Hasta La Ideas

Stamped ceramic eggsPaloma’s Nest offers custom-stamped ceramic eggs and ornaments for gift-giving and commemorative heirlooms. It’s all in the simplicity.

A selection of work from Ruan Hoffmann’s website.South African artist Ruan Hoffmann uses text and drawing on seemingly delicate surfaces.

His work was featured in Anthropologie, NYC last year.

{Thank you to Louis Boshoff for the link.}

A mini-retrospective of typographer Viktor Koen’s object alphabets

Viktor Koen takes pictures of renaissance rapiers in museum corridors. He hordes images of salmon steaks, microscopes, beheaded dolls and nautilus shells. From the thousands of archived shots, the Greek typographical artist composes unique alphabets from layers of objects. The recently opened show “Metamorphabets” at The Type Director’s Club looks back on five alphabets, numerous commissioned works and other pieces that compose the artist’s production from 1998 to present. Koen’s alphabets show a creativity, an obsession with type and a talent for finding language in the silence of objects.

“Metamorphabets is a fascination with welding and squeezing images into letters and then coming up with a very illustrative version of an alphabet,” says Koen. Setting out to build a new set, Koen often has a social or political angle to which he’s trying to draw attention—”Warphabet” is a collection created entirely from arms, and his series “Toyphabet” plays with the notion of lost childhood, which he feels has been exacerbated by technology. “It’s a schematic and typographical way to put issues in front of people in way that they might not expect,” Koen explains.

Working from a wealth of individual images, Koen is able to crop, cut and color correct his materials into representational letters with a common aesthetic. His obsessive technique takes months to create a single alphabet, during which Koen reserves the early part of the morning to work through the technical details of letter creation and the afternoons for creative pursuits.

Drawing from Greek, Hebrew and English alphabetic traditions, Koen’s approach is understandably unique. His vision has earned him notable contracts, including the cover of The New York Times Book Review titled “The Politics of Science”. His work for the cover earned him the monicker “Photoshop scribe” from Steven Heller, author of the Book Review’s “Visuals” column.

Metamorphabets is on display at TDC through 30 April 2012.

The Type Director’s Club

347 West 36th Street

Suite 603

New York, NY 10018

The most influential concepts in the history of the industry

In the new chronologically ordered book “100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design“, Steven Heller and Véronique Vienne explore the most important moments in an industry they themselves helped to define. Part of publisher Laurence King‘s popular “100 Ideas” series, the combination of symbols, techniques, archetypes, tropes and trends represents some of the major creative explosions that continue to inspire an array of visual mediums today. The scope is broad but intelligently refined, connecting all aspects of graphic design, from the age-old technique of text ornamentation to the relatively nascent appearance of pixelated images and digital type.

Heller, winner of the prestigious AIGA medal and former New York Times art director for 33 years, continues to write the “Visuals” column for the paper’s Book Review, as well as The Daily Heller for Imprint magazine. Vienne also comes from an art direction background and has published a number of books on the subject of graphic design. They draw enlightening and occasionally surprising connections, their observations identifying hidden meanings that inform images, such as the sun ray-inspired Mickey Mouse graphic created for his 80th birthday, which is actually a riff on Maoist propaganda posters.

Analyzing the use of the human body in design, the book regards the pointed finger, the clenched fist and the provocative pose as the most iconic corporeal representations from the past century. While corporate and political influences remain the most common originators of new ideas in design, there are a fair amount of underground sources that influenced the field, such as the cut-out ransom note, which was first discovered by a careless printing staff in the 19th century.

Also accounted for are specific design topics like asymmetry, color blocks and the graphic artist’s never-ending battle with forming the perfectly proportioned rectangle. The duo tackle each idea by breaking down not only how it influences visual communication, but also how it came about, whether through advances in technology or new layout restrictions.

A complete overview of the field, the book’s clean layout—including a cover designed by Pentagram’s Angus Hyland—and wealth of historical context lend insight that is as interesting for designers as it is for any art enthusiast.

Pick up the book from Laurence King or Amazon, and see more images from within its pages in the slideshow below.

Basé à Londres, Mr. Phomer est un artiste amoureux de typographie mais aussi de la culture populaire. Ce dernier nous propose une série de posters rappelant des adages et conseils. Avec des choix de couleurs intéressants, le rendu est à découvrir dans une série de visuels.

Previously on Fubiz

• Quotes Posters
• Hand-Painted Type
• Star Wars Posters in Silhouette

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