Category Archives: Graphic Design
Communication Arts, Advertising Annual 54
Your new, beloved Communications Arts Advertising Annual has arrived in your beloved library. You will peruse this issue heavily, both because it interests you and because you’ve been instructed to do so by your instructors. Below, enjoy the cover, the table of contents, and a sneak peak at pages 102 and 103.
We have a nearly complete run of Communication Arts starting with v. 1, n. 2 (September 1959).
In Today’s Mail — March 21, 2013
The Visual Arts Library has around 400 current periodical subscriptions. Everyday, from all around the world, by way of delivery services private and socialized, at least a few and sometimes a shining heap arrive at 380 2nd Ave..
Following are the covers of two magazines that arrived today. I think are they are sharp.
First, Novum and its World of Graphic Design, a title for which we have holdings dating back to 1950 when it was called Gebrauchsgraphik: International advertising art.
Description taken from page 2 of the magazine:
For the cover of this month’s novum we chose the mold made paper ZERKALL LITHO VI (270 gsm) with 75% cotton. Further information: www.zerkall.com. Marco Bölling realised the motive in letterpress and iris printing www.boelling.com.
Novum, April 2013.
Second, we have School Arts, an art education title that we have going back to 1992. The piece is a product of a high school studio lesson designed and delivered by Caroline Nay. The work itself is by Dan Prach. The lesson is fully explained in the magazine, but involves either a botanical or animal subject, and features contour line drawings transferred onto a base painting. Very sharp.
School Arts, April 2013
Charts, Graphs, & Diagrams
Currently containing about 100 item, Charts, Graphs, & Diagrams is one of the Picture Collection’s newer categories. Like Advertising – Corporate Identity, Industry, & Utility, the content of this category owes a great deal to late 1940’s and early 1950’s Fortune Magazines. In the future, if this category grows like a good category should, I will probably see fit to cull Diagrams into its own category . I have already divided this post, presenting first a few charts and graphs and the diagrams after.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a chart or graph utilizes some sort of axis or axes, often horizontal and vertical, and reveals its information by specific plots or points and their relationship to the value established by the axes and to each other. The terms chart and graph are apparently interchangeable, but I tend to think of charts as more in the map family (of which the Picture Collection has an extensive collection) and graphs as more of the where z meets x and y variety. Regardless, charts, graphs, and diagrams all fall under the greater heading of information design. If you are interested in learning more about information design, take a look at Visual Art Library librarian Amos Turner’s LibGuide which will guide you to a bevy of resources on the subject.
Given the proliferation of PowerPoint and all of its default this, auto content that, it’s easy to forget that charts and graphs are often elegant, artistic, compositionally savvy illustrations.
Fortune 1950 February
Even this arcane brown-scale graph, with its clean lines and geometric intersections, is very nice to look at.
Fortune 1949 February
Here are a couple of graphs with language out of a Philip Levine poem, with its smelter gasses and pyrites of the heart.
Fortune 1951 July
National Geographic 2011 May
A 1951 org chart in the style of Tim Burton:
Fortune 1951 August
And now the diagrams.
Esquire 1964 December
Fortune 1951 September
Fortune 1949 February (worsted yarn)
Fortune 1951 July Distilled Water
Fortune 1950 January, Drawings by Rolf Klep
I thought these last diagrams were interesting, especially the bottom one which depicts a contraption which “metalize(s)…toy airplanes, junk jewelry” and the like to be sold in dime stores. Despite the unromantic process, the output, detailed below, looks magical.
Fortune 1949 September OJ & Toys
Fortune 1949 September OJ & Toys (toy detail)
Magazine Covers 1960-1969
We continue our look at magazine covers throughout the decades with a diverse smattering from the 1960’s. We start off with some teen magazines (teen magazines, much like the teenagers, were invented in the 1950’s and really came into their own in the 1960’s).
Teen (November 1964)
19 (August 1969)
We have many nice film magazine from the 1950’s forward, here are a few:
Film Culture (Summer 1960)
Film Quarterly (Winter 1967-8) Still from Aurthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde"
The French sure love their cinema.
An early edition of L’Esprit Créateur: The International Quarterly of French and Francophone Studies.
L'Esprit Createur (Winter 1968)
A couple titanic Fortune Magazines (of which we have many from the 1940’s on).
Fortune (August 1969)
Fortune (June 1964)
A couple of our Graphic Design and Art covers:
Graphis n. 113 (1964)
Art International (1965) Photograph of Yaacov Agam's mural, Double Metamorphosis, on the S.S. Shalom, flagship of the Zim Lines.
Art International (March 1964) Cover by: Rollin Crampton
Industrial Design (November 1969)
Realites (1967)
A trio of the ever elegant Met Bulletin Covers:
Met Bulletin (February 1968)
Met Bulletin (October 1968) A North African Hanging from about 1600, woven silk with metal thread, 18 feet 8 inches x 4 feet 4 inches.
Met Bulletin (February 1969) Water Color by Jacob Marrel.
Met Bulletin (October 1969) Front (aka: right) The Thorn of Charity. Back: David with Two Musicians, and David and Goliath. Miniatures, enlarged three and a half time (per the original cover), from a psalter and prayer book made for Bonne of Luxembourg by Jean Pucelle, French. About 1345. Colors on parchment, 2 1/8 inches x 1 7/8 inches and 2 1/16 inches x 1 3/4 inches. The Cloisters Collection.
And an exceedingly shiny Harper’s Bazaar cover:
Harper's Bazar (December 1969)
Magazine Covers — 1940-1949
Tricolor is the English language edition of La France Libre, a French anti-Nazi publication that began in 1940. Here is the first page of an article about the magazine’s origins. Below we have the cover for the celebratory July-August 1945 edition.
Surgery assistance by glowing neon letters, RN from 1943.
Free World: A Non-Partisan Magazine Devoted to the United Nations and Democracy featuring both a 1940 dominant and 1945 submissive Hitler, illustrated by Luis Quintanilla.
Here is an interesting cover from a May 1946 Interiors magazine by Bernard Rudofsky, who you can find out more about in our books stacks:
Architecture without architects, an introduction to nonpedigreed architecture.
NA2430.R8
Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky : life as a voyage
This Met bulletin cover from January 1945 features their smart little logo on the back cover, a deeply saturated blue-green background, and a detail of a painting of Henry Fredrick, Price of Wales, and Sir John Harington, by and unknown painter of the British school. Dated 1603.
1947: the year of the midriff.
Another great Nature cover, February 1949. Illustration by Frederic Sweney.
And lastly, a textured, mysterious American Artist cover from January 1949. The photo is by Telberg-von-Teleheim and is titled “Mask of a Dream.”
SVA Library Picture & Periodicals Collections 