David Pearson gets the phillumeny bug. That's right, phillumeny.
“It’s no coincidence that a book designer should be drawn to matchbox labels. Their shape is intrinsically book-like, their method of communication instantaneous and spare, and they provide a dizzying range of illustrative styles. Their uncluttered compositions ensure communication across language barriers, and designs appear cohesive as a result of type and image being rendered by the same hand. But perhaps most alluring of all is their uncompromised clarity of purpose, an attribute that most modern designers can only dream about.”
Peter Mendelsund reviews The Book Cover in the Weimar Republic.
“Reading this encyclopaedia of interwar-years German books, we are introduced to the discomfiting fact that many of the tools we thought to be uniquely ours — the gestures and rhetorical flourishes we deploy on our own covers and jackets — are in fact old hat. Radically conceptual typography, witty visual juxtapositions, outlandish production effects, daring colorways and gradients … so many modern techniques and styles of modern book cover design are in evidence here that I’d posit that any of my colleagues who wished to steal from this book might find that they already have.”
Theo Inglis on how the internet has complicated graphic design, from the latest issue of Shellsuit Zombie.
“You could easily send so much time reading well-meaning online advice for designers that you never manage to do any work at all. Online, a consensus is rare, contradictions abound and one designer’s ‘wish I'd done that’ is another's clichéd worst nightmare. … The same goes for job and internship advice: be yourself but fit into the ‘studio culture’; make the tea but don't look like a suck-up; make an impression but your work needs to speak for itself; don't work for free but do an internship for less than minimum wage and work just as late as everyone else. Always ‘Work Hard and Be Nice To People’ but in a system that might not be nice back. With the amount of conflicting advice on offer it’s easy to get into a rut of anxiety and uncertainty.”
“The Tokyo Olympic logo design competition as speculative labor represents the further collapse of labor structures in the Neoliberal Era. Its probably just a bit of social media entertainment for many, but it is representative of something larger — graphic design, a relatively new sector of cultural production the name of which was only coined in 1938 — is threatened not only by the ubiquitous accessibility of ‘creative’ software and by contemporary notions that ‘anyone can be a designer’, but these notions are now being given further form by powerful global events.”
“THIS INSTEAD OF TELEPHONING BECAUSE I CANT LOOK YOU IN THE VOICE. I SIMPLY CANNOT GET THAT THING DONE YET NEVER HAVE DONE SUCH HARD NIGHT AND DAY WORK NEVER HAVE SO WANTED ANYTHING TO BE GOOD AND ALL I HAVE IS A PILE OF PAPER COVERED WITH WRONG WORDS. CAN ONLY KEEP AT IT AND HOPE TO HEAVEN TO GET IT DONE. DONT KNOW WHY IT IS SO TERRIBLY DIFFICULT OR I SO TERRIBLY INCOMPETANT”
That is all.