‘A typeface designed to reflect the aesthetic qualities of Soviet Union product design and manufacture. The typeface uses a unilateral x-height, cap height and faux Cyrillic to create a blocky, angular and awkward response. To allude to the dated methods of production, I produced the entire face as printing blocks.’
Andy Barnes’ Eastern Block typeface. Website here.
Found via Arts Thread
‘Avant-garde German artists were now branded both enemies of the state and a threat to German culture.’
In 1937, the Nazi party hosted ‘Entartete Kunst.’ This traveling exhibition showcased modern art as the work of madmen, ‘degenerates’ out to destroy the world.
Confiscated art – works of Kirchner, Nolde, Beckmann, Ernst, Chagall, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Dali, Klee, Kandinsky, Lissitzky, Grosz and many others – filled the show. After, the pieces were either destroyed or auctioned off.
For more about Entartete Kunst, watch David Grubin’s powerful 1993 Degenerate Art documentary here. Read more here and here. The show’s exhibition catalog is posted here.
Art, ideas, original thoughts: All dangerous.
This past weekend I saw a documentary on The Inquisition. Things such as inquisitions, persecutions – Entartete Kunst, McCarthyism – cycle throughout history.
What beliefs, doctrines and laws exist today that limit freedom, individuality and progress?
The concept of salad dressing – oil and water – is the basis for the magic we call printing. I learned this a long time ago, in a class. Or something.
Also, years ago, learned that this stuff is pretty much one of the few things that will remove printing ink from skin.
Pictured, the typographic work of UK-based Craig Ward.
‘Vorticism was a radical art movement that shone briefly but brightly in the years before and during World War I.’
A few months back, I picked up Black Sparrow Press’ reprints of Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticist journal Blast Magazine. Vorticism was the British entry into the realm of modern art.
There were only two issues – which ‘blasted’ old Edwardian forms in favor of the new machine aesthetic that was about to take over the world.
Out with the old, in with the new, as it were.
The two issues of Blast – there were only two – are available for browsing at issuu. Check them out here and here.
I see a connection between Lewis’ work and the original production design of TRON. But that may just be me.
There is also a retrospective now going on at the Tate. Video referencing the work of Vorticist practitioner Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915), below.
‘Before there were photocopiers, scanners and printers, there was the Ditto Machine (a.k.a. spirit duplicator), produced by the Illinois-based Ditto Corporation; originally introduced in 1923.’ –mnn
Clifford the Big Red Dog was supposed to be red. But in the handout I got in kindergarten, he was purple.
So was my introduction to the Ditto Machine – a device used to replicate most of the paperwork I’d used in elementary school.
Some of my earliest experiences as a ‘graphics’ guy was playing with one of these machines – seeing what it could reproduce and what it couldn’t. It couldn’t reproduce much. The copies were so smudgy, Dittos were grunge before grunge was grunge.
And the smell of the purple ink was incredible. Fruity and chemically at the same time! Tho it turns out ink ingredients – isopropanol and methanol – are toxic substances. Who knew? [Read more →]
‘Paul Renner’s Futura interpreted in metal’
Handmade model with engine. Cesar Santos Perez’s final project from my most-recent experimental typography course at Ai Sacramento.
‘What I did on my summer vacation’
Last week, I spent four full days with a handful of some really cool teens.
I found myself saying, ‘Yes, I’ll do it. What is it?’ to teaching a week-long Summer Studio workshop at Ai Sacramento.
I called the whole thing ‘Designer Mashup’ – and set about having my students mix contemporary designers with historical luminaries.
Design history, research, handmade collages, form studies and handing work off to other students (to reinterpret) were part of the process.
Pictured, some of the final pieces.
Designers studied included Paula Scher, Georges Braque, Josef Albers, El Lisstizky, Rick Griffin, Jessica Hische, Raoul Hausmann, Marian Bantjes, Hannah Höch, Alvin Lustig, Shepard Fairey and David Carson.
School children in Quebec are asked to guess what these odd, old technologies may be.
Found via Alice Savoie
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