Feature: Design history
Tightly packed
Owen Jones’s trademark design for biscuit tins has stayed the same for generations
Tony Brook on collecting
Spin’s founder, the subject of Reputations in Eye 86, talks about his passion for poster collecting
Rub-down revolution
A generation before home computers, Letraset’s dry transfer lettering made desktop typography possible – and gave a small group of type designers new insights into letterform construction through the art of stencil-cutting
A tradition with breaks
Stencil typefaces – late arrivals on the typographic scene – are going in new directions and rediscovering their history.
Puffins on the plate
How the Russian revolution – plus new technology – led to a colourful and radical change in children’s book publishing.
A Monotype timeline
A selected, chronological list of notable events in the long, complex history of Monotype
NASA patches
Embroidered space travel patches, collected and appreciated by Eugene Dorr
Machine head
Fritz Kahn commissioned illustrators to realise his surreal pedagogical vision – mechanical metaphors for the human body.
Googling the design canon
In the late 1980s, US designer and historian Martha Scotford set out on a mission to discover what might constitute a canon of graphic design …
South Bank show
The Royal Festival hall has regained the thoroughly English lettering of its origins in the Festival of Britain – on one side only