Category: Art

All art forms — too many to list — that don’t include photography, although there is often overlap.

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Beautifully Briefed, November 2021: Four on Photography

BB Nov 2021

Four different, yet valuable, interesting, and informative links to photography items heading into this Thanksgiving weekend.

Architectural Photography Awards

Starting with ArchDaily: The Architectural Photography Awards 2021 Announces its Shortlist. Some great stuff here:

ArchDaily 1
ArchDaily 2
ArchDaily 3
ArchDaily 4
ArchDaily 5

All simple, yet so much more. Well done.

Natural Landscape Photography Awards

Next, the Natural Landscape Photography Awards. Many here to choose from, as well, but a couple of faves:

Nature Award 1
Nature Award 2
Landscape Photography Best of How-to

So, we all ask ourselves, how to you get from the everyday stuff to the best-of-the-best? DPReview has answers, with Erez Marom: On Originality in Landscape Photography.

It has been, and continues to be, a rough time for a nature photographer who makes a living shooting around the world. This kind of time period sometimes makes we artists think about our life missions and convictions, and delve deeper into our beliefs and the way we view our art and what makes it worthwhile. While some people don’t see photography as art, I definitely do, and for that reason I feel that a discussion is needed about what makes photography an art form rather than technical labor.

Some examples:

On Originality 1
On Originality 2

Read the whole essay. Excellent stuff.

Route 66 Photography

Lastly, some art from Dezeen: Hayley Eichenbaum captures the “punchy absurdity” of Route 66 roadside architecture:

Dezeen 1
Dezeen 2

Enjoy all four — and enjoy the turkey weekend! Happy (Photography) Thanksgiving.

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Peace, Ken Garland

RIP Ken Garland

All of us recognize this symbol:

Peace!

Now, let’s take a moment to celebrate the creator: Ken Garland. Not your typical graphic designer, he reached out, embraced the 1960’s and ’70s, and never looked back.

I couldn’t remember where I’d heard his name until I realized he was in toy and game design, and likely mentioned in one of the toy books I’ve worked on over the years. But there’s so much more. Read more of his life story at Dezeen (“Graphic designer Ken Garland dies aged 92“) and It’s Nice That (“Adrian Shaughnessy on Ken Garland, a ‘disruptive and questioning spirit‘”).

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(More) Beautifully Briefed, Books and Design, May 2021

BB_May-2021_More

On David Hockney’s Piccadilly Circus logo:

piccadilly-circus

It’s been a minute since I’ve been in London — 2011, to be exact — and I’d love to go back. The food, the parks, the museums, the Thames, the short train rides to more interesting places (Hello, Cambridge?), and even the Tube. (We’ll leave the anti-Americanism aside for right now — we’re post-Trump and post-Covid, so traveling is at least an option!) Yet even the cultural masterpiece that is London is showing some cracks; from the New Statesman:

Hockney’s Piccadilly Circus has also drawn criticism for its simplistic approach. Over on the cesspit of arts criticism that is Twitter, anonymous accounts that decry all art made post-1920 as an abomination have ridiculed Hockney’s scrawl as indicative of the death of art. Other critics have rightly argued that the work feels like a red flag to a bull: fuelling culture-war debates about the legitimacy of public art, rather than encouraging the public to get onside.

I like it more every time I see it. Read more at It’s Nice That.

On the NYC subway map:

Speaking of It’s Nice That, an interesting new book from Gary Hustwit . . . on the debate over the New York City subway map. On the one side, the iconic Massimo Vignelli version, introduced in 1972, representing the less-is-more approach. On the other, the replacement version from John Tauranac, introduced in 1979, representing the more-accurate-is-more approach. (An updated version of the latter is still in use today.)

But back in 1978, the two got up on stage at Cooper Union’s Great Hall — home to debates of, among others, Abraham Lincoln — and pitched their case:

They Look Happy! (Subway debate 1978)

Newly discovered photographs and audio lead to this new, smartly-designed, book. Read more at It’s Nice That; Dezeen has an interview with the author. Pre-order the book and get a limited-edition letterpress print at Oh You Pretty Things.

Subway Map Debate Book

On books and book design:

Nice new cookbook chock full o’ seventies-era design, “Violaine et Jérémy returns with a cookbook for Molly Baz, featuring three of the studio’s much-loved typefaces,” at — wait for it — It’s Nice That:

Nicoise Sandwich

Sandwich Nicoice. Mmmmmmm.

Lastly, just because, Kottke collects pencil photography to examine the typography. Nice.

Kottke on Pencil Photography

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A History of Arab Graphic Design

A History of Arab Graphic Design is easily the best introduction to the history of modern Arab visual culture on the market today. It lacks the jargon of exhibition catalogues, leans heavily on visual sources, and dismisses some previously held assumptions about Arab art[.]

Something for those of us in the West who sometimes suffer from Western-centricity. More at the Brooklyn Rail.

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In Stitches (of CMYK)

In “XXXX Swatchbook,” Evelin Kasikov explores all of the variables of CMYK printing without a single drop of ink. She catalogs primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, two-dozen combinations showing how rotation affects the final pigment, and a full spectrum of rich gradients. In total, the printing-focused book is comprised of four base tones, 16 elements, and 400 swatches of color entirely hand-embroidered in 219,647 stitches.

Six years. Six years.

More @ Colossal.

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Beautifully Briefed: Books, March 2021

Five book design items that caught my attention recently.

First, from ArtNet News. Prior to basically everything, Andy Warhol did this:

“The whimsical book was a collaboration with interior decorator Suzie Frankfurt, who wrote the ridiculous recipes, and the artist’s mother, Julia Warhola, who provided the calligraphy, replete with charming misspellings. [It] was the last of a number of books Warhol designed in the 1950s, before he shot to fame in 1962 with Pop art compositions featuring Campbell’s soup and Coca-Cola. Book design offered him a valuable creative outlet during the years he worked as a commercial illustrator.” See more.

The rest are from the New Yorker‘s “Briefly Noted” reviews — which, I’ll admit, inspired the title of this post. They pick four titles weekly, and while I’m sure many are great, actually great book design is rare. So to have four in two weeks … well, just had to say, “noted.” (The New Yorker is, of course, subscription — but there is a free account with limited options if you’d like to read their review.)

The first three are from the March 8th, 2021, issue, starting with In Memory of Memory:

The simplicity of the concentric rectangles — and “destination” dot — is mesmerizing.

Next, Cathedral:

Not a simple illustration in this case, and still an attention-getter in the background. Nice.

Next, my favorite of this set, The Weak Spot:

A very brief (176 page!) debut novel with hits-above-its-weight cover design. (Content, too, presumably…;)

Lastly, from the March 15th issue, Infinite Country:

Color and composition unite into something … infinitely good.

Enjoy.

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Peter Mendelsund’s The Look of the Book

From Bookshop.org’s description: “Why do some book covers instantly grab your attention, while others never get a second glance? Fusing word and image, as well as design thinking and literary criticism, this captivating investigation goes behind the scenes of the cover design process to answer this question and more.”

“As the outward face of the text, the book cover makes an all-important first impression. The Look of the Book examines art at the edges of literature through notable covers and the stories behind them, galleries of the many different jackets of bestselling books, an overview of book cover trends throughout history, and insights from dozens of literary and design luminaries.”

Looks like great stuff (if you’ll pardon the expression). Get it from Amazon Smile or Bookshop.org. (Via Kottke, unsurprisingly.)

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New Book Celebrates Risograph Printing

It took 850 days, 74 tubes of soy ink, fifteen colours, 660 masters, 690,000 sheets of paper, three fans, two digital Riso duplicators and four people to complete this 360-page book that focuses on one thing: the process of Risograph printing.

I have to admit: I hadn’t heard of risograph printing before — Wiki has a (very) brief intro — but the book looks like something very interesting indeed, along the lines of a Pantone catalog on steroids. Read more at Eye Magazine.

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American Alliance of Museums: Q&A with Book Designer

After reviewing hundreds of entries every year, the jury for AAM’s annual Museum Publications Design Competition awards only one publication with the Frances Smyth-Ravenel Prize for Excellence in Publication Design, recognizing it as the best submission overall. This year, the winner is David Levinthal: War, Myth, Desire, a publication of the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, designed by Design Monsters studio. We recently talked to the book’s designer, George Corsillo,to learn more about the concept behind his prizeworthy design: a four-volume retrospective of the artist David Levinthal’s photographs which took two years to complete.

Read on!

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Columbia Journalism Review on capitalizing “Black”

“At the Columbia Journalism Review, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Blackreflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.”

Read more of this timely and appropriate article (from a great and authoritative source.)