Eye Magazine

Jonny Hannah’s The Captain’s Alphabet first appeared seventeen years ago as a box set of screen prints. Now published in book form (by Joe Pearson’s company Design For Today), it celebrates the sea in an A to Z of illustration, personal anecdotes, advice and poetry. A nostalgia and longing for the ocean is clear throughout, even if the subject matter jumps around thematically. Hannah’s distinctive curly lines and whimsical illustrations bring the realities of life at sea to the picturebook format, and he has fun with alliteration and rhyme along the way.

Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder’s Designed for Hi-Fi Living provides some amusing examples of mid-twentieth century LP sleeves. Many of these records were marketed as ‘lifestyle’ music, and the imagery employed often reflects the advertising (and social attitudes) of the time – the 1950s and early 1960s. The 420-page book is packed with examples, some of which feature artwork from artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, while others employ interior design, travel imagery and even space travel as a way of establishing their modernity.

The biting and sarcastic work of Parisian artist Vincent Sardon finds a colourful home in the pages of The Stampographer. Sardon creates rubber stamps to use for satire, grotesque insults and mix-and-matchable faces, reminiscent of Mr Potato Head. The authoritarian anonymity of the traditional rubber stamp adds further irony to Sardon’s largely cynical and anti-establishment illustrations. The book presents both physical rubber stamps and the images they produce, often side by side, to give the reader an idea of the mirroring that takes place in the stamp-making process.

David Clarke’s UFO Drawings From the National Archives includes documents and images from the long-awaited release of UFO-related information by the British government. It is primarily focused on illustrations, which range from charts for classification to amateur illustrations (and pictures by children) of ‘encounters’ with UFOs (unidentified flying objects). The images are accompanied by background information about the circumstances under which the ‘sightings’ occurred, as well as a handful of photographs. The slim, casebound book is part of ‘Four Corners Irregular’, a series of what the publisher calls ‘visual histories of modern British culture’.

Lindsay Hargrave, Eye intern and journalism student at Temple University, Philadelphia

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.