As a young child, Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), born Leah Berliawsky, immigrated to the United States from Kiev, then part of the tumultuous Russian Empire (and the capital of present-day Ukraine). She and her family settled in Maine, where she adopted the more American name, Louise. After her 1920 marriage, Nevelson enmeshed herself in the New...
In 1975, Takenobu Igarashi created the poster “Graphic Designers on the West Coast” to promote a publication that introduced American graphic designers from the West Coast to Japanese audiences. Igarashi’s simple composition is enhanced by the sculptural, three dimensional quality of letterforms that playfully refer the initials of the designers’ names featured in the book....
In 2012, under the direction of Stephen Frykholm, Herman Miller, Inc. solicited proposals from a group of international graphic designers for a limited edition poster campaign that would highlight ten of their iconic products still in production. Ten posters, produced in a edition of ten copies of each, were printed and exhibited in a small...
During the second World War, the French city of Le Havre was severely bombed. August Perret, a pioneering French modernist architect, was tasked with rebuilding the city. Perret’s reconstruction is considered exceptional for its seamless integration of the city’s extant historic structures with modern concrete construction and design innovations. Perret’s new buildings for Le Havre...
Many graphic designers have explored the graphic possibilities of lithography by combining it with photography. Among those was E. McKnight Kauffer, an American designer who moved to London just before the First World War and stayed until the advent of the second. Kauffer often combined illustration with halftone reproductions of photographic elements, and he remained committed...
Ivan Chermayeff’s famous poster uses a system of found typography to represent the gathering of design professionals at the International Design Conference at Aspen. Chermayeff uses luggage tags to represent the array of countries from which the attendees hail. Ellen Lupton is Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Director of the...
Russian-born designer Alexander Gelman worked in the United States during the 1990s and early 2000s. His simple icons strive not so much to capture the essence of a subject, but rather to offer an off-kilter view of it. Here, a table lamp represents a poetry reading. The illustration is, one might say, beside the point....
For her poster campaign for the Ad Council of Japan on the theme “Media Literacy Is an Imagination,” Shiro Shita Saori turned to the classic Japanese proverb of the three wise monkeys, who embody the maxim “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” This poster plays on the first element of the maxim,...
We see posters not only with our eyes but with our bodies. In this sense, we respond physically to the taut pose of the elegant athlete in Ladislav Sutnar’s 1958 poster for Addo-X. Sutnar created a bold new logotype for the Swedish office machine brand in 1956; he also designed numerous posters and advertisements for...
