VISUAL COMMUNICATION HISTORY BLOG

Eduardo Recife explains the origins of his remarkable art and design output as follows: "I´ve been drawing since I was little. At school I had notebooks filled with drawings instead of notes. I used to tattoo my buddies with a black ink pen. I used to draw on any kind of surface when I was bored... I believe it's what I do best. It's also the best way for me to communicate things I can't find words for... It's a therapy…

April Greiman is widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. According to design historian Steven Heller, “April Greiman was a bridge between the modern and postmodern, the analog and the digital.” “She is a pivotal proponent of the ‘new typography’ and new wave that defined late twentieth-century graphic design.” Her art combines her Swiss design training with West Coast postmodernism. Gre…

If you are a graphic designer who is suddenly confronted with having to design a retro logo or a label that asks for a no hold barred approach, needs every pattern, texture, flourish, all the typographic twists and turns and curlicues - and all correctly placed, no less - you may be quite intimidated by the task at hand. I know, I certainly would be. Kittl is a truly astonishing online app that lets you create these complex types of logos. You st…

Founded in 1992, Ray Gun was the only magazine wherein a die-hard culture seeker could find information on alternative music and the street-inspired style that really mattered. Punk rock had torn pop music to shreds and created a hunger for an original lifestyle beyond mainstream culture, and Ray Gun was its graphic chronicler: across its pages blasted a visual feast made up of era-defining artists such as Sonic Youth or Iggy Pop, music-inspire…

... is a shiny, well-fed tome that gathers the best cat-coddling articles, essays, short stories, poems, cartoons, covers, and other feats of literature and art from the New Yorker archives. Spanning nearly nine decades, the collection featuring contributions from such celebrated minds as John Updike, Margaret Atwood, James Thurber, Susan Orlean, and even the patron saint of “the other side,” famed dog-lover E. B. White. https://www.brainpicking…

Swissted is an ongoing project by artist and designer Mike Joyce, owner of Stereotype Design in New York City. Drawing from his love of punk rock and Swiss Modernism, two movements that have almost nothing to do with one another, the designer has redesigned vintage punk, hardcore, new wave, and indie rock show flyers into International Typographic Style posters. Each design is set in lowercase Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk medium—not Helvetica.

Tigre Milena, aka. Doni Parlanti is a high powered professional in a field completely unrelated to Victorian fairy tales. In her "other" life Tigre is an avatar in the virtual world of Second Life ®, where she shows skills and talents which have nothing whatsoever to do with the demands of her "Real Life" job: Tigre sets up complex scenes (which are actually lived-in locations within her own virtual home), populated with the c…

"A postindustrial Rococo master, Kris Kuksi obsessively arranges characters and architecture with an exquisite sense of drama. Kuksi uses screaming plastic soldiers, miniature engine blocks, towering spires and assorted debris to form his land scapes. The political, spiritual, and material conflict within these shrines is enacted under the calm gaze of remote deities and august statuary. Kuksi manages to evoke, at once, a sanctum and a maus…

BioShock is a first-person shooter game developed by Irrational Games and designed by Ken Levine. Set in an alternate history 1960, the game places the player in the role of a plane crash survivor named Jack, who must explore the underwater city of Rapture, and survive attacks by the mutated beings and mechanical drones that populate it. The game incorporates elements found in role-playing and survival games, and is described by the developers …

http://www.trautrimas.ca/ David Trautrimas takes the components of familiar household appliances and transforms them into ironic/iconic architectural landscape paintings such as top secret Cold War era military outposts or residential building sites. The images below are "Micro Re-Instigator" from the The Spyfrost series (top), "The Fishing Complex" (middle) and the "Coffee Pot Towers" (bottom) from the Habitat ser…

Daniel Widrig studied architecture in Germany and the UK. After graduating from the Architectural Association in London with a Master’s Degree in Architecture and Urbanism in 2006 , he joined Zaha Hadid Architects where he worked on several major international projects. Since establishing his own studio in London, Widrig has been working on architectural concepts, products, objects and experimental furniture editions. His work has won several aw…

Rigorously curated by its founder Manuel Lima , the Visual Complexity portal shows the very best output of a new hybrid profession between graphic design and computer science - Data Visualization : http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

This is a great project developed by Cam Wilde at squidspot.com . You can purchase prints and other memorabilia, such as vinyl decals or even a moleskine notebook cover, at a page dedicated to the table . Cam Wilde tells us that "the Periodic Table of Typefaces is obviously in the style of all the thousands of over-sized Periodic Table of Elements posters hanging in schools and homes around the world. This particular table lists 100 of the m…