Eye Magazine

While we look forward to launching a new Eye website next year, we’ve been busily adding more content from back issues to the Eye website archive – a task that provides a fascinating opportunity to sift through design history. Here are five recently added articles.

‘Relics of the Modern’, by Robin Kinross (Eye 11, cover top). ‘European Modernists in the years between the two world wars believed in the new, at the expense of an old that was rotten beyond saving. What are we now to make of the relics left by these designers, who rejected the idea of restoration and re-creation?’

‘Seize the sans serif’, by Alex Seago (Eye 16, cover above). Raw, vigorous, experimental and often funny, Ark magazine helped to transform British graphics.

‘The chair man dances’, by Victor Margolin (Eye 28). This little red book is a capitalist keepsake – a testament to the corporate culture of a chair company with exotic picture research.

‘The myth of genius’, by Monika Parrinder (Eye 38). Before designers get too excited about winning artist status, some caution is required.

‘Sense of place’, by Catherine Dixon and Phil Baines (Eye 58). Three new typefaces for local institutions draw on Sheffield’s cultural and typographic history.

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’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions, back issues and single copies of the latest issue. The latest issue, Eye 81, has the theme of ‘Designers and clients’.