Eye no. 2
Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 1990
Rick Poynor [Editor]
London: Wordsearch Ltd., Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 1990. Parallel text in English, German and French. Quarto. Letterpress scored photo illustrated wrappers. 86 pp. Articles and advertisements printed on multiple paper stocks. Essays illustrated with full color examples throughout, with design and typography of the highest order. Cover artwork: Jake Tilson. A fine copy.
9.25 x 11.75-inch quarterly Design journal with 86 pages of fully illustrated content. “Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture.”
Contents:
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- Agenda
- Green’s grey zones: James Woudhuysen. “It has always been the duty of graphic designers to challenge conventional wisdom. Designers have…”
- Features
- Reputations: Alan Fletcher: Rick Poynor. An interview with Pentagram’s ringmaster of paradox. Nine page interview with 15 halftone work examples.
- Maps and dreams: Rick Poynor. “No printing method is too basic for Jake Tilson. Created with photocopiers, his books, magazines and objects are crammed with offbeat invention.” Eight pages and 25 color reproductions.
- Wheels of Fortune: William Owen. “Fortune magazine was a visual encyclopedia of American business life.” Sixteen pages and 30 color reproductions. “There were two jobs every young designer wanted to do in America at that time,’ said Alan Fletcher. ‘One was to design a front cover for Fortune magazine and the other was to design an institutional advertisement for the Container Corporation.”
- Signals in the street: Yvonne Schwemer-Scheddin. “Poster design is an instantaneous art. Eye looks at prize-winners from “Typography Germany ’90.” Eight pages and ten color images.
- The designer unmasked: Profile by Gerald Forde. Jan van Toorn has turned graphic agitation into a fine art. Fourteen pages and 46 color images.
Temple of type: Robin Kinross. “St Bride Library is one of the world’s best sources of information about type design and typography. Now it is under threat.”
- Reviews
- Design: Vignelli: Rick Poynor. “Lella and Massimo Vignelli design by the grid, but they also live and work by the grid. To visit the offices they created for themselves on Tenth Avenue, New York, is to enter a temple of visual enlightenment from which disorder has been banished. Vignelli design is a highly cultivated bloom, pruned into discipline. One might complain that the pair were guilty of arid perfectionism if the results were not so ravishing.”
This issue features work by Massimo Vignelli, Leo Lionni, Will Burtin, Walter Allner, Paolo Garretto, Diego Rivera, Herbert Bayer, Lester Beall, Alvin Lustig, Ladislav Sutnar, Herbert Matter, György Kepes, Chermayeff & Geismar, Art Chantry, Lázsló Moholy-Nagy and many others.
Alan Fletcher (1931 – 2006) drew pictures as a kid. When it came time to choose a career, life in post-war Britain only offered him three options: go to university, join the army, or work for a bank. None of these was very appealing to him. However, he was fortunate to receive a scholarship to attend illustration courses at Hammersmith Art College. The next year—after he found out that there were other choices—he transferred to Central Art School. It was a livelier place, and as it happens, his future partner Colin Forbes was also taking classes there.
At Fortune the artist has always belong in the world of work. While planning the magazine's premiere issue, visionary publisher Henry R. Luce directed that "words and pictures be conscious partners." During Fortune's early years, its editors commissioned many of the twentieth century's greatest painters and illustrators --Diego Rivera, Fernand Leger, Ben Shahn, and Miguel Covarrubias, among others--to document America's burgeoning industrial society on each cover. These great artists captured more than the assembly lines and smokestacks of industry. From Wall Street ticker tape to the American farm and broadcast industries, Fortune's cover art portrays the modern era during its dramitic, formative years.
Jan van Toorn (1932 – 2020) was a rarity: a radical designer with a long, steady career and an international reputation as both designer and educator. He stood in counterposition to Wim Crouwel, another designer who dominated the 1960s and 70s in the Netherlands. Crouwel, the co-founder of Total Design, advocated an objective, functional and systematic approach to graphic design, while JVT’s style is personal, confrontational and highly idiosyncratic.
Van Toorn took an interest in all forms of propaganda, manipulation and dissemination of information. From the 1970s on, his priority has been to make the viewer of his designs aware of the mechanics of manipulation. His work includes subversive ‘dialogic’ elements (he used the term ‘dialogic’ to describe interaction with the viewer of design), which are deliberately provocative and unfinished. He is also a theorist, observing: ‘In one way or the other, the public must remain in a position where they can measure the motives of the producer and mediator that lie behind the product, against their own experience of the world.’ JVT favours expression that stimulates the reader, rather than beautiful compositions and sleek forms. As a result, his work requires the viewer to have the ability and willingness to interpret the work.— Rick Poyner