Steven Heller (1)Rezensionen

If you like the Taschen advertising books, or some of their Jim Heiman titles, I think you would enjoy this one. Some of the examples are striking, and I keep going back to them.

This was a really fascinating read. I'd regrettably never done much digging into the history of graphic design, and this book introduces that topic in a really engaging format. I pretty much devoured it in a couple days. It's also a beautifully designed book in and of itself, very inspirational and I'm sure I'll be going back to it again and again.

This fascinating and full-color volume presents a superb collection of 270 jackets promoting a wide range of books--from high-brow novels and biographies to mass-market romances and mysteries--while showcasing the talent of some of the era's most exciting illustrators and designers.

I was interested to read this as Heller was on the ground at a time in design history when significant change was happening. Call it the first-wave of the Democratization of Design. Photo-type and press-type (Letraset) opened the doors to the public’s ability to “set” type without the need for traditional (costly professional) sources.

That written, I will admit I have not finished it.

A comment on the design. It’s an odd set of choices. Strictly from a book design standpoint, the stingy margins seem at once to be expected –get as many words on a page as possible to keep the page-count down– but also a flaw given that this is a book at least tangentially, about graphic design. Following on to that, and more problematically, it appears the text is set in 8- or 9-point Centaur. Rather small for running text. Further to that, and perhaps most curious, it’s being set in Bruce Rogers’ famous Bible face which seems incongruous given the title. In the very least BR’s “white letter Venetian” is designed to be read best from maybe as small as 12- to better at 16-point. Couple that very traditional, arguably “fine press” choice of faces with a forgettable sans serif display (one of Adobe’s wood types?) and it’s a weird look. Iirc, Heller didn’t have anything to do with the design. It was done by someone on Louise Filli’s staff (Filli is Heller’s spouse). Writing as a book designer, I can’t say it’s success. It tired my eye to read which is why I bailed. That written, tons of color photos and examples of work. So there’s that in the plus column.

What I did read was fascinating enough. It certainly described the possibilities for self-invention in a not-yet-entirely “financialized” New York in the late 60s/early 70s. There was still transgressive grit, protest on the right side of history, a nascent punk rock scene, ground zero for art and opportunity before the computer leveled the landscape of possibility and everyone’s tool became a brushed aluminum enclosure and a screen of various dimension. (Ick.) Imagine the pre-digital world with thousands of different ways of making design and illustration, dozens of ways of getting ink on paper, and myriad possibilities untethered to a SaS subscription.

Interestingly, Heller was mentored by, and at times teamed with, the illustrator Brad Holland whose work I’ve been familiar with since the early 80s pouring over back-issues of “Communication Arts” as an ad intern. I’m probably in the 2% that would recognize that Holland it seems was a fan of Leonard Baskin. Several of his illustrations shown in the book are less a “nod” to Baskin’s line work, than direct stylistic copies of LB’s grotesque, chimeric imagery. Huh.

Well, so maybe Centaur makes sense? Baskin and the Western Mass. Fine Press scene at the same time were heavily reliant on Centaur, and certainly Gehenna was (along with Palatino). Is there a thread there? Eh, probably not.

Anyway, there you go. Interesting content if poorly presented. Lots of good pictures.

Awful unless you're a supporter of Screw and this egocentric person.

A very thorough history of hate symbols, particularly the swastika. An important read, sadly still, in these times.½

This book has been updated (2019) to reflect the changes since the White Christian Nationalist movement became more visible to the general public.

This book has been updated (from 2010 edition) to reflect the changes since the White Christian Nationalist movement became more visible to the general public. A must read.

This book has been updated (2019) to reflect the changes since the White Christian Nationalist movement became more visible to the general public.

Certainly an interesting collection of projects, but the process of reading this frustrated me: I wanted to see and experience each of them.

I'm a long-time fan of Gorey, but had no idea about his long career designing books for other authors. I feel I ought to have realised—his John Bellairs' covers are so obviously his—but somehow I failed to make the mental leap. And as I pored through the book, I noticed cover after cover of book that I'd owned, or read—Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, or deCoulange's The Ancient City, where the cover is really the only thing I remember about it, but I would never have known they were his.

The short text at the beginning is adequate, but a fuller volume with more discussion would have appealed to me (if not to all). I was pleased to learn about Gorey's debt to Edward Ardizzione, if only because it reminded me who Edward Ardizzione is ... in my opinion, the high-water mark of Children's book illustration (I prefer gentle and illustrative to showy and garish) are his charming black-and-whites, as well as those of Pat Marriott (for Joan Aiken's novels), Pauline Baynes, Garth Williams, and Robin Jacques. (Maurice Sendak is a genius and in his own category!)

Several of the books illustrated were unknown to me, but looked like my kind of thing—so now I've also found a new source of reading material, as apparently the editor of Anchor Books and I have similar taste.

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).

Lots of eye candy! Not only the scripts, but also the gorgeous ephemera they're printed on.

Funky, fun, makes you thirsty.

Paul Rand (1914-1996) was a pioneering figure in American graphic design whose career spanned almost seven decades. Always enquiring and investigating, he explored the formal vocabulary of European avant-garde art movements and synthesised them to produce a distinctive graphic language.

Excelente recopilación de obras de importantes caricaturistas.

Beautiful art deco graphic arts

A book not really about conventional typefaces as about art and artists and their experiments with words, word forms, and unusual layouts and creative, non-commercial graphic design. It's almost a coffee table book, nice and large and well-printed.

Excellent design ideas. Can pick this up again any time. Creative and fun.

shelved in: Interiors Library - at: B17

[Graphic d]esign is not decoration but, rather, the intelligent solution of conceptual problems; it is the manipulation of type, image, and, most of all, the presentation of ideas that convey a message.

It was from IDEO CEO Tim Brown that I first heard stressed that design is not a tweak, made near the end of a process to fine-tune or make pretty, but rather is a substantive, beginning-to-end way of thinking. It discourages me to see that designers still have to fight that characterization. But this book encourages me, with its collection of Q&As with ~80 designers, and hundreds of full-color examples of their work, that showcase the substantive contributions of graphic design.

The subtitle says it’s “A Guide to Careers in Design,” but I think it’s closer to “An Exposure to Careers in Design,” specifically graphic design. It’s not a mind-focusing, how-to book; it’s a mind-blowing primer on possibilities. It exposes the potential design student to a wide variety of content such as design genres and sub-genres, both print and digital, from fonts to images to layouts and entire installations. It touches on design markets like publishing, packaging, commerce and advertising. It also considers the workplace experience as an employee vs. independent vs. with partner, and how to stay inspired and motivated.

As a reader and writer, I enjoy author interviews for their behind-the-curtain peeks at other creatives at work. So it was for me with this book, too, where the designers’ curiosity and creativity inspired more of my own.

(Review based on a copy of the book provided by the publisher.)

New in the "100 Ideas that Changed..." series, this book demonstrates how ideas influenced and defined graphic design, and how those ideas have manifested themselves in objects of design. The 100 entries, arranged broadly in chronological order, range from technical (overprinting, rub-on designs, split fountain); to stylistic (swashes on caps, loud typography, and white space); to objects (dust jackets, design handbooks); and, methods (paper cut-outs, pixelation). Written by one of the world's leading authorities on graphic design and lavishly illustrated, the book is both a great source of inspiration and a provocative record of some of the best examples of graphic design from the last hundred years.

It was just over 60 years ago that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, two of the world's most powerfully imposing leaders, died and their regimes crumbled. One of the most illuminating facts about this dark era of history is the way in which these tyrants, and others like them, used graphic design as an instrument of power. But how did these regimes succeed in influencing the minds of millions? It is in the visual language the imagery, the typeface, the color palette that the answers truly take shape.

Phaidon Press is pleased to announce the publication of Iron Fists: Branding the 20th Century Totalitarian State by Steven Heller, the first illustrated survey of the propaganda art, graphics, and artifacts created by the totalitarian governments of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Communist regimes of the USSR and China. The book sets the disturbingly powerful graphic devices in historical context.

The infamous symbols produced by these regimes are recognized universally: the swastika and gothic typography of Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's streamlined Futurist posters and Black Shirt uniforms, the stolid Social Realism of Stalin's USSR and Mao s Little Red Book. Author Steven Heller, a world-renowned design historian, who has long collected two-and-three-dimensional examples from this period, reveals how these symbols were used in a wide variety of propaganda, from posters, magazines and advertisements to uniforms, flags and figurines.

In addition to using logos and symbols, all of the leaders researched in this book deliberately cultivated certain personal characteristics (Hitler's mustache, Mussolini's baldness, Lenin's goatee, Mao's smile), in an attempt to transform their corporeal selves into icons. These regime personalities were blanketed across public venues, from monuments to postage stamps. The Nazis, for example, installed an intricate graphic program that featured Hitler s face as a ''logo,'' a system remarkably similar to modern corporate identity creations.

By integrating color images of artifacts with archival black and white photographs, Iron Fists offers unique insight into how these regimes were effective in using graphic design to further their causes. In the section on Fascist Italy, for example, there are numerous reproductions of stylized posters, magazines and handbooks designed to excite impressionable youth. Heller then connects this printed propaganda with historic photographs of Italian children dressed as men prepared for battle stoic and serious their small hands clutching guns instead of toys.

Divided into four sections by regime, Heller also explores the color systems (each dictatorship had a distinctive palette), typefaces, and slogans used to both rally and terrorize the populace. In result, he demonstrates how these elements were used to ''sell'' the totalitarian message. The first extensively illustrated book on the subject, Iron Fists will have an obvious appeal to graphic designers but will also be an important contribution to the study of the history of the totalitarian state.

If you're interested in the history of the book, then this is a must-have for your library: beautiful large color photographs of book covers from the 1920s - 1950s, artistic treasures.