mid-century
A Link to the Past
NYU Gallatin AlumniLink Mentor Program Brochure
I’ve been on a bit of a “ribbon lettering” kick lately. For this brochure/identity design, I was heavily inspired by a number of different sources, both old and new.
I wanted to conjure the notion of “link,” without using a cliché chain illustration in the process. The idea of roads and paths intersecting felt apropos to the concept of mentorship, and after doing some Wikimedia Commons research on such structures, I came up with a lettering style based on the look and feel of junctions or interchanges.
"Link" lettering, process
I wanted the composition of the piece to be simple and adaptable. For inspiration, I perused my copy of Meggs’ A History of Graphic Design (best textbook ever), and came across a simple-yet-gorgeous modernist poster by Lester Beall designed in 1937 for the Rural Electrification Administration. According to Philip Meggs, the poster was intended to be “understandable by illiterate and semi literate audiences,” and although my derivation was a bit more complex, I figured it would probably get the point across fairly easily to very literate university students.
After the basic concept was designed and approved, my brother Devin Korwin helped out with some last-minute Cassandresque shading, just as he had for the “Listening to Wine” poster.
Seattle World’s Fair Platter
Souvenir platter from the Century 21 Exhibition / 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, scored on eBay.
Dan Reisinger Brussels Exposition Poster, 1958
Just scored this wonderful Dan Reisinger poster on eBay, from the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. It even came with the original envelope in which it had been mailed to Sarkes Tarzian, Inc. / WTTV in Bloomington, Indiana, from Brussels, Belgium in 1958. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Reisinger won first prize for this poster design for the Palais International de la Science (International Hall of Science). I’ve actually had quite a difficult time finding any other images of this poster anywhere else on the Internet, besides the French version depicted on danreisinger.com. I’m looking forward to learning more about it—but I think the first step is to have it linen-mounted and framed.
NYU Stern Orientation Program print photos
This project has been previously detailed, but I recently photographed the actual booklets for posterity. Here’s how they came out.
More vintage matchbooks
After the last treasure trove of matchbooks I came across, the idea of starting a collection of my own has been on my radar. I found a few on eBay that were from Torrance, California, the current location of three steps ahead and a subject of particular interest to me. The same seller had a bunch of interesting ones, so I figured I’d scoop up as many as I could.
Josh & Alyssa Wedding “Save the Date” Postcard
My fiancée Alyssa and I are not typical when it comes to our wedding planning. For one thing, we’re getting married at an unconventional venue, the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. Moreover, we both work in design, and there’s no chance in heck that we’d buy any prepackaged save-the-dates or invitations. No sir. So we’ve spent the better part of the year planning out how our wedding will look, from the décor to the communications, and the first component of this gigantic undertaking is the “Save the Date” postcard that you see before you.
Original photographs that became our silhouettes (Photo by Sakura Koontz)
We want our wedding to feel like a party. Not just any party, mind you; more like a 1960s-concert-in-the-park-meets-prehistoric-hipster-safari. Or something like that. We’ve been scouting inspiration from far and wide, and one of the first ideas that hit us was to create a “gig poster” or a vintage-style handbill to inform our potential guests of the basic logistics in advance of the invitation. I’ve designed a whole bunch of save-the-date postcards for Gallatin at NYU (as you can see on the portfolio), but this was obviously a lot more personal. We decided it would be an adventure to silkscreen the invitations ourselves using the “split fountain” technique. It was a popular method of decoration for old concert or boxing posters, but it was usually used in the background to create a bright, colorful gradient on which black type would be set and printed on a letterpress. To stick with the theme, I used a combination of different type and lettering styles, some of which mimic the rough letterpress style of printers like Hatch Show Print in Nashville and Colby Poster Printing Co. here in Los Angeles. Other lettering comes from House’s Photo-Lettering site, such as the “Save the Date” script at the top. We referenced old show prints as well as movie posters (for the “Dino Vision” logo, a pretty blatant rip of the Cinerama logo and the Sinclair dinosaur mark. For the central silhouette illustration, we combined vector traces of two photographs taken by our good friend Sakura Koontz.
The process was remarkably smooth. We’d both done some screenprinting on t-shirts before, but neither of us had any hands-on experience with serigraphy on paper. The stock we chose is French Paper’s Mod-Tone in gray, which comes with a pre-printed pattern. We designed the card to be printed without bleed, 2-up on an 8.5″ by 11″ letter-sized page, allowing us to make a very simple cut and end up with a finished product. (We printed the back side on the cheap using inkjet). Using a Photoshop mockup of the design, we determined that Pantone Orange and Rubine Red would make a nice, yummy “Tequila Sunrise” gradient. Our comp wasn’t far off the mark, but the real-life result was far better than the digital version. Before we knew it, we’d printed up about 150 of them. The right side of the screen had some imperfections in the emulsion which led to some interesting artifacts, while the left side was nearly perfect. I think the variation between different prints is one of the beautiful and lively aspects of hand-printed serigraphs. So even though we sacrifice a bit of legibility, I think we’ve really hit the mark with our attempt at creating a vintage, imperfect look.
Tune in some months from now to see what we do with our invitation!
Metal architectural lettering
One of my favorite aspects of living in Southern California is the local architecture and its accompanying signage. Many of the schools in my area were built in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and lots of them utilize gorgeous, low x-height, geometric titling faces like the ones on which Neutraface is based. The Southern California Regional Occupation Center, circa 1969, has some particularly nice signage adorning its sturdy, imposing Battersea-esque industrial architecture.
NYU Stern Orientation Program — inspiration by Erik Nitsche
(Update: photos of the printed booklet are now up.)
New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business engaged with three steps ahead this summer to create a set of program booklets to be distributed to incoming students at Summer Orientation. Our work for Stern thus far (NYU Stern CACE Poster & NYU Stern IBEX Poster, for example) has leaned towards classic mid-century design meets The Naughties, when compared with designs we’ve done for NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. I’ve felt that Stern evokes a more streamlined, straight-shooting feel than the more expressive and eclectic nature of Gallatin. For this project, however, I wanted to branch off in a slightly tangential direction. The design needed to evoke feelings of: orientation; summer in New York city; a first time visit to the most overwhelming of all American cities; business; and a sense of edginess and fun.
I was particularly inspired by the work of Erik Nitsche, a modern graphic designer whose understanding of form and palette helped him to create some of the most iconic designs of the 20th century. I obsessively pored over the Flickr pool devoted to Nitsche’s work, trying to discern exactly what it was that made his work resonate. In my eventual concept sketches, I was influenced by Nitsche’s use of certain typeface pairs (Akzidenz Grotesk + Bodoni, for example) and graphic motifs, but I did my best to make it my own and keep things feeling of-our-era, rather than co-opting the 1960s zeitgeist completely.
The client had requested that several initial concepts be presented. The first set of ideas that I sketched were less related to Nitsche’s work than they were to some of the 1964 World’s Fair pieces I’ve come across, as well as mid-’60s record album art. These initial concepts had a very playful feel and a color palette that evoked New York City. I also really wanted to specify French Paper’s Dur-O-Tone in Butcher Orange as the cover stock. It’s fantastic. I created two different covers, one with a line-art illustration of Stern’s headquarters, and one with a motif evocative of a New York city manhole cover, a vinyl LP, or a stylized depiction of the summer sun (à la Rocky and Bullwinkle).
My next set of designs, which would form the foundation of the final pieces, moved more in the Swiss modernist Nitsche direction. I liked the idea of a diagram depicting a literal interpretation of “orientation.” I liked the associations with the summer season and the earth’s axis being tilted at 23.44°. I also liked the concept of a Little Prince-like planet with New York City as a major topographical feature. The colors I had chosen for this group of sketches was a lot more subdued, in contrast with the orange-and-blue palette of the previous concept. The feedback I received indicated that the perfect compromise was to combine the geometry and basic form of the modernist concept with the brighter, happier colors of the World’s Fair concept.
After selecting from a handful of colorways, we arrived at the final palette and polished the design to completion.
Interior spreads include several photo-illustrations based on the photography provided by NYU along with an extension of the arrow motif from the cover design. The inside cover also includes a map of the Washington Square Park NYU Campus area with important orientation locations highlighted by color for quick reference.
The Heritage Club—gorgeous book design
I’m a sucker for well-designed books—the paper, the printing, the typography, the illustration, the binding. Yum. Unfortunately, well-designed, well-printed, well-typeset books are the exception nowadays, not the rule.
I learned by watching the Antiques Roadshow that it became common practice in previous centuries for publishers of expensive books to sell them by subscription or in installments. This simultaneously allowed the collector to afford pricy volumes, and for the publisher to predict demand in advance of production. Good business model, but over time it became cheaper to produce books, so “well-enough” became the standard. (Not that I have anything against paperbacks, but a well-bound book is a work of art.)
So at some point, in stepped The Heritage Club, a subscription-based publisher of top-quality books.There’s not all that much information online about The Heritage Club. Wikipedia seems to be missing an entry about it altogether. But on this site I managed to learn a thing or two:
In 1929, [George Macy] founded the Limited Editions Club and began publishing fine illustrated books in limited numbers (1500 copies) for subscription members. In 1935, Macy extended his range, founding the Heritage Press for the creation and distribution of more affordable ’semi-luxe’ books. Directors of the Heritage Press included Cedric Crowell, General Manager of the Doubleday Bookshops, Frank L. Magel, head of Putnam Bookstores in New York, and A. Koch, head of Brentano Stores in New York.
Macy published editions under several imprints. Heritage Press editions were sold through bookstores, while The Heritage Club, The Heritage Illustrated Bookshelf, and The Junior Heritage Club editions were sold by subscription only. These publishing enterprises were combined in 1944 as units of the George Macy Companies, Inc. Each imprint targeted a specific audience; George Macy was a master publicist and had excellent marketing skills.
Macy created the Heritage Club in 1937 in part to satisfy book lovers who weren’t able to afford to join the Limited Editions Club. By 1942, membership exceeded 9,200, and three of its selections, Lust for Life, Song of Songs, and Mother Goose, had each sold more than 20,000 copies in a single year. Circa 1938, these were the terms: The subscriber could either send a remittance for $2.50 plus wrapping and carrying charges for each book immediately upon its delivery or he could take a discount of ten percent and prepay $27.00 for a year’s subscription. Each month a new edition would be sent with only wrapping and carrying charges due on receipt.
The Heritage Press Illustrated Bookshelf operated in the same manner but was targeted at young adults and teenagers. These editions were not issued with the usual Sandglass newsletter or brochure but did have slipcases or dust jackets. The Junior Heritage Club, founded in 1943, was targeted at preteens, ages 5 to 12, and included The Monthly Magazine of The Junior Heritage Club. This booklet was approximately 16 pages and, like the Sandglass, discussed the accompanying edition, with information about the illustrator, designer, and author.
[...]
Macy’s accomplishments did not go unrecognized during his lifetime. In 1948, he received an honor never before accorded to a living publisher: A special exhibition of his books was held in the Salle d’Honneur of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. A second honor followed in England in 1952, when Macy became the first living publisher to be given a special exhibition of his books in the King’s Library of the British Museum in London. The President of France conferred him the title of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor as well, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts awarded him the 1953 AIGA Medal, its highest honor.
[...]
An advertising brochure from 1972 provides a good overview of the Heritage Press:
This is a Heritage Press book. As such, it is a class by itself. For 37 years the Heritage Press has been producing fine editions like this one. Every book selected by our editors is a classic in its field, chosen from the world’s best-known and most enduring literature.
Once a title is chosen, we employ the most creative designer, artists, typographers, printers and binders, who combine their talents to produce our fine editions. We believe that the resulting volumes are the only books of their quality available at their price level in the market today.
These collector’s volumes, beautifully slipcased, are priced no higher than the ordinary current work of fiction or non-fiction. By investing in them, you have not only benefited your own library but have also created a “reading trust” for generations to come.
So that’s about as much as I know. I came across these examples at my fiancée’s aunt’s house—they’d been sitting on the same bookshelf for many, many years, having been part of my fiancée’s grandparents’ collection back in the 1960s. Each of the books has its own protective slipcover, and while the slipcovers and the spines of the books have seen quite a lot of sun (as evidenced by severe fading), anything inside the cover was protected quite well against the elements. They’re in amazing condition otherwise; if any of these books were ever read, they were read with gloves on.
I borrowed as many as I could easily carry back to photograph, but there were more. The selection here includes:
- The Romance of Tristan & Iseult [Isolde, Yseult, etc.], as retold by Joseph Bédier, with an introduction by Padraic Colum and illustrations by Serge Ivanoff
- Zuleika Dobson (or An Oxford Love Story), by Max Beerbohm, with a preface by Douglas Cleverdon and illustrations by George Him
- The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, with a preface by the author and illustrations by Edy Legrand
- Tales of Mystery & Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe, with an introduction by Vincent Starrett and photogravures of the original aquatints by William Sharp
- Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain, with an introduction by Edward Wagenknecht and illustrations by Thomas Hart Benton
- Ben Hur, by Lew Wallace, with an introduction by Ben Ray Redman and illustrations by Joe Mugnaini
- The Koran, Selected Suras, translated from the Arabic by Arthur Jeffery and decorated by Valenti Angelo
I also borrowed Typee, by Herman Melville, but it turns out this is a 1962 limited edition published by the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company, and not related to the Heritage Club.
There’s too much to comment on, but I hope that the photographs do the books justice.
Cosmographs update
After my recent post on harmonographs, I ponied up for a copy of the Photo-Lettering Alphabet Thesaurus, Volume 2. And now that I can read the book in “full resolution,” I learned a bit more about these mysterious space drawings. The following is transcribed directly from the book:
The figures on the following pages are a unique graphic arts innovation. Photo-Lettering has picked the name “COSMOGRAPHS” to describe these intriguing, orbiting motifs. They represent a significant, modern art-form, for here is scientifically-produced art that unerringly reflects the pitch and flux of this electronic era…free forms unencumbered by traditional patterns…designs with internal momentum capable of exercising a subliminal influence. These are not superficial ornaments; they possess a visual harmony with an enchantment that sets a dominant mood or tone.
Cosmographs are the product of an invention by Edward Lias, physicist in sound. They are visual records of patterns produced by interfering sound waves. Each figure represents a harmonious musical chord or triad. The adjustment of tonalities to different ratios produces the varying formations. The potential of effects is limitless. Here science and art literally join hands in the unity and harmony of basic universal motions.
This introductory showing of cosmographs will no doubt suggest a variety of interesting and practical uses. The designs are available from Photo-Lettering Inc. in SpectraKrome color prints, or black and white glossies from reproduction…as shown or flopped over… positive or negative. Size should be measured on the longest dimension. Prices are adjusted to the intended use.
And later:
Cosmographs are useful for setting moods, attracting attention, decorating backgrounds, and adding distinction to printed matter. Some specific applications include record albums, book jackets, trademarks, letterheads, package designs, wallpaper, murals, displays, TV spots, etc. Also special uses in the areas of electronics, music, art, architecture, fashion, industry, etc.
I think the persuasive 1960s copywriting is almost as good as the designs themselves!
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- Ed Rondthaler's Life with letters …as they turned photogenic
- House Industries: The Book
- Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State by Steven Heller
- Meggs' History of Graphic Design
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- The Graphic Artists Guild Handbook