Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

Lorca: Three Tragedies Alvin Lustig The 1953 paperback cover for Lorca: Three Tragediesdesigned by Alvin Lustig ( 1915 – 1955 ) ...

experiment with graphic forms. New Directions’ eccentric list of reprinted contemporary classics, which featured authors such as ...

The New Classics succeeded where other popular literary series, including the Modern Library and Everyman’s Library, had failed. ...

Decorative Book Jackets^207 W. A. Dwiggins In the early 1920 s, when William Addison Dwiggins ( 1880 – 1956 ) was in his forties ...

But Dwig did not follow the rules. His longtime friend and collaborator Dorothy Abbe once said that he had arrived at his own de ...

rendered by hand; given the extant physical evidence, many were done without a single mistake (when mistakes did occur, he simpl ...

work stands up not as nostalgia, but for its invention. Even the book jackets, which are stylistically locked in time, could, wi ...

Merle Armitage’s Books^211 Merle Armitage Merle Armitage ( 1893 – 1975 ) taught himself to design sets and costumes for the thea ...

books evidence a formal bridge between celebrated classicists, like Bruce Rogers and T. M. Cleland, with modernists like Herbert ...

sans serif typefaces, custom-made hand letters, and bold pictorial images. He imbued in each book a certain monumentality that u ...

developed by Loewy and other industrial designers in the 1930 s was as concerned with veneer as with function, and that was echo ...

About U.S.^215 Lester Beall, Brownjohn Chermayeff Geismar, Herb Lubalin, Gene Federico In 1955 Aaron Burns ( 1922 – 1991 ) was t ...

Gene Federico’s discourse on the Love of Apples,an exercise to see how close he could touch slugs of type without using a razor ...

Ha Ha Ha: He Laughs Best Who Laughs Last^217 Lou Dorfsman The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was the foremost American telev ...

a typeface as novelty or decoration simply to grab attention, or abused a photograph, painting, or drawing merely for shock valu ...

Going Out^219 Gene Federico Good graphic design was long an exception to the rule in American advertising. Beginning at the turn ...

“Lester Beall opened my eyes to the idea that type could be used to emphasize the message,” Federico said about one of American ...

Man with the Golden Arm^221 Saul Bass There are two Hollywoods. One, the land of fantasy and glitz. The other, the land of formu ...

which were decidedly unique compared to the mundane lettering superimposed over backgrounds common in Hollywood movies at that t ...

all aspects of a movie should fit together like pieces of a puzzle. “In every title I’ve done, I’ve been very conscious of the f ...