Franco Grignani (February 4, 1908 – 20 February 1999) was an Italian architect, graphic designer and artist. He is best known for black and white graphics, particularly the Woolmark logo, which was voted 'Best Logo of all Time' by Creative Review Magazine in 2011.
Grignani was born in Pieve Porto Morone, Italy. He studied architecture in Turin between 1929 and 1933. Early on, he became absorbed in experimentations in photography, and in optic and visual phenomena. He played a part in Italy's second Futurist and Constructivist movements. Subsequently, his work was more closely associated with Kinetic Art and Op Art. Based on theories of perception, particularly on the Psychology of Form and his knowledge of architecture, he created more than 14000 experimental works. He remains a powerful influence in the world of graphic design.
In Italy, Grignani is well known as the master of optical graphic design and his firm together with Studio Boggier were the leading names in Op-Art-Graphics in the 1960s.
The Futura font (really typeface, but let's drop the pedantry for the sake of clarity) is famous. Futura was created by Paul Renner in 1920s Germany, just as the Bauhaus movement was picking up steam. Though Renner wasn't Bauhaus, Futura had that flavor, which was part of the problem.
The newly powerful Nazis favored the ornate Fraktur type style to modern Futura, so they excluded both the type and its creator. Of course, Nazis are not just evil, but also often insane and inefficient — so Futura returned to Germany, as did Renner. But by that time, Futura had established itself as the international typeface of the future, and the font's legacy was secured.
That's even more clear when you learn about the lunar plaque that went up on Apollo 11. Futura was the font selected for that great task — making Futura the font that escaped the Nazis and landed on the moon.
In 1935, as part of his New Deal program to put Americans back to work during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt established the Work Progress Administration. The WPA (its name was changed to the Work Project Administration in 1939) employed millions of people to carry out major public works projects, and within it, there was a smaller, creative arm: the Federal Project Number One.
The goal was not just providing funding and work for artists, but also promoting and sharing the work being done by American musicians, writers, and theater professionals. It reflected the belief of New Deal administrators that art could, and should be, a part of everyday life.
"The government unwittingly launched a movement to improve the commercial poster and raise it to a true art form," Richard Floethe, who headed up the Poster Division in New York, wrote in an essay.
The group designed posters for art programs as well as for public parks, and organizations devoted to health and education. The posters were first made by hand before moving to the silkscreen process, which allowed for a greater volume to be printed. From 1936 to 1943, over two million posters were printed. The lion's share of the Work Project Administration poster trove is held at the Library of Congress.
Below, we've gathered some of the most striking and thought-provoking posters created for libraries in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
A video documenting the making of the Breaking Wave kinetic ball suspension sculpture by Plebian Design and Hypersonic for Biogen IDEC in Cambridge, MA. USA. Installed February 2014.
GRADUATION PROJECT. Animation which shows typography evolution from paper to screen. The animation is divided in two parts. The first deals with the basic rules of typesetting. The second, is about the evolution of typography in cinema. Used mainly for Opening and Closing title.
By Thibault de Fournas Music : Clair de Lune - Debussy Shoot the Piano Player: Poursuite - Hugh Wolff & London Sinfonietta - Georges Delerue
We had the pleasure of spending some time with Stefan Sagmeister at the recent FITC Toronto conference in April, 2014, and he had some things to say.
See Sagmeister in Calgary at the CAMP Festival Calgary, Alberta • Sept 8-9, 2014 • http://campfestival.ca
Stefan Sagmeister Partner, Sagmeister & Walsh
Stefan Sagmeister formed the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO and the Guggenheim Museum. Having been nominated eight times, he finally won two Grammy Awards for the Talking Heads and Brian Eno & David Byrne package designs. He has also earned practically every important international design award.
In 2008 Stefan authored a comprehensive book titled “Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far”, published by Abrams. Solo shows of Sagmeister Inc’s work have been mounted in Paris, Zurich, Vienna, Prague, Cologne, Berlin, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul and Miami.
Stefan teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Art in New York and lectures extensively on all continents. In 2012 young designer Jessica Walsh became a partner and the company was renamed into Sagmeister & Walsh. A native of Austria, he received his MFA from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and, as a Fulbright Scholar, a master’s degree from Pratt Institute in New York. After his studies he worked as a Creative Director for Leo Burnett in Hong Kong and for M&Co. in New York. http://www.sagmeisterwalsh.com/
...numa destas casas, inventadas, claro, ao estilo de artistas plásticos variados. Nem são bem casas, são prédios que os artistas também são grandes. O design é de Federico Babina que também já tinha dado a sua 'opinião visual' sobre cenários de filmes famosos. O detalhe pode ser visto aqui.
A Taschen dá cabo de mim... E o Natal que já passou... Suspiro. Algumas ilustrações abaixo. Diz o site deles:
The Book of Miracles that first surfaced a few years ago and recently made its way into an American private collection is one of the most spectacular new discoveries in the field of Renaissance art. The nearly complete surviving illustrated manuscript, which was created in the Swabian Imperial Free City of Augsburg around 1550, is composed of 169 pages with large-format illustrations in gouache and watercolor depicting wondrous and often eerie celestial phenomena, constellations, conflagrations, and floods as well as other catastrophes and occurrences. It deals with events ranging from the creation of the world and incidents drawn from the Old Testament, ancient tradition, and medieval chronicles to those that took place in the immediate present of the book’s author and, with the illustrations of the visionary Book of Revelation, even includes the future end of the world.
