The best things come in pairs. Or so we think after coming across “Similarities“, retired Professor of Graphic Design at West Texas A&M University Bob Caruthers’s Flickr set of reused designs, which we discovered over at Quad Royal. Carthuers writes, “The pairs of images in this “Similarities” set are similar visually in one way or another. They are presented without judgement as to the motives of their creators. The viewers of the pieces can form their own opinion(s) about what they see.” Some of the pairs are “accidents”, some are “re-contextualized”, some are “inspired”, some are “homages”, some are “appropriated”, but no matter what the politics or language, it’s amazing to see the way that images can influence — or down right form the basis of — new designs. Hey, our mothers always told us it was good to recycle. Click through to see some of our favorites, and head on over to Caruthers’s Flickr page for many more.
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Brooklyn-based graphic design team Two Arms Inc. have recently released the first two installments of their Brooklyn Neighborhood Series, wherein they will design posters representing each neighborhood in the eastern borough. The designs are simple but elegant — Two Arms pulls essential, representative elements from each neighborhood and juxtaposes them for a warm and fuzzy, almost nostalgic feel. So far, they’ve only released Williamsburg and Greenpoint, which is probably a smart move — we bet those are the areas with residents most likely to buy a poster of their hood — but we’re excited for the rest. Click through to see the posters, and let us know which elements of your neighborhood you’d want to hang proudly on your wall.
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National Public Radio chronicles four decades of broadcasting independent-arts and political programming across America with a new book presenting the faces behind the radio dial.
A constant companion to daily commuters and fans of arts and culture journalism, NPR celebrates what it does best in This Is NPR: The First Forty Years, combining stellar graphic design, in-depth interviews, behind-the-scenes photos, and rare anecdotes from its best-loved voices. And if reading the radio is too strange, there’s also an audio version.
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The journals of commercial designers, graphic artists, and illustrators become subjects in a new publication from Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World’s Great Graphic Designers
by Steve Heller and Lita Talarico (Montacelli Press). Whether it’s design and branding, stock illustration, print, interactive media, or typography, ideas are recorded in the artist’s sketchbook long before the finished products are in the public eye. This book illustrates a wide span of creative approaches and techniques with themes as unique as the artists who created them.
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We’re suckers for a juicy paperback as much as anyone else, but there’s no denying that the modern grocery store variety falls short on external appeal. Although raised gold lettering and glossy monochrome tend to dominate recent cover design, the art of the paperback was once a far more enticing feature of cheap genre fiction. Steven Brower’s Breathless Homicidal Slime Mutants pays homage to a wide-ranging variety of paperback art from the last century — from romance to mystery, science fiction, and westerns — while detailing the nuances of the medium’s evolution. Many of the featured stories are out of print these days, so consider this your guilt-free chance to judge a book by its cover.
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Spanish graphic designer Mark Brooks has created a unique series of posters that require the viewer to, as he puts it, “distance yourself from the stars and enjoy the view.” Up close, there’s nothing but a sea of black dots; step away from your computer (or tilt the computer screen backwards), and the true portraits become visible. Click through and try to see the stars within the stars.
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Graphic design studio Chermayeff & Geismar recently unveiled a spiffy new look for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC — one of the venerable Smithsonian art institutions and the second most attended contemporary art museum in the US.* The problem? The museum’s name is still widely unknown, even after a previous rebranding effort in 2008. (And as highlighted in the revamped logo design, it possesses two concurrent H’s in its spelling.) Take a closer look with us after the jump and examine some possible influences for the new design. Update: hear what the designer has to say.
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OK, so this is the last Olympics-related post for a while, we swear, but we had to pass it along for all the design geeks out there. Olympic pictograms were first used in the German games of 1936 and became standard practice after the Tokyo Olympiad of 1964. Watch the video after the jump for a taste into the psychedelic, op art-inspired icons that defined the 1968 Mexico Summer Olympics, as well as the unloved blobs of Nagano’s 1998 Winter Olympics. “Is that a luge sled or a giant squid?” Harsh, but point taken.
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AIGA (or, the American Institute of Graphic Arts) has just relaunched its website in a new, user-friendly format. With 300 collections — including Graphic Explanations, The Humor Show, Push Pin Graphics, A Decade of Sports Graphics, and 50 Books/50 Covers — prepare to be lost among a sea of images. Search tools are provided to filter by year, industry, discipline, location, and format. Or you can browse the archives by color. Select the pea green, and up comes the cover of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel
alongside the February 26th, 1979 The New Yorker issue.
Let us know what discoveries you make; find some of our favorites after the jump.
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Gallery exhibitions may be sexier, and museum patrons may be wealthier, but the government-backed National Endowment for the Arts is still alive and begging for your arts attention. The 2011 budget for the NEA was just proposed by President Obama at $161.3 million for the fiscal year, the same goal he set for 2010, which was ultimately increased by Congress to $167.5 million. (Some perspective: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is slotted for $470 million, international disaster assistance for $860 million, and proposed military construction will net a staggering $18.18 billion.) What else is new?
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