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)
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I hold deep appreciation and great respect for ancient cultures and original peoples (and the incredible lessons that they have to teach us) if we are open and willing to listen, look back, and learn. I included this beautifully elegant example of traditional Japanese egg packaging in my recent talk ‘Welcome Change‘ in Vilnius, Lithuania. No energy consumed in production, no chemical waste produced… the ultimate recyclable/compostable package.
The above image is from the 1969 book How to Wrap Five Eggs: Traditional Japanese Packaging by Hideyuki Oka, with photographs by Michikazu Sakai.
Atlanta, Georgia (from My Modern Met)
Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed. Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures. He also folds, bends, rolls, and stacks multiple books to create completely original sculptural forms.
“My work is a collaboration with the existing material and its past creators and the completed pieces expose new relationships of the book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception,” he says. “The richness and depth of the book is universally respected yet often undiscovered as the monopoly of the form and relevance of the information fades over time. The book’s intended function has decreased and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. By altering physical forms of information and shifting preconceived functions, new and unexpected roles emerge.”
Dettmer is originally from Chicago, where he studied at Columbia College. He currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.
View more of his incredible works here and an in-depth interview (with more images) here.
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A colleague just reminded me of some (long-forgotten) environmental writing I was involved in while working on a book project about 20 years ago…
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.
