Vienna, Austria
Mladen Penev is a Bulgarian-born artist/photographer now working in Vienna. This powerful piece and its expression of “clean slate” (illustrating the impact of branding on an impressionable/defenseless consciousness) entitled Tabula rasa is exemplary of the fine work he does… see more here.
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This is the “award-winning” logo designed for the Catholic Church’s Archdiocesan Youth Commission by Gerry Kano in 1974.
Perhaps the 1970s really were simpler, gentler, more innocent times (?)… and it can happen that designers at times “get too close” to their own work to “see the bigger picture”—yet it seems hard to believe that no one in the decision-making and client-side approval process saw just how badly this could be interpreted.
Steven Heller offered some astute comments on this design in an AIGA article (from 2009): “On some occasions, logos are more than marks of failure or malfeasance; sometimes they unintentionally illustrate the foibles or folly of a company or institution all too vividly… the unfortunate pictorial relationship between the priest and the child, given our collective awareness… suggests a much too ironic interpretation. It’s a challenge to see what this positive/negative image once suggested, a guardian protecting the innocent, since the benevolence of its subject is no longer black and white. When a good design signifies bad deeds, the result is, well, a really unfortunate logo.”
Esslingen, Germany
Three weeks ago I was visiting designer friends in this charming Swabian burgh… the after-dinner conversation swung towards influential German typographers and Gestalter such as John Heartfield—to my delight, when I mentioned his name our hostess jumped up from the table to fetch (after a bit of searching) a portfolio of Heartfield prints she had acquired back in the 1980s when she was a socialist activist in Berlin (all prints I had never seen before).
John Heartfield was born Helmut Herzfeld on 19 June 1891 in Berlin-Schmargendorf, Germany to Franz Herzfeld, a socialist writer and Alice née Stolzenburg, a textile worker and political activist. He changed his name in part as a way to protest World War I (and he even feigned madness to avoid returning to the service). During the Weimar period he became a member of the Berlin DADA group, where he used his collage work as a political medium, incorporating images from the political journals of the day. He edited “Der DADA” and organized the First International DADA Fair in Berlin in 1920. Sharply critical of the Weimar Republic, Heartfield’s work was banned during the Third Reich, then rediscovered in the German Democratic Republic in the late 1950s.
I’ve posted about John Heartfield before and have long been fascinated by him—his politically charged photomontages during the Nazi regime ended up influencing successive generations of artists and graphic designers.
Above: a small sampling of Heartfield’s diverse work; The hand has 5 fingers; Serenade; Adolf the Superman. Below: a 1971 stamp from DDR (East Germany) in Heartfield’s honour.
Vienna, Austria
Once in a while you come across an image that just smacks you on the cheek… like these flavour-saturated compositions by Staudinger+Franke, a team of photographers and artists, created for the TMW London advertising campaign for Lipton Tea.
(found on designtaxi.com)
Bloomington, Illinois
Fredric W. Goudy (sometimes also written as ‘Frederic’) was a master craftsman and an “American legend of type design,” a man of humble beginnings who started his career at the late age of almost 40. At the time of his death at the age of 82 (in 1947) he had 127 typeface designs to his credit—a list of typefaces designed by Goudy is available here. Read an interesting, in-depth magazine article about Goudy in the April, 1942 issue of Popular Science here.
The graphic above is from a promotion piece published by International Papers that’s been kicking around our design studio for quite a few years (illustrator/designer unknown).
Stuttgart, Germany
My Iranian friend Mehdi Saeedi (extraordinary calligrapher/designer) will be presenting at the Akademie Schloss Solitude next week… had it been last week, I might have been able to attend.
London, UK
My friend Paul Derrick has submitted this poster to the 2011 Busan International Design Festival in Korea, in response to an invitation to contribute to the exhibition themed ‘Expression of Peace through Design’ that will show from 1 – 12 June at the Busan Design Center and the Busan Metropolitan City Hall. In Paul’s words, the poster is “a graphic representation of new and different perspectives needed to build steps towards peace and disarmament.”
Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of re-connecting with Paul and his wife Cathy in Vilnius, Lithuania… we had become friends a few years back in Havana during the Icograda congress in Cuba.
