Eye no. 9
Volume 3, Number 9, Summer 1993
Rick Poynor [Editor]
London: Wordsearch Ltd., Volume 3, Number 9, Summer 1993. Quarto. Letterpress scored photo illustrated wrappers. 88 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: Roman Cieslewicz. Light wear overall, but a nearly fine copy.
9.25 x 11.75-inch quarterly Design journal with 88 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:
- Design history, Graphic design, Agenda
- What has writing got to do with design?: Anne Burdick. “We canonise the giants of design history as champions of total authorship, while overlooking the obvious message of their work.”
- Whatever became of the content? Book design, Graphic design, New media: Rick Poynor. “Much new design is over-complex and confusing. An alternative current, sharing many of the same assumptions, aims for clarity.”
- Features
- Reputations: Roman Cieslewicz: Margo Rouard-Snowman. “Posters are dying out. They need strong themes, which at present they lack. As a form of communication, they belong to another age.” Seven pages and 13 reproductions.
- Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics. “For the first in a new series, Eye revisits Richard Hollis’s innovatory design for a book on the French film-maker.”Thirteen pages and 10 reproductions.
- White space black hat: Jeremy Myerson. ”Derek Birdsall harbours a secret. It has given him 30 years at the top. If it works, he says, use it again.” Twelve pages and 26 color and halftone reproductions.
- Stop making sense: Véronique Vienne. “The best-loved children’s stories are for adults too. Five American illustrators push at the boundaries of the book.” Eight pages and 17 images.
- Prints of Islam: Rana Salam. “In Syria and Beirut, craftsmen make inexpensive devotional images for the workplace and home.” Six pages and 11 color images.
- Cult of the ugly: Steven Heller. “Designers used to stand for beauty and order. Now beauty is passé and ugliness is smart. How did we get here and is there any way out?” Eight pages and 18 color images.
- Video to go: Michael Horsham. “Video packaging is an area of graphics both marginal and ubiquitous. Who decides how it looks?” Twelve pages and 33 images.
- Max Bittrof: visual engineer: Friedrich Friedl. “Max Bittrof was one of the leading German designers of the 1920s. Unlike many exponents of the New Typography, he was able to apply the aesthetic to a major commercial client.” Six pages and 14 images.
- Reviews
- The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design and others. These 23 essays encompass some 35 years of Tschichold's career from "House Rules for Typesetting" (1937) to "Ten Common Mistakes in the Production of Books" (1975).
Includes work by Lane Smith, Henrik Drescher, Maira Kalman, Etienne Delessert, Cindy Sherman, Jamie Reid, Frank Edie, Art Chantry, Michael manwaring, Rod Clark, Scott Clum, Phil Gips, Edward Fella, and many others.
Roman Cieślewicz (1930 – 1996) iwas a Polish (naturalized French) graphic artist and photographer. From 1943 to 1946 he attended the School of Artistic Industry in Lvov and from 1947 to 1949 attended the Krakow's Fine Arts Lycee. He studied at Kraków Academy of Fine Arts from 1949 to 1955. He was an artistic editor of "Ty i Ja" monthly (Warsaw) 1959–1962. In 1963, he moved to France and naturalized in 1971. He worked as art director of Vogue, Elle (1965–1969) and Mafia - advertising agency (1969–1972) and was artistic creator of Opus International (1967–1969). Kitsch (1970–1971) and Cnac-archives (1971–1974). Taught at the Ecole Superieure d'Arts Graphiques (ESAG) in Paris. In 1976 he produced his "reviev of panic information" - "Kamikaze"/No. 1/ published by Christian Bourgois. In 1991 he produced "Kamikaze 2" with Agnes B. He took part in numerous group exhibitions of graphic, poster and photographic art and was a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale).
Derek Birdsall, RDI (August 1934) is an internationally renowned British graphic designer. Birdsall w attended The King's School, Pontefract, Wakefield College of Art and Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. At Central, Birdsall came under the influence of Anthony Froshaug, who – alongside Herbert Spencer and Edward Wright – taught his students the difference between beautiful lettering and typography proper, with its pre-eminent concerns of clarity, directness and, above all, textual legibility." Birdsall failed to earn a diploma, however, and began his career in design in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Birdsall's career and fame were built on a variety of designs and commissions. During his long career—among much other work—Birdsall designed Penguin book covers and Pirelli calendars; he art-directed several magazines (including Nova and Mobil Oil's Pegasus; and he designed books for the Yale Center for British Art, the Tate, the V&A and the British Council and redesigned the Book of Common Prayer in 2000. Alongside his practice in design, Birdsall also taught design at the Royal College of Art beginning in 1987. Birdsall was the author of Notes On Book Design, published by Yale University Press in 2004.
Max Bittrof (1890 – ?) trained at Krefeld and Wuppertal-Elberfeld, where he combined evening classes with an apprenticeship in lithography and printing. He settled in Frankfurt am Main in 1920 and soon became one of the established graphic artists in the Rhine / Main area, designing posters, wine bottle labels, tobacco advertisements and book jackets. He was one of the co-founders in 1923 of the German Association of Graphic Designers (BDG), which still represents the professional interests of designers in Germany today. The BDG helped the newly defined profession to gain recognition through a series of self-assured campaigns, many of which Bittrof orchestrated.