Graphic Design

Still from Helvetica 2007

Sex and typography! The two most essential things in a stylish life!

Letter by Letter: An Alphabetical Miscellany

TI is a font fiend, having great love for both the classics from Arial to Zapf Dingbats, to those insane new forms the likes of M &M/Paris keep coining. If you are passionate too about the shape, size and scale of the lettering you encounter in your everyday life then you must read Letter By Letter. Designer/calligrapher/artist Laurent Pflughaupt painstakingly traces the history and structure of each and every letter of the "Roman" alphabet. It may sound boring on the surface but visually the book is inspiring and invigorating and telegraphs the idea that evolution is implicit (and inevitable) in all creative human endeavor.

A point and click moment is coming

I've been wondering why the "tropes" of computer and design culture don't show more explicitly in current design. TI senses something powerful coming from that angle. More later.

Colette/Domestic: Curated Alpahabet: Ezra Petronio

Ezra Petronio has a dream life. He breaks the rules and ends up reinforcing fashion's status quo. He publishes Self-Service as a hardcover magazine. Which is a very genius conceit if you really think about it. He breaks tons of rules in Self-Service. He covers images with huge blocks of type which for the post-Brodovitch school is absolute sacrilege. He has made a book of his fashion celebrity Polaroids (which ironically enough I just mis-typed as PRO-laroids) . The book is titled "Bold and Beautiful". It is printed by 7L, my favorite publishing imprint in the world. You really should buy it for the reference library. Other than that Petronio plays with clients and collaborators like Miu-Miu, Prada, Chloe, Colette in imaging these very selective brands. This ranges from product packaging to websites to advertising and general creative direction. TI worships this ideal. The altar may be found at Petronio's blog : workinprogressblog.com. It is so bookmarked right this minute!

Mogollon 2007 Promo Logo

What or who could possibly be next in the super-sped up world of design and art direction? Putting a vote in for the Brooklyn based design/art direction/motion graphics/internet radio team of Mogollon comprised of Francisco Lopez and Monica Brand. Minimal they're not but that's important because as much as we sense the chill of a retro-minimalism brewing in the image trade, the curling excesses that computer assisted design can give you is an important counter-balance. Their CV is very Absolut Vodka, Le Book, PS/1 Moma as well as Tokion (where we discovered them) and Matador Records. The style is versatile and funny and quirky and well worth tracking to see if fashion clients bite. And wouldn't you know, they're already slinging prints, T-shirts and fonts. Viva ambition.

Peter Saville's legendary Mayfair pad. The "woman" is a live in plastic mannequin

Some of Marc Atlan's Greatest Hits

From I-phones to limited edition Nikes, why has design become this much of a market force? Is it that we're experiencing an on-going visual evolution of contemporary culture in the same way we are under-going a technological revolution? I'm not trying to write a master's thesis. (Part of the discipline of The Imagist for me is to learn to be...succinct). I'm just trying to figure out how the hell the whole world got to be so design sensitive. When did American product packaging start to overwhelm its content? To personalize the issue a little bit... I was out out to dinner last night with a pal from an ad agency, when the subject turned to Fabien Baron and his powerhouse agency Baron and Baron. Its not a company anymore it seems.Its a brand in itself, if you'll pardon that dirty word..."brand".

Baron you know from the firm's traditional image management of magazines : Paris Vogue, the 90's Harper's Bazaar- which obviously I've been looking at a LOT- Interview magazine, Arena Homme +, as well as fashion ads -most notably Calvin Klein. We gossiped a little bit about the influence Le Baron and Karl Templer now had over the direction of Calvin, down to the models, in which that team seems not to be as personally invested in. Certainly not the way Calvin the man invested in Kate Moss and Brooke Shields and now no girl or boy for Calvin is allowed to be a bigger story than the clothes.