Now in Graphic Design

NOW in Graphic Design

Amsterdam Museum of Modern Art

2006

introduction

irma boom

rene knip

chip kid

tibor kalman

garth walker

biography

index

4

5

6

13

17

21

25

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table of content

NOW in Graphic Design 2006Amsterdam Museaum of Modern Art

This exhibition has been sponsored by Metropolitan Arts Magazine and Quad Graphics Printing, Inc.Additional support was provided by the John Porter Retzer and Florence Horn Retzer Fund.

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 89-61864Copyright © 2006, Amsterdam Museum of Modern Art,Stedelijk Museum, Post Box 75082, 1070 AB Amsterdam

Designed by: Pio A. DabrowskiPre-press production by Graphic ServicesPrinted by Quad Graphics Printing, New York, NY

introduction by Michael Rock

irma boom

W hen is NOW? Does design ever have a NOW? Can design ever be current? Is that

the point of books like this, to capture a spe-cific moment?

The NOW of design is a peculiar one. The forms of design – books, brochures, even web sites and film title – tend toward the synchronic: they unify time and mask their own making. A book is published, it’s about a subject, it bears a publication date. But when is the design fin-ished? Is a design done when the electronic file is shipped? At the moment the print impression is made? The instant the final trim is trimmed? When a reader opens it? When it finally crumbles away to dust? Is the work in this catalogue done?

This is the fourth complete introduction I have written for this catalogue: which one is cor-rect? The event that this catalogue documents is now a memory. The work it celebrates is already historicized. Each introduction has fallen vic-tim to the demands of being contemporary. The project itself, as it plowed on through the politi-cal and administrative turmoil, has out lived all our attempts to capture NOW.

Each time we dragged the increasingly ar-chaic files out of the archive, we couldn’t help rethinking the design issues at hand. As the book lay dormant, we had changed. I can see why Jan Tschichold reverted to traditionalism late in life since the way we think about design

keeps changing – modernism is so exhausting.As we started collecting examples from the dirty world of common design, we realized that those examples were evidence of the NOW of this catalogue. The moment of making was mir-rored by decisive devices: the daily newspaper, the dated memo, the postal meter stamp, the FedEx form, the computer log all chronicle a time-based process.

The time of this catalogue, however, as it stretched from one year to the next, worked to defy the emphemerality of the framing device. Each moment blurred. The catalogue became a catalogue of out-dated images, multiplied past tenses. A string of THENs.

So rather than a catalogue of NOWs – which is always a fantasy – this is a catalogue that em-braces THENs. It doesn’t compare the entries to the great political images of the day in the manner of the Business as Usual catalogue did. These are common objects. Most of the stuff here is part of the design of everyday life, the things you encounter in normal, informal set-tings: the record store, the book shop, the library, the bus shelter. So our comparisons are banal to banal; nothing more, nothing less.

It is the exhibition itself, of course, that is at the heart of the matter. At the start my role was simply to choose three judges and beg them to join me in Chicago. My goal was to find three

eloquent writers who happened to be compel-ling designer/typographers that spanned an ideological spectrum. I am proud to report that Somi Kim, Abbott Miller, and Robin Kinross perfectly captured that agenda. I am indebted to them for giving so generously of their time and writing so thoughtfully.

NOW in Graphic Design is emblematic of individualistic vision. I was, however, more interested in the cross-over selections than the individual choices. Where do our ideas of beauty and interest intersect? So the selec-tions here represent a series of negotiations and overlaps. What do they mean? I leave that for you to figure out.

Now, for all you cultural studies scholars – twenty, thirty, fifty years from now – when people try to decipher the design of the early 2000’s by scrutinizing primary sources like this one: Good luck. Looking around I get the sense that the community of designers is more unified than is often supposed. I get a whiff, now and then, of a little optimism. The ideological/generational battles that marked the beginning of the decade have, for the most part, faded. I am not sure who won, but that was THEN, this is NOW.

4 5

“If there is something in common about my books it is the roughness, they are all unrefined.”

irma boomirma boom

M any of the most artistically intriguing and beautiful books to have been designed in

recent years are the work of Amsterdam based designer, Irma Boom. Born in 1960, in Dutch town Lochem. Irma started her artistic journey by enrolling in 1979 , in School of Fine Arts in Enschedé, Holland. In 1985, after graduation, she joined the Dutch government publishing and printing office in Hague where she worked for five years as a senior designer. In 1991, she established her own Irma Boom Office in Amsterdam, where she has designed scores of books. Her clients include Ferrari, Prince Claus Fund, Vitra, SHV, OMA/Rem Koolhaas, and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The focus of her work is on book design, for which she has re-ceived many awards including the prestigious Gutenberg Prize 2001. She has taught at the

Arnhem Academy, the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, the Rhode Island School of De-sign, the Art Institute of Chicago, the California Institute of the Arts, and Mimar Sinan Univer-sity, Instanbul. Her work has been published in I. D. , and Eye magazine, and exhibited nearly all over the Europe, South Korea, and the US. In 1992 he was appointed to the Yale faculty and is currently senior critic in graphic design.

Irma Boom has established an international reputation with nearly 200 books that she has designed. Boom’s books are, aestheically speak-ing, very beautiful, almost sculptural objects before they are repositories of information. The defining characteristics of her work is a raw beauty with bold juxtapositions of type, die-cut holes and text teetering off the edge of the page. Often using two or three typefaces. “If there is something in common about my books it is the roughness,” she says. “They are all unrefined.” Doing things precisely, using perfect typogra-phy, perfect print, it is not Boom’s issue. She is after the concept, ideas. She strongly believes that every book should somehow always contain text. She always read the text first, the design comes later. To her, the text suggests inspiration and ideas. If there are no images, she will find or make them herself.

Reading one of her books is like embarking on a visual adventure yet, by beginning each design project with rigorous research into the book’s contents and detailed discussions with its subjects, editor and author, Boom ensures that the aesthetic impact of her work is entirely em-pathetic with the text.

Her most ambitious project to date was a book celebrating the centenary of the Dutch conglomerate SHV in 1996 to which she devot-ed five years of work. She described the project as: “Dream and nightmare. Dream because of the conditions which were ideal – a very good client – but nightmare because of the very long,

intense process.” Originally Boom envisaged producing a 4,000 page book. The end result ran to 2,136 pages and weighed several pounds but was devoid of page numbers or an index. “The book is a voyage,” she explained. “You find things you don’t want to find and discoveries happen by coincidence. The only clues are the dates. The book is made in anti-chronological order. It’s a book for the reader’s mind including doubts mistakes and changes.”

Since the publication of the SHV book, Boom has adopted a prolific pattern of working, generally designing several books at once. She admits that the freedom given to her by SHV has made it difficult to deal with less permissive clients and that, whenever possible, she avoids working to briefs. “I prefer not to work with ‘in betweens’, it is important for me to talk with the person who can make decisions,” she says. I can’t even work for someone telling me what size of book to make.”

Currently Irma Boom is working on a book about herself. She mentioned, that even though she made an outline, she doesn’t know yet how it will look. With all her busy schedule, it is a slow process with no deadlines. Perhaps there will be no books in her books? She claims to never look back at her work. When the book is completed it is out of her system, it is really gone.

I absolutely adore her and her design. I admire her uncompromising attitude in ap-proaching projects, reinterpreting the facts, and accepting nothing else but total freedom. Her bold, but yet so thought complex and provoking design process, gives birth to amazingly visually striking ‘products’. Her books are beyond design, their are truly unique pieces of art. All I want to say is: Bravo Irma, bravo! That’s pretty darn impressive, especially for someone who almost became a designer by coincidence. Boom was a painter whose voice at last is loud and heard through graphic design.

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pic. 1, 2 • SHV Book, 1996. 10 x 7 x 5 in.pic. 3 • Color Book, book cover, 2001.pic. 4 • Light Years, The Zumtobel 2000 - 1950.pic. 5 • Vitra Work Spitra, book cover (fragm.), 1998.pic. 6 • European Flags, book cover, 1999.

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irma boom tibor kalman

“When you make something no one hates, no one loves it.”

9

tibor kalmantibor kalman

M uch in the same manner that Aesop’s Father, Son and Ass could not please everyone, de-

sign that is too fearful of offending often falls short of making any sort of a statement at all. To be opinionated, to make a statement, to evoke intense emotion, is to be both loved and hated. Tibor Kalman, in his personal quest to define the role of design in a corporate driven economy, was just such a personality. In his own words, “When you make something no one hates, no one loves it.” An incredible driving force in design, he constantly questioned the accepted norms of the design industry and publicly chal-lenged designers to take responsibility for their influence in society and culture. “You see this as a good opportunity, a nice career, a chance to make a killing,” Tibor argued at the AIGA’s Dangerous Ideas conference, “And I see this as a business that affects people’s lives and people’s brains.” He reacted against the “cool”, slick cor-porate campaigns that were becoming altogether too prevalent, preferring to use the vernacular, startling images and brash typography to com-municate his concepts and ideas. He felt that “cool had replaced content and that design itself was being mistaken for the message rather than being the medium for a message.

There are those who question his outspo-ken rants against corporate design however, citing his work at Colors as just that: design funded by a corporation to benefit its own sales. Though he claims that it is the corporate driven media that is corrupting society, he also states that corporations are the solution to this very same problem. In his “Fuck Committees” essay Kalman explains the concept of “lunatic entrepreneurs” as being corporate benefactors (such as Benetton, the money behind Colors) who would give money to designers to create thought provoking campaigns.

pic. 7 • Page from Tibor Kalman biography, 1999.pic. 8 • Magazine illustration spread. (fragm.), 1981pic. 9 • Colors, cover magazine, 1987.pic. 10 • Marketing Compaign for M&Co, 1979.pic. 11 • Typeforms, magazine spread, (fragm.), 1989.

Born in Budapest in 1949 and raised in suburban New York since the age of 8, Tibor attended NYU but began working as a self taught designer in 1968 at a small bookshop that eventually became Barnes & Noble Booksellers. He eventually moved on to open his own hugely successful firm, M&Co. in 1979. He was art director at Artforum, creative director at Interview, and the found-ing editor in chief of the highly controversial Colors magazine which explored how people are all so similar, and at the same time so indi-vidual and unique. Tibor Kalman died in 1999 surrounded by friends and family.

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rené knip

#11

“If I have something in my head I simply have to make it.”

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tibor kalman

rené kniprené knip

R ene Knip lives, thinks and designs in what he himself calls the second and a half dimension.

This dimension has a physical manifestation, but perhaps even more important, it is also an attitude, a state of mind. The second and a half dimension is that intangible place where flatness and depth meet and merge. From this unknown place, products emerge-the designer calls them “typographic furniture,” “spatial typography” or “architectural graphics.” In this, everything relies on the relationship between the hole and the surrounding cardboard, or between the paper where there is ink and the paper where there is none. Enigmatic? Just wait.

“At art school I couldn’t decide which di-rection to go in,” says Knip (37) in his atelier, located at the rural northern edge of Amster-dam. The uncluttered double-height space has little furniture aside from a table, a mezzanine for the designer and his laptop, and a couple of astoundingly large, cumbersome, old-fashioned printing presses. “First I thought I wanted to be a painter, but halfway in my studies at the St. Joost Academy in Breda, and later at the Ri-jksacademie in Amsterdam, I discovered that I was actually more intrigued by graphics. Of course the ‘free’ artists regarded this as treason!”

His love for signs and letters goes back further than he himself can remember. “My father saved my childhood sketchbooks, and you can see that even at three I was already fascinated by numbers and letters. The urge was always there.” Knip moves through the world like a sponge, sketchbook and camera always at hand, bringing back inspiration from hand-stenciled signs from Java, tram’s letterings, faded advertising slogans painted on a wall. “The street is the real library,” he says.

At the academy, one of the teachers, the wide-ly respected Dutch letter designer Chris Brands, had noticed his talent and offered to tutor him privately. Brands said, “First learn the craft, the artistry will come of its own accord. It’s the same as in music, if you don’t know what tonality is, you can’t master atonality.” Once a week Knip would go to Brands’ studio, who would then mutter something like: “Too pretty,” or, “Much too much, I can’t see anything.” He taught him abstraction, the power of the immaterial. It’s the same in architecture, you don’t live in a wall, but in the space created with walls. Typography is just as much about the space between the letters as about the letters themselves.”

Knip soon realized that traditional book ty-pography, frozen as it is in two dimensions and with ink as its only material, would be too restric-tive. “There are already so many dry Calvinist letters. I approach letters architecturally, po-etically, I want them to keep, or to recover, their soul.” For Hema, the Dutch household goods chain store, he designed an alphabet spelling out the names of traditional Dutch dishes on square blue or burnt orange tiles in a long line running all the way around the coffee shop. For a recent major commission, the yearbooks for the Dutch designers society BNO, he designed not one but many different alphabets, one for each discipline, and then a very straightforward phonebook-like register. The final result is extravagant, to say the

least. Each of the six volumes has its own pri-vate riot of color and letters-letters that, we now know, are safely hidden away in Knip’s laptop and will never be used elsewhere. Equally unique, in a totally different mate-rial for an entirely different function, is Knip’s “Laundry Sans.” He designed it for the large exhibition on Dutch graphic design “Mooi maar goed” (“Pretty but good”) in 1999 at the Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. The letters are made of thin bright green plastic with perforated tabs on the top, so that they can be hung by plas-tic envelope fasteners from a steel wire, evoking images of sheets flapping in the wind.

Part of living in the 2-1/2 dimension is push-ing the technological envelope. How to make lace out of steel? He picks up a specimen of the 1998 prize for the best theater poster, itself a kind of placard but made of steel and orange enamel. The precise, delicate cutout of the let-tering was possible thanks to a new technique, using water to cut steel. “The image is not on the flat surface, but in it. This is spatial typography-indeed, 2-1/2 dimensional design.”

Comparable to the theater poster award is his “typographical furniture,” such as his wedding gift to his brother: a stone bench with a haiku etched on it, with calligraphy seeming to flow into a pattern of branches. Knip does commer-cial work on an occasional basis. For the factory Akzo Nobel, for example, he did the graphics for an in-house training program, but he doesn’t want to let his creativity-inexhaustible though it seems-drain away in the service of others.

After having worked for Anton Beeke for three years, he set himself up in 1995 under the name Atelier Rene Knip (www.atelierreneknip.nl). If I have something in my head I simply have to make it.” That was the case with two objects, a table and a lamp, that he designed together with Bas Witlox. The lamp begins as an intriguing cardboard box, containing all the

necessary ingredients: light bulb, wire, and three cards, one with instructions for assembly and two with pre-punched legs. When you’re finished there is no waste material at all: the packaging is the product. “You see, we’re back in the 2-1/2 dimension.”

The table comes as a single piece of MDF, a large flat surface with the instructions printed on it. Same here: no waste, and a table whose provenance is still written all over it. “All the ingredients, and everything you need to know in order to move from the flat surface to a three-di-mensional form-instructions, sawing or folding lines, prepunched parts-is provided in two-di-mensional graphics,” explains Knip. The design has been reduced to the possibility of a table or a lamp, thanks to the metamorphosis from packaging to object. Conceptual idea meets local D.LY. store. The first two “tables” were bought by the Stedelijk Museum. Knip is an autono-mous designer working within the limits of applicability.

Rene Knip: Ideas That Can’t Wait Graphics are a landscape of tracks: There are no tracks in the snow without snow. The paper that is cut away is what gives form to the paper that is still there.

pic. 12 • Metal Wall Font Installation (fragm.), 1996.pic. 13 • New Font Plate.pic. 14 • Typographical Sculpture Basket, 1998.pic. 15 • Font Clock, Metal Sculpture, 2001.

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rené knip garth walker

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“At the end of the day you are forced to have these visceral elements in your life, extremes which affect your brain.”

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garth walkergarth walker

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S ince its first issue in 1994 (the year of the election of Nelson Mandela as President of

South Africa) this magazine has promoted the “look” of South Africa. In early issues Walker, South African to his core, presented indigenous street art and ephemera which he deemed cru-cial to this country’s identity (he has collected thousands of these images). And as i-jusi evolves (issue 16 has just been published), local motifs, styles and naive artworks not only appear in their own right, they inspire Walker and con-tributing designers to visually parody or to incorporate the textures, patterns, images found on the streets into more sophisticated designs. One issue featured hairstyle portraits by a local barber. A subsequent issue featured an African haircut-inspired typeface. With recent issues of i-jusi focusing on death, religion, pornography, and street style, the reader is presented with a vi-sion of a Third World country in a monumental struggle. South Africa has the usual problems of an “economy gone south,” a falling job market, debates on privatization, education, housing and health care. But Walker adds, “our biggie is crime which affects everyone (including fraud and bribery in the public sector), and AIDS (highest in the world).” There has also been a consistent migration into South Africa from other African

countries adding to overpopulation in the cities. These issues are reflected in i-jusi and sometimes offered with a sardonic twist, low-ball humor, scathing commentary, or personal soul baring combined with visual motifs and idiosyncratic iconography that blatantly could come from no where else.

Walker’s own perspective on South Africa is that it is “a land with no ‘gray’: things are black and white. It’s a land where the animals may be beautiful, but eat you, where you may have a gun in your ear since someone may want your running shoes or your car.” But none of this depresses him. “At the end of the day you are forced to have these visceral elements in your life, extremes which affect your brain.” These he feels are key to a sense of “identity—a need for everyone here to have a voice and a sense of how this affects other people.” Personal and cultural identity for Walker is “a sort of African design” drawn from the visual life of the streets and townships of Durban. “While much of my inspiration comes from the streets of Durban, I have traveled (quite literally) to every town (dorp in Afrikaans), city, or ‘two huts and a horse’ in South Africa,” says Walker. “If a road leads to it, I’ve been there. Much of my image collection is an accumulation of stuff I have photographed on these journeys. Interestingly, Durban really is a ‘fruit salad’ of everything, ev-erywhere, countrywide.”

Walker also proposed that a powerful new visual language has emerged out of this chang-ing culture, one that mixes icons from the past and from different cultures. It is a language, he says, that “everybody can understand—a visual language that starts on the streets and ends up in glossy magazines on coffee tables. Our visual language is our most powerful traditional weap-on. It’s our tool of change.”

And i-jusi has been part of that emerging language, and Walker’s tool of change. He attri-

butes much of the magazine’s visual and verbal verve to his collaborators (often with specialist skills) beginning with the talents of his staff of ten at Orange Juice Design. Other alliances in-clude art schools. Issue 16 on religion was done with The Red Yellow School of Logic & Magic. An upcoming issue on identity involves students from The Royal Academy of Art and Design in The Hague. Walker describes as “devotees” of i-jusi, which offers an alternative outlet for their talents. In the “Amaout: Street Style” issue, Sudheim and Kotze collaborate, documenting the adventures of “an Irish-Afrikaans Catholic Marxist-Leninist Zulu Historian with a Hexx or Two” who goes to a Zulu fortuneteller for “reve-lation” (translated from Zulu). Walker estimates that more than half go to Europe and the USA. The copies distributed in South Africa go to cli-ents, who relate to it as “arty-farty stuff,” Walker says, and the remainder goes to “fellow design-ers.” In spite of its provocative content, Walker says that he has the advantage of publishing that he wouldn’t enjoy in the “first world.” Since South Africa has no strong tradition in reading publications and because so many languages are prevalent, it is unlikely the magazine would be seen by anyone who might object to it.

Walker has brought his vision of a South African, African design to conferences and art schools and on the Web (www.ijusi.co.za). He also brings a commitment to his country in spite of its many problems. “There is much optimism here. The weather is spectacular and the quality of life is good (assuming you have the where-withal to cope). On balance, most of us feel the price paid—the transition—has been worth it.” Through i-jusi, Walker presents a vision for a new South Africa where the black and white, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-dimensional diversity of this place has a voice.

Garth went solo and opened Orange Juice Design in 1995 in Durban. In 1997, OJ was ac-

quired by Ogilvy South Africa as their premium design brand. OJ designs for many of South Af-rica’s blue chip corporate and consumer brands in the fields of branding, identity, literature and editorial design, packaging and digital media.Recent projects have included The Brenthurst Initiative for Nicky Oppenheimer and a unique typeface and related public signage system for the Constitutional Court of South Africa.

In 1995, Garth published the first issue of OJ’s studio magazine “i-jusi” (Zulu for juice) which aims to promote and encourage a local design language rooted in the South African experience. The publication has been acclaimed worldwide, exhibited in 11 countries and fea-tured in over 60 magazines and books.Design education is a long standing passion for Garth and he lectures widely on design issues and has facilitated workshops in South Africa, France, Croatia, Germany, Holland, United Kingdom, Korea, China, America and Brazil.

Garth is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and the St. Moritz Design Summit. He is also a member of British Design & Art Direction, The New York Type Direc-tors Club and is a trustee of the South African Graphic Design Council (THINK).

pic. 16 • African Blood, Cover, 2001.pic. 17 • Magazine Illustration, 2003.pic. 18 • Magazine ad, 2000.pic. 19 • Poster , 13x21 in., 2004.

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garth walker chip kidd

“I’m a matchmaker, not a pimp. I design jackets that are elaborate versions of name tags at singles parties.”

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chip kiddchip kidd

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W hether or not we know it, we all judge a book by its cover. Its role is to communicate not

only what the book is about, but who will enjoy reading it. There is a subliminal language of im-ages and typography that speaks directly to the subconscious mind of the potential book buyer.”

All Hail Chip Kidd. As associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf, Kid has designed more than 1,500 book jackets in little more than twenty years. His expressive yet appropriate marriage of typography and imagery denotes a perfect un-derstanding of material and audience. Since his graduation from Penn State, Kidd’s insightful blend of photography, illustration, found imag-ery, and suitable typography have driven a revolu-tion of american book packaging design. Coined as the “the closest thing to a rock star” in graphic design today (USA Today) Chip Kidd’s work has been featured in Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, The New Republic, Time, The New York Times, Graphis, New York, Print (cover story) and ID magazines. Not only a celebrated designer but also an acclaimed writer. Kidd’s first novel The Cheese Monkeys, was a national best-seller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and is currently working on his second novel (a second episode) entitled The Learners.

pic. 20 • Jurrastic Park, book cover, 1995.pic. 21 • Sexual Slang, book cover, 2000pic. 22 • The Boomer Novel, book cover, 1992.pic. 23 • Blues Explosion, Vinyl package, 1993.pic. 25 • The Elephant Vanishes, book cover illust., 1998

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“ With his broad influence on American graph-ic design, Kidd finds his personal inspiration in the pop culture of his childhood, as quoted [the first cover he ever noticed was] “no doubt for some sort of Batman comic I saw when I was about 3, enough said. Or maybe not enough said: the colors, the forms, the design. Batman himself is such a brilliant design solution.” The influences of his childhood turned into adult passion and the creation of a large collection of Batman memorabilia and all things comic book. Kidd has turned this knowledge toward author-ing commentary in a number of related publica-tions including Batman Collected and Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz.

biography

Irma Boom by Pio DabrowskiMany of the most artistically intriguing and beautiful books to have been designed in recent years are the work of Amsterdam based designer, Irma Boom. The focus of her work is on book design, for which she has received many awards including the prestigious Gutenberg Prize 2001. Her work has been published in I. D. , and Eye magazine, and exhibited nearly all over the Eu-rope, South Korea, and the US. Irma Boom has established an international reputation with nearly 200 books that she has designed. Boom’s books are, aestheically speaking, very beauti-ful, almost sculptural objects before they are repositories of information. The defining char-acteristics of her work is a raw beauty with bold juxtapositions of type, die-cut holes and text tee-tering off the edge of the page. Often using two or three typefaces. Doing things precisely, using perfect typography, perfect print, it is not Boom’s issue. She is after the concept, ideas. She strongly believes that every book should somehow always contain text. She always read the text first, the design comes later. To her, the text suggests in-spiration and ideas. If there are no images, she will find or make them herself.

Tibor Kalman by Michelle YangBorn in Budapest in 1949 and raised in subur-ban New York since the age of 8, Tibor attended NYU but began working as a self taught design-er in 1968 at a small bookshop that eventually became Barnes & Noble Booksellers. He even-tually moved on to open his own hugely success-ful firm, M&Co. in 1979. He was art director at Artforum, creative director at Interview, and the founding editor in chief of the highly con-troversial Colors magazine which explored how people are all so similar, and at the same time so individual and unique. Kalman died in 1999 surrounded by friends and family.

René Knip by Carie WestfallRene Knip lives, thinks and designs in what he himself calls the second and a half dimension. This dimension has a physical manifestation, but perhaps even more important, it is also an attitude, a state of mind. The second and a half dimension is that intangible place where flatness and depth meet and merge. From this unknown place, products emerge-the designer calls them “typographic furniture,” “spatial typography” or “architectural graphics.” In this, everything relies on the relationship between the hole and the surrounding cardboard, or between the paper where there is ink and the paper where there is none.

Garth Walker by Leah SnyderSince its first issue in 1994 (the year of the election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa) this magazine has promoted the “look” of South Africa. In early issues Walker, South African to his core, presented indigenous street art and ephemera, which he deemed crucial to this country’s identity (he has collected thousands of these images). And as i-jusi evolves (issue 16 has just been pub-lished), local motifs, styles and naive artworks not only appear in their own right, they inspire Walker and contributing designers to visually parody or to incorporate the textures, patterns, images found on the streets into more sophis-ticated designs. One issue featured hairstyle portraits by a local barber. A subsequent issue featured an African haircut-inspired typeface.

Chip Kidd by Rob StantonAll Hail Chip Kidd. As associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf, Kid has designed more than 1,500 book jackets in little more than twenty years. His expressive yet appropriate marriage of typography and imagery denotes a perfect understanding of material and audience. Since his graduation from Penn State, Kidd’s insight-ful blend of photography, illustration, found imagery, and suitable typography have driven a revolution of american book packaging design.

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chip kidd

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index

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This booklet was designed, typeset, printed and bound by Pio Dabrowski. The text of this booklet was set in Adobe Calson and Marten. The booklet was printed on white laser stock paper at the Print Lab of Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, WA.

April 28th, 2006

chip kiddpic. 20 • Jurrastic Park, book cover, 1995.pic. 21 • Sexual Slang, book cover, 2000.pic. 22 • The Boomer Novel, book cover, 1992.pic. 23 • Blues Explosion, Vinyl package, 1993.

pic. 25 • The Elephant Vanishes, book cover illust., 1998.

garth walkerpic. 16 • African Blood, magazine cover, 2001.pic. 17 • Magazine illustration, 2003.pic. 18 • Magazine ad, 2000.

pic. 19 • Poster, 13x21, 2004.

rené knippic. 12 • Metal Wall Font Installation, (fragm.) 1996.pic. 13 • New Font Plate.pic. 14 • Typographical Sculpture Basket, 1998.

pic. 15 • Font Clock, Metal Sculpture, 2001.

tibor kalmanpic. 7 • Page from Tibor Kalman biography, 1999.pic. 8 • Magazine illustration spread, (fragm.) 1981.pic. 9 • Colors, magazine cover, 1987.pic. 10 • Marketing Compaign for M&Co, 1979.pic. 11 • Typeforms, magazine spread, (fragm.) 1989.

irma boompic. 1, 2 • SHV Book, spread and book, 1996. 10 x 7 x 5 in.pic. 3 • Color Book., 2001. pic. 4 • Light Years, The Zumtobel 2000 - 1950.pic. 5 • Vitra Work Spitra, (fragm.) cover book , 1998.pic. 6 • European Flags, cover book , 1999.

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Art Museum Logo

Project objectives:

• Design a logo type that shows an understanding of letter form structure, proportion + legibility.• Use type only to convey the modern feeling of a Museum of Modern Art.• Explore using type only to create a logo.• Understand the challenges involved in making a multiple functioning logo.

Graphic Design Exhibition Book

Project objectives:

• 2 color multiple-paged catalog for a design exhibition at the AMOMA.• Exploration of grid structure for organizing larger bodies of copy in multi-paged layouts.• Develop informational systems using larger bodies of copy.• Gain sensitivity to type with respect to informational hierarchy.