Opinion:
Editorial Eye 08
This special issue of Eye examines how American graphic design has changed in recent years…
Changing of the guard
Design history by Steven Heller
American graphic design is divided. The once rebellious avant-garde has become the status quo, while the new guard shun their elders’ example and adhere to few of the old ‘isms’
Fits, starts and fads
Graphic design, Agenda, Ralph Caplan
Eras cannot be neatly sliced up according to decades or even generations. Graphic design keeps changing while somehow staying the same.
The (layered) vision thing
Design education, Graphic design, Mike Mills
If it has dotted lines, an arrow or two and it’s impossible to read, then it must be ‘postmodern’. Are we using the theory the way it was intended?
Features:
Reputations: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville by Ellen Lupton
‘Diversity and inclusiveness are our only hope. It is not possible to plaster everything over with clean elegance. Dirty architecture, fuzzy theory and dirty design must also be out there.’
Comics for damned intellectuals by Steven Heller
It is ten years since Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman impetuously founded Raw Books and Graphics. Since then, Raw, the couple’s alternative comic strip magazine, has provided an outlet for talented unknowns, given new significance to the term ‘graphic novel’, almost single-handedly reinvented one of America’s most popular indigenous artforms – all on a shoestring budget.
This is not a cigar by Michael Rock, Susan Sellers
Graphic design has always resisted analysis, but new critical approaches show there is more to understanding the medium than first meets the eye
Quentin Fiore: Massaging the message by Abbott Miller
The man who gave form to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ designed books that were both for and ahead of their time
Techno cubists by Mike Hicks
Champions of the layered look, Nancy Skolos and Tom Wedell wed theory and technological wizardry
Total design by Steven Heller
In its all too brief life, Alexey Brodovitch’s Portfolio magazine achieved perfection
Your system sucks! by Natalia Ilyin
The flight from Modernism left a yearning for graphics that were rough, real, unaffected and believable. At some point, though, the downtown poster hardened into a convention
Reviews:
Photography without film: Digital imaging