VISUAL COMMUNICATION HISTORY BLOG

The first Christmas catalogue Edward Bawden (1903 - 1989) created for Fortnum's was in 1955. The 1958 catalogue is an extended pun on the word 'cat', and is full of witty and playful drawings. Cats were a passion of his, as they strut, dance, and grin their way through these remarkable pages. Part of his enduring appeal is his combination of modernism and tradition. He always believed that a good piece of design was as valuable as …

The pictures are from my own collection. They are scans from a book that I bought for the university years ago when I was putting together material for the history of visual communication course. Not exactly legal, I know, but I am very glad I had the foresight to do it anyway, since when I made a search for Brad Thompson's work online just now I was astonished by how slim the pickings were. Definitely one of the greatest graphic designers…

https://www.moma.org/search/?q=armin+hofmann

... 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.

See a collection of spreads from the typographic journal, complied from various issues of the year 1968, on Sébastien Hayez's Flickr stream here >>>

Founded by producer Manfred Eicher in 1969, ECM has issued over a thousand albums spanning many idioms, including standard-setting jazz recordings by Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and others: http://www.ecmrecords.com/Startseite/startseite.php Importantly, for the field of graphic design Ecm has also pursued a consistent visual language based upon an interpretation of Swiss Style in…

http://www.fulltable.com/CA/index.htm : Fabulous resource on mid 20th century living, told through all kinds of visual material, mostly advertisements and editorial design. Here is what Chris Mullen has to say about his own site: "Welcome to Chris Mullen's website, The Visual Telling of Stories. You can go to the main gate or shuffle about in the Samplers till you get some hang of the place. It was started in 1996. Material is added ever…