A Link to the Past

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.

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.

Tags: 1930s, A.M. Cassandre, Devin Korwin, font, Gallatin, identity, Lester Beall, lettering, logo, mid-century, New York, NYU, paper, Philip Meggs, poster, type, typeface, typography, vintage, wordmark

3D Ribbon Script Lettering

 

I’m always looking for innovative ways to set text, and in the process of creating this postcard, I thought I’d give 3D lettering a try. I wanted to use a three-dimensional “ribbon” to mimic the movement of the pen or brush in the process of cursive writing. I also wanted to reinforce the feeling of papercraft in this piece, inspired by sophisticated pop-up books, especially given the recurring theme of Gallatin’s Alumni Day activities, “Return to the Great Books.”

While the process was somewhat laborious, it was interesting to play with 3D tools to create lettering in a somewhat unconventional way. It allowed me to direct the stroke through loops, and to tie knots inside of letters. There’s something rather Tron-like about it. Perhaps I’ll try “light cycle” lettering next time, or experiment with the smoke trails left by skywriting airplanes.

Tags: 3D, cursive, experiment, font, Gallatin, lettering, NYU, paper, postcard, script

Holiday present: A.M. Cassandre Photoshop Airbrush Tutorial

A reader wrote to me today to find out more about how the airbrush effects were achieved in the Gallatin “Listening to Wine” poster design. The design had been based on the feel of many wonderful posters by Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, whose dramatic shading effects defined an era of 20th century advertising posters. As a holiday present to all who may stumble upon this post, here’s a quick and dirty tutorial to help you experiment with the stippled airbrush texture effect made possible by Photoshop’s dissolve blending mode:

1. Start with a new Photoshop document, with a blank white layer as the background.
2. Create a new transparent layer on which you will use your “airbrush.” (It’s a best practice to create layers instead of destructively airbrushing directly on the background.)
3. On the new, transparent layer, create a circular selection using the Elliptical Marquee tool.
4. On the Layers palette, click the “Add layer mask” button (looks like a shaded rectangle with a white circle inside). This will create a layer mask from your circular selection, allowing you to work on the layer without having to worry about losing the original selection shape.
5. Click on the Layer 1 thumbnail to make sure that the layer itself is selected and not the layer mask. It’s sometimes difficult to tell which is currently “active.”
6. Select the Brush tool from the tool bar (or press “B” on your keyboard).
7. From the Brush palette, select a brush that is soft, round, and large. The exact size will depend on the application, but you can use the [ and ] keys on your keyboard to scale the brush up or down while you’re using it.
8. Also from the Brush palette, use the Mode drop-down menu to change the brush’s blending mode to Dissolve.
9. Make sure that the Foreground Color is set to something other than white (black is a great color to practice with), and then click and drag your brush tool across the canvas. You should see a speckled effect on the feathered edges of the brush. If you were using the “Normal” blending mode instead of dissolve, the feathered edges would be soft and clean and would lack the texture that “Dissolve” offers.
10. You can vary the effect by changing the brush size and also by altering the Brush palette’s Opacity or Flow settings. Experiment in order to find the effect that works best for your application.
11. Use additional layers and layer masks just as you would use vellum and stencils in the real world. Layer mask “stencils” help to define the boundaries of the shading effect, but the brush itself defines the look. Another advantage to using layer masks, rather than simple selections, is that the “overspray” is accessible if the mask needs to be moved at any point in the future. It’s like having a stencil that can travel through time!

Tags: 1930s, A.M. Cassandre, font, Mostra, paper, poster, retro, technique, tutorial, typeface, typography, vintage

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.

Tags: 1950s, Dan Reisinger, eBay, mid-century, modern, paper, poster, printing, typography, vintage, World's Fair

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.

Tags: 1960s, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Erik Nitsche, French Paper, mid-century, New York, NYU, paper, Photo-Lettering, printing, retro, typography, World's Fair, zeitgeist

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.

Tags: 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, lettering, matchbooks, mid-century, packaging, paper, printing, Torrance, typography

Nintendo hanafuda cards

I don’t mention it often, but I’m a gamer, and a lifelong fan of Nintendo. After purchasing the New Super Mario Bros. Wii game (which is fantastic, by the way), I found out that Nintendo has a reward system called Club Nintendo, where users can register their Nintendo consoles and games, and earn “coins” doing so. Among the handful of exclusive prizes available to those of us who have spent several hundred dollars on video games, the most “expensive” reward caught my eye: a set of Nintendo hanafuda cards.

Hanafuda means “flower cards” in Japanese. The cards and their associated games have a colorful history, and it’s definitely worth reading the Wikipedia article to learn more. But the interesting tidbit here is that Nintendo goes way back. They were founded in 1889 as a manufacturer of handmade hanafuda, about one hundred years before the dawn of Mario. So these cards are not merely a novelty, but a link to the past¹.

I could tell from the Nintendo website that there was something interesting about these cards; they seemed to have a quality quite different from what you’d expect of today’s promotional products. The thing that really caught my eye was the way that the graphics were printed; the offset fills and strokes seemed anachronistic, especially when paired with characters like Wario. From what I can gather, it seems like Nintendo cleverly substituted their trademark characters to replace the “standard” hanafuda graphics (like cranes, etc.), while maintaining traditional backgrounds. So I registered all the games I have, and happily reached the 800 coin mark. The cards came only a few days later, and I’ve documented the unboxing and some detail shots to show off the cards’ vintage look.

Lovely pattern in the title graphic courtesy of néojaponisme.

1. Get the reference? [↩]

Tags: gaming, hanafuda, Japan, Nintendo, paper, printing, vintage

Barton Bee Line Legs Box

I just love packaging from the ’60s. This one may have been printed later (it says “Series ‘76″), but I’m pretty sure it had to have been designed in the 1960s and used a few years beyond its intended shelf life.

Tags: 1960s, font, lettering, packaging, paper, printing, type, typography, vintage

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.

Tags: 1960s, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Erik Nitsche, mid-century, New York, NYU, paper, Photo-Lettering, retro, typography, World's Fair, zeitgeist

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.

Tags: 1950s, 1960s, lettering, mid-century, paper, typeface, typography, vintage