"The Ariel" poems were a series of pamphlets published by Faber and Gwyer (later, Faber and Faber) illustrated by leading English artists. Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot was illustrated in a cubistic style by E. McKnight Kauffer in 1927. Kauffer and Eliot were good friends, and worked together on several occasions. Kauffer was [...]

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Children's book illustrator and fantasist collage maker, Sara Fanelli's work is now on sale at the Tate Gallery in London. Jo Mazzotta, who commissioned the work, says: "I was captivated by Sara's work when I joined Tate nearly two years ago and came across the book?Sometimes I think, Sometimes I Am and I felt that [...]

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Fine artists look down on graphic designers. And graphic designers look down on comics artists. Like all generalizations, this one isn't entirely true. For one thing, a great number of successful designers look into the work of comics artists, very often and very closely. Chip Kidd is, of course, the prime example. He was also [...]

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My father was not a salesman, but for some reason he cannot recall, he had a collection of how-to LPs that taught salesmanship (they were very popular in the 50s). Some people were natural salesmen, but others had to learn all the tricks. Elmer G. Leterman had the right stuff. He believed "Personality can open [...]

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By Nicole Torres It looks like CAKE is going far beyond the distance. The Sacramento-based rock band, known for their unique sound and front man John McCrea’s recognizable half-spoken vocals, not only released their sixth studio album early this year, but they also got their hands a little dirty with some handcrafted graphic work. CAKE [...]

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If you think of a book as a sandwich (and you're not a vegetarian) then the content is the meat. Sometimes lean other times fatty, but hopefully prepared just right. A new book adds spice to this meat metaphor. New York D!ck: Lewd Drawings and Obnoxious Comments on New York City Advertising Posters by Galen [...]

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Mega-hype for upcoming B-movies! Appearances by genre TV show actors! Geeks wearing gaudy, scanty costumes! Steven Spielberg! Francis Ford Coppola! Vampires! Now that that crap's out of the way, here's my real report on last week's San Diego Comic-Con: a "top dozen or so" list, with respect to comics(!) and graphics. All photos taken by [...]

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To commemorate MICA’s history from 1825 to 2010 ? a lot of years ? the college published what is decidedly an exhaustive and elegant visual history. Making History / Making Art by Douglas L. Frost, designed by J. Abbott Miller and Jeremy Hoffman, is an accessible portrait of an institution that came to prominence with [...]

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I first learned about The Institute for the Future of the Book while working on a magazine assignment that eventually became this piece for The Millions. In getting to know Bob Stein, his colleagues and the projects they championed I became convinced that concerns about the death of reading and writing were deeply misplaced. What [...]

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Current pictographic character studies for toys and comics are more often hybrid mash-ups of graphic conceits that came earlier. This example of such character simplification, "Children's World 1932" The Yearbook of Working-Class Children (in urban and rural environments) was meant as socialist propaganda, but was illustrated with the light-hearted reduction of Otto Neurath's ISOTYPEs and [...]

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