March 27, 2018 On Design Oliver Munday’s Graphic Design with a Conscience By Andrew Ridker Perhaps the most striking images in Oliver Munday’s new monograph, Don’t Sleep, appear just before the title page. On the left-facing page is a nineteenth-century map of the Senate floor. On the page opposite is an illustrated cross section of the hull of a slave ship, scaled to the same size as the Senate and in the exact same semicircle shape. This encapsulates Munday’s design work: arresting juxtapositions, an engagement with the political, and above all, a deliberate, understated presence. As heavy as the visuals are, Munday’s hand is light. The images speak for themselves. Don’t Sleep is a powerful survey of thirty-three-year-old Munday’s career thus far. The title, which asks readers to stay alert to the implicit and explicit messages of an image-saturated culture, also calls to mind “wokeness.” Though Munday is hesitant to call himself an activist, he readily acknowledges the role of design in various social movements, from May 1968 to Cold War Cuba. Munday’s editorial illustrations, posters, and book jackets draw attention to social-justice issues—and awareness is the first step in making change. He is after, as he says, “the thing that makes you stop and think for just one extra moment.” Read More
September 14, 2017 On Design The Art of Space Art By Kastalia Medrano Tim Pyle’s conception of the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Between 1952 and 1954, the Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun ran a popular series in Collier’s Weekly called “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!”, outlining a manifest-destiny approach to space, the moon, and Mars. The articles were prescient in their analysis of how we might colonize the stars, but what really brought the possibility of human spaceflight to life in the public consciousness were the illustrations: planets, rockets, human settlements. These were rendered by a trio of artists that included Chesley Bonestell, widely considered the father of what we’ve come to call space art. The genre soon bubbled over with breathless visual predictions of our ascent into outer space, wrought with glamor and a childlike wonder, like pulp-fiction covers for what the future was going to be. People have been painting celestial bodies for thousands of years, but only after World War II, as space programs flourished, did the field evolve into a thriving subgenre, and an occupation in its own right; with new technology came a new lust for imagery. NASA, founded in 1958, has commissioned space art since its inception, and along with the European Space Agency it’s sponsored artists’ residencies over the years. “It could be argued that NASA owes its very existence to space artists,” Jon Ramer, president of the International Association of Astronomical Artists, told me in an email. The IAAA currently stands at 120 members worldwide, and serves as a sort of hub connecting the community. Read More
September 13, 2016 On Design Flying Saucers Over the Art Department! By Jack Womack How the book designers of the fifties and sixties tackled alien invasions. A still from Forbidden Planet, 1956. It’s impossible to know what sort of cover design will make a book fly off the shelves. Through timidity, this often leads to a certain monotony in covers, especially when they’re genre specific—“If it worked before, it’ll have to work again, eventually.” At times the uniformity is comical: it’s hard for book people of a certain age not to remember, say, the gothic romance subgenre without bringing to mind the same cover that was on every one by the end of the sixties—a woman, at night, dashing (often in a white nightgown) from a darkened mansion in sinister woods. Familiarity bred contentment; every reader knew what to expect when they saw the lady running. Flying saucers as a phrase entered the modern English vocabulary at the end of June 1947, immediately after the initial sightings by Kenneth Arnold in Washington State—which, as it happened, turned out to be the first of thousands of such sightings. The subject was becoming more popular by the week, and publishing houses such as Henry Holt, Fawcett, and Citadel were quick to recognize the need for books on it. But what kind of a cover should go on a book about flying saucers? At the outset, there was no consensus as to what the saucers even actually looked like: they were described as blinking lights, purple blobs, flying wings, boomerangs, shiny metal balls, floating kerosene lamps, pie plates, hubcaps from an old Terraplane; in photos, during the first ten years, the most popular model resembled either the top of a chicken incubator, or part of the casing of a 1937 Electrolux vacuum cleaner. Read More
October 27, 2015 On Design Criterion at Thirty By Charlotte Strick I’d always thought that designing new packaging for a classic film was like designing a jacket for a new edition of a well-known book: both are associated, in the popular imagination, with familiar, even beloved, graphics. If the designer strays too far from the original vision, the potential for public outcry is high. But where a book offers visual freedom—our minds are free to imagine the scenes and the various characters—a movie comes with a profusion of visual material that’s not soon forgotten. There’s the original theatrical poster, and then, of course, there’s the very film itself, and all the iconic images we associate with it. For designers, translating a director’s vision is hard enough the first time. How do you do it again? The Criterion Collection is known for its impeccable taste in classic and contemporary films, and for the artful packaging that puts these films in a much-needed new light. Late last year, I sat down with their head art director of more than a decade, Sarah Habibi, and designer/art director Eric Skillman, who were celebrating the recent publication of a book they’d produced at breakneck speed in time for Criterion’s thirtieth anniversary: Criterion Designs, an illumination of their process in imagining some of the collection’s most successful projects. Read More
August 3, 2015 On Design The Font of Poetry, the Poetry of Font By Adrienne Raphel Adventures in typography. Photo: Willi Heidelbach I was a teenage font addict. On Microsoft Word I’d lovingly scroll through the drop-down font menu: Avenir Book, Baskerville, Goudy, Goudy Old Style. For every story or poem I started to write, I first spent hours choosing the font. The dystopian soap opera could only be in Geneva; surrealist time travel, Book Antiqua. In college, my writing was corralled into twelve-point Times New Roman, regardless of how beautiful it might have been in Hoefler Text. I chafed at this restriction, but a true typographical enthusiast finds ways to express her creativity. Font manipulation became a tool to avoid real editing. To make a paper longer, change the spaces to size fourteen; make the punctuation thinner to squeeze more into the page. Read More
April 10, 2015 On Design Anatomy of a Cover: The Complete Works of Flannery O’Connor By J. C. Gabel At the time of her death, at age thirty-nine, Flannery O’Connor had published only two novels, thirty-one short stories, and a small book’s worth of literary criticism and critical essays. “In most English classes,” she once wrote, “the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected.” O’Connor, of course, was referring to her readers experiencing the work, not picking it apart in a writers’ workshop. That same principle drove Charlotte Strick and June Glasson in their recent redesign of the covers of O’Connor’s five books. Strick, the former art director of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and current coprinciple of the design firm Strick&Williams (as well as the art editor of The Paris Review), approached Glasson, an illustrator, about the project in 2013. Four of the five redesigned jackets have been released, with the last coming next month. Glasson and Strick met through happenstance—a journey that began at a doctor’s office. “Years ago,” Strick says, “while absentmindedly flipping through a magazine in my doctor’s waiting room, I serendipitously stumbled upon a piece about June. I thought her work had a strange, seductive and unique beauty all its own.” In 2012, Strick commissioned Glasson to create illustrations to accompany an essay by author Rich Cohen about French-American pirate Jean Lafitte and 1800s piracy in New Orleans, which appeared in The Paris Review no. 201. This collaboration triggered Strick’s art-director instinct, and she returned to Glasson when it came time to reenvision O’Connor’s works. “June is capable of imbuing her paintings with a curious maleficence,” Strick told me. “She seemed up for the task of tackling O’Connor.” Read More