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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Since Kosovo is in the news for the current renewed border conflicts with its Serbian neighbors, it is useful to know that the country is more than a hot-spot for violence. It has a thriving design community with a robust design magazine, Kosovo 2.0 (and website). Here's what the editors say: Kosovo 2.0 pulses with [...]

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There are illustrators. And then there are illustrators?the dripping with personality, oozing with expression, can’t-peel-your-eyes-away-from-the-page storytelling kind. Speaking of the latter, Southern California-based ink-to-paper maker,?Jared Andrew Schorr, is a definite cut above the rest. From monsters to retro radios, hotdog-shaped letters to space cadets, Schorr is a wizard paper crafter ? Xacto-knifing his witty drawings [...]

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Eye, The International Review of Graphic Design, published in the UK, is now 80 issues old. It was founded by Rick Poynor, now writer at large, and currently edited by John L. Walters, who joined as managing editor in 1997. He became editor in Fall 1999.? In 2008 art director Simon Esterson, Hannah Tyson and [...]

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Fifty-five years ago Swiss design was at a crossroads. In "Uber Typographie" (Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen, April 1946) Max Bill urged Swiss designers to follow “‘asymmetric’ or organically formed typography”, to reject “the conventional text-image of axial?symmetry” and the retreat into historicism that it represented. Jan Tschichold’s rebuttal, “Glaube und Wirklichkeit” (SGM, June 1946), repeated his [...]

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As part of the Abstract Conference, held a few weeks back in Portland, ME, design students from around the country were invited to submit cover ideas for any of the magazines under the creative direction of the panel of speakers (including heavy hitters like Wired, Fast Company, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Martha Stewart [...]

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Last week was the much anticipated (in editorial design circles anyway) Abstract Conference, in Portland, ME. Co-sponsored by AIGA Maine, the conference is a new venture by Conde Nast’s Executive Director of Editorial Development, Scott Dadich, and his dream team of creative friends, including Luke Hayman of Pentagram, Arem Duplessis of the New York Times [...]

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This is the first of two features on PMCA's latest exhibition. The second, my interview with the Clayton Brothers, is here. . The letter "R." There's the capital, erect with the stately nobility of an opera diva. And there's the lower case: diminutive, downcast, dejected. That's the letter Rebeca Mendez tackled as one of the [...]

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What more fitting organization to jump head first into iPad publishing than the one that has championed periodical design for dozens of years. Josh Klenert of the Society of Publication Designers just announced "We officially uploaded SPD 45 to the App Store." SPD 45: The Design Annual For iPad is the first of its kind: [...]

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A long awaited book about printing, printers and type by type historian Jerry Kelly is ready to be devoured. The Art of the Book in the Twentieth Century (Cary Graphic Arts Press, RIT Press) highlights the work of eleven essential practitioners, among them Bruce Rogers, Joseph Blumenthal, Stanley Morison, Max Caflisch and Hermann Zapf.? Kelly [...]

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