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Following my FTF images a few weeks ago Anne, a graphic designer in Baltimore, sent me a link to one of her Flickr sets: lots of fantastic images taken at the Museum of Transport in St. Louis.
Big thanks to Anne. All contributions welcome.
This is usually the kind of stuff that I've been assigning to that Elsewhere thing over on the left but it's so good. And forgive me for repeating myself but if you haven't signed up for FontShop News already you really should, it's always good.
This is a brilliant Omnific/Birdsall designed cover from 1974 (although I think this version may have been first printed in 1971). OK, perhaps the dictionary definition thing is a little cliché now but it wasn't back then. No, forget that; what I should have said was: perhaps the dictionary definition thing is a little cliché when someone else does it but in Birdsall's masterful hands it works beautifully, backing up the real star idea, the extracted S and I.
Oh, and of course, it is a dictionary.
Ben from British Letterpress has very kindly sent me a bumper pack of printed samples and ephemera, loads of stuff.
Including this ace map of The North from 1970.
Well whoopdedoo! Project 79 is complete, well as complete as it's going to be - I've only missed one essay out which I put down to its personal anecdotal nature and me being a bit thick at times. If you've read the book, you can compare notes here. If you haven't, you really should.
Really interesting skies today.
Download 01_make_the_logo_bigger.mp3
If you haven't already, listen and weep.
Special thanks to Tony in Oz.
As a consequence of my fascination with graphic design history I've developed a rather romantic image of what it must have been like to be a graphic designer in the sixties, when the profession was being shaped, when processes were relatively manual and when everything was that much slower. When London was swinging; all dark suits and slim ties, I remember black and white photos of Alan Fletcher from the Design Museum retrospective last year, probably smoking a Gauloise (or maybe not). Very cool. And then I check myself and think, naa...
Well two years after its publication and Design Museum exhibition I've eventually got around to reading Emily King's book about Robert Brownjohn, the oh so perfectly titled (Atelier Works designed) Sex and Typography. And the message you get from that is, yes, it was super cool to be a designer in the sixties; well, if you were up at the top anyway. Bob Gill, quoted in the book, puts it superbly, "London in 1960 was amateurs-ville, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. We were so obviously number one, there was no question. We ended up doing everything".
Now perhaps it's just me, I had a less than conventional design education, but in my world Bj has always been a kind of shadowy, cult figure that only the most informed designers knowingly referenced. He reminds me of those bands that only the coolest kids were into at art school, the ones the rest of us had never heard of (like Felt, somewhere described as the most influential unknown band of the eighties). Perhaps it's not just me, certainly some of the blogatry around two years ago goes a little way to suggest it's not.
If you haven't read this book, you really should. It starts with 75 pages of short quotes from those that knew him best which at first, and to my subsequent shame, I thought was slightly lazy writing (it felt a little disjointed) but as I got into it those very personal memories began to paint a vivid picture of a turbulent life typical of creative genius.
And then, before I knew it, I found myself almost one hundred pages through the book and I haven't seen any work - not one piece of work. Despite that I'm utterly gripped...and moved...at the end of this first section Bj dies, in August 1970, from a massive heart attack, encouraged by his excessive lifestyle. Really sad.
But during his life he broke ground big time, pioneering and championing techniques we take for granted now, he hung out with (amazingly!) Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Warhol in the US then in the UK is listed alongside Polanski, Caine and Jagger on the guest list of the coolest and most exclusive restaurants and clubs. He was quite a dude.
Of course there's much more to the book, I'm not trying to do a review here, my point really is that, as I suspected, being a graphic designer in the sixties really was very cool.
For Bj anyway.
As a footnote, one of the things I really love in the book is this drawing by Fletcher. Everyone who was anyone in the London graphic design scene is there: Forbes, Facetti, a rather wonky Crosby, Henrion, a self-portrait of Fletcher, Games, Hawkey, Garland...well, you get it...everyone.
* This was how he described himself to Bob Gill, infering that Gill was head honcho.
It's been a few weeks now since Randy first sent me some pics of this stuff. Sorry it's taken so long to get them on Ace Jet Randy - I've got a bit of a backlog.
He explains what they are, "Those aren't drawers! They're actually boxes and boxes of lead type sticks. My girlfriend's dad actually builds hotstamping machines so he bought 2 machines off ebay and repaired/furbished/oiled them and they're good as new."
I've seen hotstamping before of course but wasn't so familiar with the precise term. There's a good explanation on Malahide's website: "The industrial printing process that we call 'Hot Stamping' goes by many synonymous names including: foil stamping, hot foil stamping, gold stamping, gold blocking, dry stamping, dry printing, embossing and imprinting. What sets the hot stamping process apart from any other method of printing is it's ability to apply a shiny metallic foil print. A brilliance that cannot be duplicated with ink, foil stamping is employed in a diverse range of consumer and industrial applications."
The Kinsley machine looks fantastic; I want one and for anyone else interested, have found a user manual here.
Many thanks to Randy for the contribution. If anyone else would like to take part, please email me here.
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