Daily Heller by Steven Heller

Last week, Mildred "Connie" Constantine died at 95. For the better part of her lifetime, she was the engine that drove the graphic, package, and poster design collections at the Museum of Modern Art during the 1950s and '60s. She founded the Ephemera Collection at MoMA and gave career-defining exhibits to the likes of Alvin Lustig and Bruno Munari. I met her when she was trawling for additions to the caricature and cartoon collections. She was an invaluable advocate of applied and decorative arts, and later, a champion of textiles and fiber arts.

For design historians, however, and even design practitioners, her greatest contributions were two books, which she co-authored and edited. Word and Image (above) was the catalog that helped put the MoMA poster collection on the map. For a long time the collection, which Constantine revived after a period of dormancy, was the flagship of the graphic design holdings, and continues to grow. Revolutionary Soviet Film Posters, co-authored with Alan M. Fern (then of the Library of Congress), was the first book to assemble the avant-garde design of the USSR that had long been banished from public view. This book arguably triggered the revival of Constructivist design (bottom) so popular in the 1980s and '90s and that remains an influence on contemporary practice. Thank you Connie.

12/17/2008 10:01:42 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) Comments [0]

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Window Wonderland
Posted by Steve

For the past three years, Saks Fifth Avenue has published a children's book that serves as the basis for their holiday windows (above and below). This year's volume, A Flake Like Mike by The Simpsons writer Mike Reiss, tells the story of a lacy snowflake who is shunned by the mass of lookalike flakes but who eventually leads a bloodless revolution against conformity with a smile on his face. Honored with his own parade, Mike is featured on the cover of "The Daily Flake," the local tabloid. Today, thanks to Mike, snow now floats down to the earth, flake by flake, instead of dropping in one big whomp. The book and windows are illustrated by Chris Capuozzo, who runs Intergalactico, a multimedia firm, and teaches in the MFA Designer as Author program. He portrays an abstract past in New York City, one where today's parents are young, dinosaurs roam, and aliens regularly visit Earth.

I asked Chris how he got the job: Through a friend's recommendation, Saks loved the illustration work I did for Nike's "Join Bode" campaign a few years back (promoting the U.S. Olympic skier Bode Miller).

How he got the idea: Growing up in Staten Island, a stone's toss from one of the biggest garbage dumps in the world, had an influence. Ever see the stuff that washes up in the tide line on a Staten Island beach? Tons of weird stuff. I've used mixed media collage for years and I love orchestrating and manipulating disparate fragments into pictures (god bless Photoshop).

What was the most fun: When I showed some proofs of the book to a 5-year-old friend and his mother. He was instantly captivated. Now, I want to do more of this.

Books | Events | Shopping

12/16/2008 8:02:21 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) Comments [3]

Friday, December 12, 2008

Comics as Literature?
Posted by Steve

For most of us (well, some of us) comics were our first introduction to narrative art (well, at least my first). So when the late 1960s rolled around and I was given a healthy diet of underground comics--notably R. Crumb, Kim Deitch, Yossarian, Spain Rodriguez and others--I was happy as could be.

Undergrounds took what had become a tamed medium and released it from the prison of puritanical hypocrisy. My reawakening came when the East Village Other published Gothic Blimp Works (below, bottom), a precursor to the underground comic book. But even after such a feast of anti-establishment fodder I became hungry for more "intellectual" fare. Enter Art Spiegelman. He'd been around, but he had not reached his stride until the publication of Arcade: The Comics Revue (below, top). It was about the time that the bridge between hippie and post-hippie comics was built when I became art director of the New York Times Op-Ed page. I asked Spieg to produce the page's first two-part comic (sans words), and also ran some Crumb images that came from Arcade. I also helped organize Print's first comics issue with Spiegelman as guest editor (cover, top).

This week Print has been running an online interview with Spiegelman on the occasion of the new publication of his first autobiographical book, Breakdowns. (If you have more time, check out my review at Design Observer.) The interview is well worth reading.

Want to weigh in on the Spiegelman interview? Leave a comment here!

Books | Comics | Illustration | Jewish Culture | Magazines

12/12/2008 11:20:27 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) Comments [1]

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Who Named the Kindle (and Why)?
Posted by steve

Ever wonder what Kindle, the name of the Amazon "e-book," means and where it come from? Well, even if you didn't, I'm going to tell you. The name was conceived by San Francisco designer Michael Cronan and according to his wife and partner Karen Hibma, this is how it was coined:

About three years ago, Cronan was asked by Lab126, an Amazon.com company, to name a consumer product line, which turned out to be the Kindle. Hibma says, "Michael came up with the name through our usual practice of exploring the depths of what the potential for the new product and product line could be and how the company wanted to present it. Jeff [Bezos, the CEO] wanted to talk about the future of reading, but in a small, not braggadocio way. We didn't want it to be 'techie' or trite, and we wanted it to be memorable, and meaningful in many ways of expression, from 'I love curling up with my Kindle to read a new book' to 'When I'm stuck in the airport or on line, I can Kindle my newspaper, favorite blogs or half a dozen books I'm reading.'"

Kindle means to set alight or start to burn, to arouse or be aroused, to make or become bright. The word's roots are from the Old Norse word kyndill, meaning Candle. "I verified that it had deep roots in literature," adds Hibma. "From Voltaire: 'The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others and it becomes the property of all.'" No other name could hold a candle to Kindle.

Cronan also named TIVO (and designed the logo) and currently has an exhibition of his paintings, "Sibyls and Prophets from the Sistine Chapel," at Vintage Berkeley, 2113 Vine St., Berkeley, California, until January 17.

What do you think about the name? Tell me on the blog!

Advertising | Books | Branding | Logos

12/10/2008 8:36:01 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) Comments [15]

Monday, November 24, 2008

An Illustrated Book Show
Posted by Steve

“The Book Show” is an exhibition of graphic novels, comics, and children’s books by students in the School of Visual Arts' MFA as Visual Essay department, curated by Marshall Arisman and Carl Nicholas Titolo. Books in the show include Alphabetic Ballyhoos by Anna Raff, which is a fresh take on both the conventional ABC book and medieval illuminated manuscripts (below middle); Edwin Vazquez's War Story, which illustrates his father’s experiences during the Vietnam War (below bottom); Joanna Neborsky’s Shmo, a book the author describes as "a guide to the great unknowns"; Sybille Schenker's The Way Things Run, a story inspired by marathon running; and Rich Tu’s Crispy Kid, the tale of a nine-year-old burn victim.

The exhibition also features the work of Rachel Hope Allison, Lisel Ashlock (below top), Joshua Bayer, Maria Berrio, You Byun, André da Loba, Matt Cavanaugh (above), Ray Jones, Yuriko Katori, YJ Lee, Youngsun Liu, John MacConnell, Heejin Roh, Nu Ryu, and Russ Spitkovsky.

"The Book Show" runs from November 21 to December 13, with a reception on November 25 from 6 to 8 pm at the Visual Arts Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th Floor, New York City. (Closed from Wednesday, November 26 through Sunday, November 30, for the Thanksgiving holiday.)

Books | Events | Exhibitions | Illustration

11/24/2008 9:07:45 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) Comments [0]

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Still Evergreen
Posted by Steve

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This past Sunday morning I heard an NPR interview with Barney Rosset, the former publisher and founder of Grove Press and Evergreen Review magazine (cover above by Paul Davis), who aggressively challenged the puritanical mores of 1960s America.

As Chip McGrath in the New York Times wrote:

"In its heyday during the 1960s, Grove Press was famous for publishing books nobody else would touch. The Grove list included writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara, and Malcolm X (his autobiography), and the books, with their distinctive black and white covers, were reliably ahead of their time and often fascinated by sex.

The same was, and is, true of Grove’s maverick publisher, Barney Rosset, who loved highbrow literature but also brought out a very profitable line of Victorian spanking porn."

When I was 16 years old, I did everything imaginable to get my drawings printed in Evergreen Review, which already published Robert Grossman, Brad Holland, Tomi Ungerer, Edward Sorel, and others. By the time I was 19, I was briefly its art director (the cover of one of my issues--the one with the lion--is below). I met with Rosset a few times during my tenure, and once was when he told me he lost all the mechanicals for a book I designed for him about the film Last Tango in Paris. Fortunately I made photostats of all the layouts and we printed from that (needless to say, the typography was a mess).

Tomorrow Mr. Rosset will receive a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation to honor his groundbreaking legal battles to defy the censors and publish uncensored versions of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, among other important literary events. He is also the subject of a documentary titled Obscene.

Mr. Rosset is still editing Evergreen Review, this time online.

Books | Daily Heller Vaults | Illustration | Magazines

11/18/2008 2:07:57 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) Comments [0]

Monday, November 17, 2008

Glaser is Drawing
Posted by steve

When Milton Glaser draws he thinks. This is the concept behind his elegant new book Milton Glaser: Drawing is Thinking, his most personal book to date. It is a symphony of drawing themes and styles juxtaposed in unique pairings to impart the emotional aspirations of Glaser's art rather than the client-driven function of his illustration. From representation to abstraction, from portraits to still lifes, this is a book about the joy of creating images on paper, free from the strictures of the marketplace.

"In Drawing is Thinking," says the publisher, "the drawings depicted are meant to be experienced sequentially, so that the reader or viewer not only follows Glaser through these pages, but comes to inhabit his mind. The drawings represent. . . the author's commitment to the fundamental idea that drawing is not simply a way to represent reality, but, as the title suggests, a way to understand and experience the world."

Books | Illustration

11/17/2008 1:42:58 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00) Comments [2]

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Chwast Versus Ogden Nash
Posted by Steve

Thanks to Art Chantry, design archeologist par excellence, I am now the proud owner of Funniest Verses of Ogden Nash, illustrated by Seymour Chwast in 1968, and published by Hallmark Editions. It features such wry witticisms as "Lines on Facing Forty": I have a bone to pick with Fate. / Come here and tell me, girlie, / Do you think my mind is maturing late, / or simply rotted early? (image below, top). Then, there's "Assorted Chocolates": If some confectioner were willing / To let the shape announce the filling. / We'd encounter fewer assorted chocs, / Bitten into and returned to the box. (image below, bottom)

There's more, like "Ask Daddy, He Won't Know," "Lather as You Go," and "The Hat's Got My Tongue," all splendidly illuminated in Chwast's early, colorful linear style.

Happily, if you look, / you may find the book. / The online dealer is not a crook, / and his prices do not rook, / so surf here yourself to get the book / I guarantee it will look very good in that special nook.

Books | Daily Heller Vaults | Illustration

10/22/2008 9:28:56 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) Comments [1]