Feature: Design history
Visual prose
A Wealth Of caRefully flaggeD pages, the books collected by Peter Mayer contain a panoply of visual and verbal tricks, conjured by the authors themselves, playing eccentric games with space, structure and meaning, then painstakingly typeset to exPress fLux, sound, extrAvagant imagerY and the passage of time.
Reputations: Roman Cieslewicz
‘Posters are dying out. They need strong themes, which at present they lack. As a form of communication, they belong to another age’
Quiet spirit of joy
By championing pattern-making, art and ephemera, the Curwen Press brought a new ‘Comfy Modernism’ to commercial printing
The United Nations of Type
Look beyond the confines of the Latin alphabet, urges Johannes Bergerhausen of Decodeunicode
Buy this book
Jürgen Holstein’s volume of rare Weimar-era jackets and covers is an extraordinary labour of love
Permanent innovation
With his ‘livre objets’ for the French book clubs, Pierre Faucheux invented a new genre
Reputations: Josef Müller-Brockmann
‘I would advise young people to look at everything they encounter in a critical light … Then I would urge them at all times to be self-critical.’
Total design
In its all too brief life, Alexey Brodovitch’s Portfolio magazine achieved perfection
Your system sucks!
The flight from Modernism left a yearning for graphics that were rough, real, unaffected and believable. At some point, though, the downtown poster hardened into a convention
Quentin Fiore: Massaging the message
The man who gave form to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ designed books that were both for and ahead of their time