Feature
A sense of rupture
ReVerb is a four woman, one-man design team in the heart of polyglot Los Angeles. In their conceptually based work, artificial distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ melt into an alternately grating and blended concoction that reflects the discord and simultaneity of life in the city
Underground matriarchy
Ellen Lupton, Laurie Haycock Makela
Women who have shaped the profession by their own work and by enabling those around them
Theatre of dreams
Andrzej Klimowski is obsessed with eyes, faces, hands, angels and devils. He is one of Britain’s most haunting image-makers
White space black hat
Derek Birdsall harbours a secret. It has given him 30 years at the top. If it works, he says, use it again
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
Techno cubists
Champions of the layered look, Nancy Skolos and Tom Wedell wed theory and technological wizardry
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
Reputations: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
‘Diversity and inclusiveness are our only hope. It is not possible to plaster everything over with clean elegance. Dirty architecture, fuzzy theory and dirty design must also be out there.’
Max Bittrof: visual engineer
Max Bittrof was one of the leading German designers of the 1920s. Unlike many exponents of the New Typography, he was able to apply the aesthetic to a major commercial client