple, not only convey the idea of a movie so poetically, but the images are stark and arresting.