AIGA (or, the American Institute of Graphic Arts) has just relaunched its website in a new, user-friendly format. With 300 collections — including Graphic Explanations, The Humor Show, Push Pin Graphics, A Decade of Sports Graphics, and 50 Books/50 Covers — prepare to be lost among a sea of images. Search tools are provided to filter by year, industry, discipline, location, and format. Or you can browse the archives by color. Select the pea green, and up comes the cover of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel
alongside the February 26th, 1979 The New Yorker issue.
Let us know what discoveries you make; find some of our favorites after the jump.
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Gallery exhibitions may be sexier, and museum patrons may be wealthier, but the government-backed National Endowment for the Arts is still alive and begging for your arts attention. The 2011 budget for the NEA was just proposed by President Obama at $161.3 million for the fiscal year, the same goal he set for 2010, which was ultimately increased by Congress to $167.5 million. (Some perspective: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is slotted for $470 million, international disaster assistance for $860 million, and proposed military construction will net a staggering $18.18 billion.) What else is new?
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New Zealand’s got a literacy rate of 99.0%, so the nation must be doing something right. Maybe that something is fancy schmancy ad spots for the national book council. Andersen M Studio designed this two-minute stop-motion animation film from paper cutouts of books, set to a voiceover narrating Going West by Maurice Gee. It’s a little creepy, a lot dramatic, and very cool. Next steps? State mandated reading hour, please.
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NC State student designer Kayce Lomas experiments with typefaces in a way that sure tickles our fancy. This particular abecedary comprises 26 letters made up of textures corresponding to each one: B for barnacles, C for clouds, H for hive, and so forth. After the jump, peep the letters in sentence form.
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John Gall, art director for Vintage International, was gifted the “most daunting project of [his] entire life”: redesigning all 21 book covers in the Vladimir Nabokov literary canon. Not an easy task. Gall rounded up an ace group of graphic designers to contribute to the project, from Pentagram partner Michael Beirut to Knopf heavy hitters Chip Kidd and Barbara de Wilde.
Because Nabokov was an avid butterfly collector, Gall assigned a design brief that proposed all the covers should resemble specimen boxes. Vintage and Anchor Books are currently hosting a giveaway of these art-meets-literature re-imaginings; we’ve listed our five favorites after the jump. Read More »
We’ve already chatted about the America Online rebranding, in which the online media conglomerate went hip with a sans-serif font, lowercase letters, and punctuation. (Aol. > AOL?) It got us thinking about the efficacy of that one small dot, and what brands are trying to convey by punctuating their logos. From greater-than symbols to obnoxious exclamation points to a growing number of quotation marks, we have to wonder if punctuation is the new emoticon.
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See, graphic designers aren’t just a bunch of font-minded prigs. They’re musical, too! Designers Mark Searcy, Jason Kinney, Forrest Martin, and Tristan Bynum star in this video send up to “Pokerface,” and take it from us, the beards and round glasses only enhance the slinky dance moves that put Lady Gaga to shame. Another fun fact: Neutra is actually pronounced “NOY-tra.” The more you know.
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Our friends at Buzzfeed pointed us to this awesome series of minimalist tributes to popular TV shows by graphic designer Albert Exergian. While his work pays homage to everyone from Charlie’s Angels to Better Off Ted, we’ve decided to use this as an opportunity to countdown the ten best shows of the past decade — with their accompanying posters as visual aids, naturally.
Click through for the rainbow-colored eye candy and let us know which poster is your favorite.
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Rarely does graphic design inspire such heated discussion as in the case of the almighty logo (with the recent exception of Arnell’s Tropicana packaging, which we’ll be glad to never, ever revisit). Corporate versions tend to inspire particular ire, but are occasionally, thoughtfully, worth a second glance. After the jump, we have ten logos from big box retailers on down, plus secrets — lots of secrets! — that these companies may or may not want you to decode.
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A set of illustrations by Andy Warhol depicting the story of the Little Red Hen will be put up for auction in New York on December 9th as part of a 365 item-strong sale by Bloomsbury Auctions. You may not recognize these drawings as Warhols, but we spy a sense of color and whimsy (and a super fabulous hen) that are solid markers of the man himself.
Check out images of Warhol’s work and some more of our favorite book illustrations from Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Charley Harper, and Saul Bass after the jump.
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