I Love Typography Blog

New York Design Week

New York Design Week is going on. Check out the enormous list of events at Core77.

Don't miss the Designboom Design Mart at ICFF this year.

I'm totally ripping you off - great Story on SpeakUp

Alexander “Fish” Bohn describes how wanted to have my own intellectual property demonstration, to see how the concept might operate in the field of graphic design. I assembled an exhibition of posters at a student gallery here at RISD. The show, called "I AM TOTALLY RIPPING YOU OFF", consisted completely of from-scratch recreations of notable typographically-oriented examples from graphic design and conceptual art. In each recreated work, I used the words "I AM TOTALLY RIPPING YOU OFF, _______" with the blank substituted by the author or artists' name. I ripped off a very wide range of practitioners in this fashion, from Wim Crouwel, to John Baldessari, to M/M Paris.

W.A. Dwiggins Research Blog by Kelly Rakowski

Kelly Rakowski started a new blog on her research of Type Designer, Illustrator, Graphic Designer, Puppeteer and Book-Artist William Addison Dwiggins.




What I didn't know, is that Dwiggins also did a lot of work on marionettes. Very beautiful stuff:

All photographs by Kelly Rakowski.

Here is a short piece on WAD, as he called himself, from Wikipedia:

William Addison Dwiggins (June 19, 1880 Martinsville, Ohio - December 25, 1956 Hingham, Massachusetts ) was a U.S. type designer, calligrapher, and book designer. He attained prominence as an illustrator and commercial artist, and he brought to the designing of type and books some of the boldness that he displayed in his advertising work.

His typefaces—Electra and Caledonia are most widely used—were specifically designed for Linotype composition and have the clean spareness of the motor age. Metro is most notable as his most modern sans serif typeface. Metro was developed by Linotype in the late 1920s in response to similar type being sold from European foundries such as Futura, Gill Sans, and Erbar.

His scathing attack on contemporary book designers in An Investigation into the Physical Properties of Books (1919) led to his working with the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. A series of finely conceived and executed trade books followed and did much to increase public interest in book format. Dwiggins was perhaps more responsible than any other designer for the marked improvement in book design in the 1920s and 1930s. He gained recognition as a calligrapher and wrote much on the graphic arts, notably essays collected in MSS by WAD (1949), and his Layout in Advertising (1928; rev. ed. 1949) remains standard.

WAD (as he called himself) is credited with coining the term 'graphic designer' in 1922 to describe his various activities in book design, illustration, typography, lettering and calligraphy (his first typeface designs were released much later). The term did not achieve widespread usage until after the Second World War.

New Design Blog by Ali Madad

Ali Madad, Design Director at Studio Red and Professor at Pratt Institute started a new blog called SCTY, Society for the Advancement of the Graphic Arts.

It has some intriguing images of the final projects from the graduating seniors students in his class.

Some of them will be in the Pratt 2007 Show this Tuesday:

Tuesday, May 8 – Thursday, May 10
Manhattan Center
311 West 34th Street
New York, New York
Reception for the Professions, 6-9pm, May 8

Jim Termeer: Car Booklight

From DesignBoom:
Jim Termeer's latest project is this booklight based on the light effect
created by car headlights.

Jim explains: 'have you seen the movies 'ronin', and 'ghost dog',
where the physical spaces in the movie are defined by the headlights
and taillights of cars in empty parking lots? if light can carry meaning,
is it in the 5000 headlights that pass by everyday driving home?

Jim will be participating at the upcoming designboom mart at the ICFF
new york, USA. you can see him at some our previous marts here.

WEAK - By Kelly Rakowski

"WEAK is a 1 page, letter sized, b+w photocopied zine made by KR in a studio overlooking the East River. Each time KR visits her studio she completes an issue. All of WEAK's collages are built from an old book of etchings found at a used book store entitled 'AMSTERDAM'. WEAK is inspired by KR's life and dreams."