Another 10 projects I Love
- Kali
- May 21, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 9, 2020
1. Herbert Bayer, Banknotes design for Thuringia
He continued to spread the influence of the Bauhaus, made a notable advertising career in the United States, and turned design into a valuable corporate asset.
His work was versatile: signs on the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, magazines like Vogue and Fortun, prefabricated trays for selling newspapers. Thus, one of his works was created to help the Economy of the Weimar Republic. Economy
there, the suffering from hyperinflation was so unstable that each region had its own reserve currency. The design of the new banknotes that Bayer created has moved away from tradition (National symbols, curls, serif fonts). Bayer used grids, geometric shapes, and sans-serif fonts.
2. Alex Steinweiss, Music Album Design "Serge Prokofiev, Symphony N6"
Created innovative album covers and designed cardboard packaging for LPs!
It’s hard to imagine in this digital distribution that packaging once played an important role in selling new music. But it was, and Alex Steinweis stood at the origins of the golden age of album design. In 1939 Columbia Record hired Alex to draw advertising posters and design display cases for selling records. Wrapped in plain paper and packaged in boxes, the plates did not attract attention. For example, the company Decca at that time placed on the covers of photographs of artists. Alex made a cool innovative move, applied his skills as a poster designer to paint magazine covers. One of these designs was the cover for Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 6.
3. Bradbury Thompson for the Westvaco paper company, Copyright 1945
Used ancient elements in modern design, worked as a designer and art director in more than 30 magazines and developed a new concept of the alphabet.
He is best known for his work in Westvaco (West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company). For advertising paper and printing processes, Thompson created "Inspiration"- a magazine for design professionals. Existing images were proposed, but the designer introduced a big limitation. He experimented with photo reproduction technology and printing processes. Combining old designs with vibrant colors, transparent layers, and a sharp scaling of fonts, he demonstrated how historical elements can be used in modern designs.
4. Saul Bass, Vintage Movie poster "The Man With The Golden Arm"
A pioneer in the design of captions for films, he developed a number of advertising campaigns for films and created many well-known corporate styles.
About his works, Martin Scorsese said:
"Bass turned the credits into an art form, in some cases even creating a mini-film inside the film. His moving graphic compositions serve as a prologue to the film - set the tone, create the mood and hint at upcoming actions."
Before Saul Bass, movie credits were considered so unimportant that curtains in movie theaters opened only after they were completed. When Otto Preminger’s film “The Man with the Golden Arm” was released for which Bass made a minimalistic animated screen saver, projectionists were even given special instructions to open the curtain before the credits began.
5. Milton Glaser, Bob Dylan's poster
Combined historical styles, moving away from modernism, created legendary logos, posters; designed magazines and significantly influenced other designers, as he writes books and teaches.
Dylan hated the released album, which was the last album he made for Colombia. Glazer told the story of how an image arose from two stylistic conventions: a self-portrait carved by the silhouette of Marcel Duchamp and Islamic forms and colors, which together created something “uniquely American”. After he was seriously injured in a car accident in 1966, singer and songwriter Bob Dylan was bedridden and rumored to have died. To create a positive advertisement for his future album, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, CBS records instructed Milton Glaser to design a special poster that will be packaged with the album. Inspired by a self-portrait of Marcel Duchamp, Glazer portrayed Dylan in profile, his plentiful curly hair dyed in rich colors that stood out against a contrasting white background. The vibrant design with its swirling streams of color evokes the visual effects of psychedelic drugs that have gained popularity among the counterculture.
6. Otl Aicher, Olympics pictograms
Created pictograms based on the grid, one of the founders of the influential school of design.
In the work of Otl Aicher, the main role was played by systems. He created corporate-style systems for companies such as L, B and B.
In 1936, the Olympic Games were held in Berlin. Otl and his design team developed colorful posters and a logo based on the sun. To overcome the language barrier of a foreign-language public, Aicher looked for any opportunity to replace the text with visual information. He developed a system of pictograms to indicate various sports and signs. The image of a person was represented by a set of simple geometric shapes, but remained recognizable. He first invented the use of a single coordinate grid for all pictograms, which ensured the unity of forms, which the previous ones, more similar to pictograms, lacked.
7. Peter Saville, Joy Division Album "Unknown pleasures"
He created the famous album covers, pays great attention to conceptual images to create an emotional connection between groups and their fans.
Peter Saville was 22 years old, he had just graduated from college and was ready for the opportunity. “At this age, no one asked me to redesign the transit system, but someone asked me to make a cover for the record. So I made the cover of the record the way I wanted - not just the way I wanted the cover of the record, but the way I wanted everything to be, ”says Saville, now 63 years old, about his work on the gloomy masterpiece of Joy Division 1979 "Unknown Pleasures".
40 years after the release in June 1979, “Unknown Pleasures” became at least one of the defining albums of the punk era and perhaps one of the defining albums of the last half century, the answer depends on how much black is in your wardrobe. The album's design, good or bad, may have surpassed music in terms of ubiquity, if not necessarily the influence looming more than ever. You can see this on character t-shirts on major movies, on shower curtains, tattoos on the back and in every corner of the Internet.
The cover of Unknown Pleasures is simple. This is a diagram of a series of pulse waves, folded in white in the background and centered, as if in a box, motionless in space. The image of a pulsar, as briefly summarized for us by Scientific American mannequins by Jen Christiansen, is a data visualization that "shows a series of radio frequency periods from the first pulsar detected."
The radio pulsar was discovered on Nov. 28, 1967, at Cambridge by the astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell. To implement such a deep meaning and invent such an unusual design that will appeal to many people is worthy of praise and I am delighted with this work!
8. Steven Doyle, installations of character traits in two NYC schools
He experiments with typography, uses the power of color to communicate (by the way it a bit similar as Bradbury Thompson did) and transmit information. He also found a balance between art and commerce.
Doyle regularly works for NY, creating illustrations from a single word, which he first makes from photographs of various materials, and then transforms. Images attract attention and make the reader think.
9. Michael Birut, Logo For "Saks 5th Avenue"
Designer of bold corporate styles, one of the founders of the online forum for designers.
Using the already existing simple calligraphic logo and brand name, as a result of the Birut redesign, he graphically redesigned the famous logo to create overly effective, modernized bags in a graphic style. Usually I would find simple black and white drawings a little boring or not powerful enough for their purposes, but in this situation and for this purpose I believe that Birut’s decision to rebrand this design as an ideal balance of tones, as it exudes sophistication and elegance, elements important for maintaining the image of companies.
10. John Maeda, Design By Numbers
Combines design and technology, encourages designers to study computers and heads the well-known college of design.
For Maeda, a computer is both a tool and a storage medium. His project Design By Numbers encouraged designers and artists to learn computer programming.
Design By Numbers is an easy-to-read guide to artists philosophy and programming techniques.
Practicing what he preaches, Maeda composed Design by Numbers, using a computational process that he developed specifically for the book. He introduces the programming language and development environment available on the Internet, which can be downloaded for free or run directly in any JAVA-enabled web browser. Accordingly, the new language is called DBN (for "design by numbers"). Designed for "visual" people - artists, designers, those who like to take pencils and scribbles - DBN has very few commands and consists of elements resembling elements of many other languages such as LISP, LOGO, C / JAVA and BASIC.
Citations :
Herbert Bayer banknote 1923, 2010, Marianela Ramos Capelo. Available from :
Typography, 2018, January 13. Available from :
Bradbury Thompson, 2017, August 14, Susan Merritt. Available from :
Saul Bass, The Man With the Golden Arm. Available from :
Milton Glaser Reveals How He Made The Legendary Bob Dylan Even More Legendary, 2015, March 16, CAREY DUNNE. Available from :
Sign of the Times: Bob Dylan, 2010, June, Owen Edwards. Available from :
Olympic Pictograms: Design through History. Available from :
What does the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures mean?, 2020, April 24. Available from :
Stephen Doyle Interview, 2013, July 24, Mark K. Available from :
Michael Bierut: Saks 5th Avenue Branding Update, 2013, December 10, ccgoodwin1994. Available from :
5 Design Stars That Switched Gears in the Middle of Their Careers, 2014, August 27, John Clifford. Available from :
Design By Numbers, Paola Antonelli. Available from :
Literature :
Saul Bass A Life in Film & Design, Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2011, page 117
Graphic Icons: Visionaries Who Shaped Modern Graphic Design, John Clifford, 2013.
Comments