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Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Pardon Me Turkey
Posted by steve
This is that time of year (or time of term) when the President of the United States exercises his power to show mercy in the form of a pardon. Traditionally, one of the first of the season is an American turkey. In honor of Thanksgiving, let's take a little time to celebrate the bird that stuffs the nation (if you're not vegan) and the POTUSes who have spared the symbolic few. If you want to learn more about such acts of executive clemency, visit Thanksgiving at the White House. Incidentally, the good pilgrims at Print have released me from the stocks, I mean blog, so there will be no new Daily Heller until the Monday after gobble-day.
Animals | Politics
11/26/2008 9:05:03 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Flora Stora
Posted by steve
Jim Flora was the man behind the covers of Columbia Records' jazz 78 rpm records in the 1940s. As I wrote in his New York Times obituary, "Flora, a jazz fan who was working in
advertising at the time, sent a proposal to Columbia, suggesting ways
to improve the packaging of jazz recordings. He was hired almost
immediately and began producing ideas for covers in the company's small
art department, quickly working his way up to being an art director
with responsibility for jazz imagery." Today his brute cartoon style is
the inspiration for illustrators and painters alike. His work is kept
alive in large part from the efforts of musicologist and pop cultist Irwin Chusid,
who has opened an online store, Little Shop of Flora's, to sell books,
calendars, and note cards featuring Flora's work. With the holidays and
the economic downturn fast upon us, here are some lovely, low-priced gift ideas for Flora fans and wannabes, as well as some slightly higher priced prints (below).
Design | Illustration | Music | Shopping
11/25/2008 5:15:46 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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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)
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Friday, November 21, 2008
If It Was On TV, Then It's Gotta Be Good!
Posted by steve
For years now, advertisements have featured a logo with the outline of a television tube, usually in red with white letters reading "As Seen On TV," as the ultimate badge of promotional credibility. The "As Seen On TV" emblem echoes the logo of TV Guide, the most trusted name in TV guides, and gives the impression that the product or service being advertised is endorsed--much like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval--by the magazine. And despite the emergence of the educated consumer and a healthy skepticism of anything advertised on television, "As Seen On..." continues to be a trusted brand, even though everyone knows that anyone with money can buy time on TV to sell almost anything. So what's going to happen in February 2009 when the venerable, bulging TV screen will go the way of the transistor? (Analog television owners can buy a box to convert their TV, but by now, analog sets have become a rarity.) Can this trusted logo be adapted to the rectangular flat screen format and continue to be as credible? I doubt it. So let's take the time remaining to pay homage to "As Seen On TV," knowing we will never see its like again.
Advertising | Branding | Logos | Television
11/21/2008 8:37:06 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Thursday, November 20, 2008
Obsessing Over Shopping Carts
Posted by steve
 Julian Montague, a designer in Buffalo, New York, is obsessed with shopping carts.
He writes on his website, "Over the
last several decades, the stray shopping cart has quietly become
an integral part of the urban and suburban landscapes of the
industrialized world. To the average person, the stray shopping
cart is most often thought of as a signifier of urban blight
or as an indicator of a consumer society gone too far. Unfortunately,
the acceptance of these oversimplified designations has discouraged
any serious examination of the stray shopping cart phenomenon."
He has made it his mission to categorize "stray shopping carts" according to an intricate identification system (here). Enter at your own risk, his notions are addictive.
Starting on November 21 through December 18, two pieces from "The Stray Shopping Cart Project" will be in a group show, "Sign / Age: Lost in the Supermarket" at Armand Bartos Fine Art in New York, including William Eggleston, Martha Friedman, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and more. "It seems crazy that my work is in a show with all these huge artists," says Montague, "I'm hoping the gallery people won't change their minds about me before the opening."
His project is also featured in The Design Entrepreneur by Lita Talarico and me.
  
Exhibitions | Street Art
11/20/2008 8:08:18 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Purging Picasso
Posted by steve
After complaints to the city's Buildings Department and concern from the
Ukrainian community in New York City's East Village, Cooper Union removed a large banner from its façade showing Pablo Picasso's 1953 portrait of Josef Stalin (above). The work (below) was part of a solo installation by Lene Berg, a Norwegian artist, who included it as part of her exhibit, "Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of Woman with Mustache," featuring projects that reflects on the artistic and cultural works produced during the Cold War–era. "Berg's exhibition provokes discussion on the relationships between art and politics, in recent history and in the contemporary moment," states the press release.
According to Ms. Berg, who lives in Berlin, the removal occurred without her knowledge or any warning. Community leaders complained that this year was the 75th anniversary of a famine imposed by Stalin that killed millions of Ukrainians. Ironically, when this portrait was drawn, it was frowned upon by the Communists as being an unsympathetic depiction of the Russian dictator, which prompted this response from Picasso: "Can you imagine if I had done the real Stalin, such as he has become,
with his wrinkles, his pockets under the eyes, his warts. A portrait in
the style of Cranach! Can you hear them scream? 'He has disfigured
Stalin! He has aged Stalin!'"
On November 14, the New York Civil Liberties Union issued a press release with a letter to the Bloomberg administration asking them to explain the removal of the banners from Cooper Union's façade ( click here). And for more information read here and here (photo below by Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times).
Politics | Propaganda | Signage
11/19/2008 7:27:13 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Still Evergreen
Posted by Steve
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)
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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)
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Friday, November 14, 2008
Putting the Picture in Politics
Posted by Steve
Tomorrow--Saturday, November 15--the Parsons Illustration Department is hosting Picturing Politics (organized by Nora Krug) at the New School Tishman Auditorium from 1 to 5:30 pm. Admission is free. (Image above by Guy Billout.) The event is described thus: Illustrative responses to world events, large scale and small, have an
effect both visceral and intimate. PICTURING POLITICS explores the
current state of political and social visual commentary. The
Illustration Program of Parsons The New School for Design and the
Department of Politics of The New School for Social Research jointly
present an afternoon of reflections on the intersection of art and
politics.
Also on view in conjunction with the symposium is a reception for an exhibition of illustrated covers for Der Spiegel magazine that opens on November 14th, 6pm, at Parsons, 2 W 13th street, 8th floor. The exhibit will be on view until November 30th. If you are in Santa Monica this weekend, check out Robbie Conal's exhibit of political commentaries at Track 16 Gallery. Or if you simply want to curl up with some reading (and viewing) matter on political and apolitical illustration, check out the following: Varoom magazine, edited by Adrian Shaughnessy; 3x3 magazine (image below by Polly Becker), edited by Charles Hively; All the Art That's Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn't): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page, by Jerelle Kraus; or Illustration: A Visual History, by me and Seymour Chwast.
Events | Exhibitions | Illustration | Magazines
11/14/2008 10:08:39 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Thursday, November 13, 2008
Get Home Delivery
Posted by steve
If you missed the Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition (and the incredible examples of pre-fab houses in the gallery and outside) that recently closed at MoMA, you can still get the exceptional catalog edited by Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen. This well-designed document (see here) profiles the leaders in prefabrication from Charles and Ray Eames to Buckminster Fuller and many more from the 1920s to the present, including the Lustron house (above), which never needed to be painted. For those who like playing trivia guessing games, the book is filled with facts, including the answer to the riddle, "Who designed the Lincoln Logs toy?" Okay, I won't keep you guessing ... John Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright's son.
Design | Exhibitions
11/13/2008 8:41:04 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Macabre but Fascinating
Posted by Steve
Guess whose face (above) this is? If you said Abe Lincoln, you'd be correct, and it's one of 60 life and death masks in the collection of Laurence Hutton, the literary editor of Harper's magazine from 1886 to 1898, and donated to the Princeton University Libraries. "Hutton traveled around the world to collect these plaster casts,
looking in obscure curiosity shops and major museums, where many
curators granted Hutton permission to have copies made from their masks," explains the museum blog. "The collection began almost by accident while shopping in New York
City. Hutton was interrupted by a ragged boy trying to sell a cast of a
human face, unquestionably that of Benjamin Franklin (below). He purchased it
for two shillings and offered another quarter if the boy showed him
where he found it. In a couple of ash-barrels on Second Street were
dozens of casts of Washington, Sheridan, Cromwell, and many others,
which Hutton carted home." The rest, including the death mask of Sir Issac Newton (bottom), can be seen here. And while somewhat macabre, they are indeed quite fascinating.  
Museums | Obit
11/12/2008 8:02:26 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Tuesday, November 11, 2008
A River Runs Through It
Posted by Steve
The Esopus River is in upstate New York. But Esopus magazine is available here and here
on newsstands. The Fall 2008 issue of the magazine features a wealth of
exciting art and literary content and special printing effects, not to
mention its regular music CD (this one, devoted to "Advice").
Ever since Esopus began in Fall 2003, the bi-annual magazine edited and designed
by Tod Lippy has attracted experimental magazine lovers. Each issue is
more than a good read (or look), it is a kinetic experience, full of unusual content and exemplary special effects. For my money, it just may be
the most innovative print magazine of the 21st century. For back issues,
go here.
Magazines
11/11/2008 5:24:01 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Monday, November 10, 2008
Who Designed the Obama O?
Posted by Steve
Who designed the Obama O? John Maas on bnet.com has the answer: The Obama logo was created early in 2007, through a
collaboration between Chicago firms Sender LLC and MO/DE. Chief Obama
strategist David Axelrod gave the agencies a mandate: design a logo that would
evoke "a new sense of hope," as he told the Chicago
Business Journal. After working feverishly, the design was introduced on February 10, 2007.
Sol Sender discusses the "brand development" of the most memorable political logo in the past 50 years here. And MO/DE addresses its contributions to the campaign here with a video here. Bravo to both creators for breaking the conventional mold. Speaking
of molds, Hilary Ross and Jim Lennox of Shickshinny, Pa., painted the
Obama Hope poster (100 by 70 foot) on their rural field (below). "When
we were on the ground applying the colors, we couldn't tell how
beautiful this mix of color fields was," Hilary told me. "Only when we
climbed the tree did we know what we had done."
Branding | Design | Politics
11/10/2008 9:25:50 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Thursday, November 06, 2008
He's Spreading Disease
Posted by Steve
Smartly designed, sometimes comic posters warning against syphilis, gonorrhea, malaria, and tuberculosis were once as common as all of the above. In An Iconography of Contagion: An Exhibition of 20th Century Health Posters at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington (through December 19), these and more recent posters about AIDS show how the advertising industry and public health officials have long fought battles against ignorance in the war against contagious disease. For more on the exhibit, read Amanda Schaffer's New York Times article or download the catalog. And for information on William Helfand's 2003 exhibit To Your Health: An Exhibition of Posters for Contemporary Public Health Issues at the National Library of Medicine, go here.
Advertising | Exhibitions | Posters | Science
11/6/2008 8:10:34 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Tuesday in the Park with Zaha
Posted by Steve
The other day, the School of Visual Arts Designer as Author students visited the Zaha Hadid-designed Chanel Mobile Art display in Central Park's Rumsey Playfield. It was a gorgeous fall morning, leaves falling from trees painted with oranges, reds, siennas, and fading greens. The 7,500 square foot orb is filled with installations inspired by the quilted Chanel bag (bottom) and perfume pervades the air. A personal tour is narrated by the deep yet dulcet tones of Jeanne Moreau "discussing everything from sex and love to the secrets at the bottom of a woman's handbag," writes The New York Times. However, with everyone listening to their own prompts (i.e. "now walk with me to the stairs, and turn left") on individualized MP3 devices, visitors became willing zombies, walking slowly, mindlessly to Moreau's resolute commands. Some of the artworks were clever (a series of cardboard boxes, below, with witty videos projected from above showing naked people frolicking and assaulting one another with Chanel bags) and some were more tritely surreal. There was also a hint of the 1964 New York World's Fair to be found in the space-age orb that seemed to be plunked down from the heavens in the anomalous surround. The students left with mixed feelings. The morning was blissful and beautiful enough, but this monument to high-end commercialism (guarded by Chanel-clad docents) at such a critical period of economic distress seemed a tad out of touch with reality. But maybe that's the point.
Design | Exhibitions | Shopping
11/5/2008 8:18:13 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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What Comes After C? TD!
Posted by Steve
Just when I got used to the clunky and bulky red "C" logo for Commerce
Bank (above), they pulled a bait and switch on me. This past weekend, the
red and blue turned into the green of TD (below),
which bought Commerce for $7 billion earlier this year. In the snap of a finger (or a switch of a light), all the branches
in Manhattan changed the logo and color scheme to dollar green. But in
case you were worried how this would affect the celebrity spokespeople,
Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa, they are being kept on, just like free
coin counting machines.
Branding | Logos | Signage
11/5/2008 6:28:42 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Election Day Memories
Posted by steve
It's hard to believe that Election Day 2008 is finally upon us. The logos below, including candidates who were once shoo-ins, others
who were might-have-beens, and still others who never-have-been-nor-will-be
(who in tarnation is Duncan Hunter?) serve as a reminder of all the
hub and hubbub of the past 18 months. It is
sobering to note that from the first category, the
once-apparent-shoo-in Hillary Clinton was not the first almost-was
woman candidate for president of the United States. Belva Ann Lockwood
(above) ran for the highest office in 1884 and 1888 (before women even
had the right to vote). Lockwood was a follower of women's rights
activist Susan B. Anthony of silver dollar fame and the second woman, after Victoria Woodhull,
to run on the National Equal Rights Party ticket. Although she received
a number of votes, they were never counted. Supporters had seen ballots
destroyed and called upon Congress to investigate voter fraud. Lockwood lost
the elections but successfully practiced law for 43 years.
Election | Homage
11/4/2008 4:44:45 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Monday, November 03, 2008
Fins and Chrome, Ooh La La
Posted by steve
"To call Art Fitzpatrick an automobile illustrator," writes Dave Caldwell in The New York Times, "is to leave half of the canvas blank." Mr. Fitzpatrick is the man behind the chrome when it comes to selling cars in dreamlike illustrations "pitching a carefree lifestyle." His luminescent ads for Life, Look,
and the Saturday Evening Post for Pontiac Bonnevilles and
Catalinas created the aura for American behemoth automobiles (and
influenced Bruce McCall's parodies (bottom) in " The Last Dream-O-Rama.")
The Times refers to him as "the Michelangelo of the Muscle Car," but
more than that, he is the chronicler of the American Dream. See his
recent set of Fins and Chrome U.S. stamps below.
Advertising | Illustration
11/3/2008 5:50:03 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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