Jazz & conversation. Alan Kitching’s biographer. Former Guardian columnist. ✒️ Editor: Eye, Pulp. European, producer, composer @Landscape_band
Articles by John L Walters
Come to Type Tuesday: Punches to pixels
Friday, 12:00pm 6 March 2026 Buy your tickets for Type Tuesday 10.03.26 John L.
Day Tripper — when The Beatles entered the battle of riffs
This article has been amended to reflect the fact that The Beatles went into the studio three days after recording ‘Drive My Car’, not as...
Eye Magazine | We made this: Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes
John Morgan’s Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes is an unabashed and unironic love letter to print. Morgan, who died of a brain tumour on 2 September 2025, aged 52, described the books in his library as his ‘muses’ – mystifying objects of admiration and adoration. The texts that accompany each item, set alongside calm spreads and covers photographed by Ed Park, reveal that Morgan did not claim to understand fully such books, that his relationship with them was ‘superficial’.
Downtown Train — Tom Waits’s vivid 1985 track became a pop classic
Music has long drawn inspiration from railways and trains, from Duke Ellington’s “Happy Go Lucky Local” via Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island...
Eye Magazine | Feature | Reputations: Brian Collins
Margaret Calvert is the doyenne of British graphic design, much admired for her contribution to the sign systems for the UK’s motorways and roads on which she worked with her boss and mentor Jock Kinneir in the late 1950s and 60s […] Was there a sense that you were part of a New Wave, the Modernists who were changing the way? Well, I never thought that, but I do remember thinking that the Festival of Britain – all this Victoriana and decorative stuff – that wasn’t me at all.
Eye Magazine | Feature | Jump cuts
There is nothing new about moving type and image. The desire to make graphics move, to see type twist and change within three-dimensional space – or create that illusion – has been around for some time. The optical effects of signpainting, day-glo inks, shadows, embossing and debossing all allow the designer to play with the idea of kineticism, even when there is no actual movement.
Editorial Eye 105
At a time when people are seeing Artificial Intelligence as either a get-rich scheme or an existential threat, Marian Bantjes’ article ‘Artificial idiot’ is a useful corrective to the tsunami of commentary. Bantjes has taken the time to investigate the processes required to coax something interesting out of Midjourney, and has found a typically novel way to incorporate the application into her own practice.
Connecting a collection
Autumn 2023 Connecting a collection John L. Walters Toshiya Izumo Ferdinand Ulrich A stylish pack of artist cards celebrates this German-Japanese collaboration. By John L. Walters This bright green pack of Künstlerkarten (artist cards) has already been showered with awards, including one from the New York Art Directors club, and a ‘Best-in-Show’ from Communication Arts.
Eye Magazine | Opinion |
It is commonplace to say that history is written by the winners, but if we have learned anything in the past few years it is that the historical record needs to be challenged. After all, some of the biggest winners are now seen as bad losers.
Editorial Eye 89
Winter 2014 Editorial Eye 89 John L. Walters Graphic design Illustration Magazines New media Photography Photography and illustration may be separate disciplines, but they are interwoven with design. The photo portraits of Platon, who studied design, have a graphic sensibility that makes his work especially powerful on the page, and his People’s Portfolio has become a way to give a voice to those once excluded from the news.
Eye Magazine | Review |
After all the rhetoric expended upon new collaborations between art, science and technology, this straightforward and conventionally presented book delivers something genuinely radical – a new way of understanding a big slice of art history. Hockney has pieced together an extended visual research document about his investigations into the way painters used optical methods to represent the world about them.
Eye Magazine | Review |
Gilles Peterson is known for his unfeasibly large record collection and an unstoppable enthusiasm for Black music. The pandemic forced radical changes to the DJ’s schedule, but he continued broadcasting from his North London basement studio. The core of Gilles Peterson’s Lockdown FM – Broadcasting in a Pandemic is a series of 80 playlists, coolly typeset by designer Hugh Miller in Monument Grotesk.
Cage recast as eye candy
American composer John Cage was a prankster, a gameshow champion and a creator of graphic scores whose conceptual and aesthetic beauty often outstrips their musical content. Graphic scores such as Cage’s Aria (1958) are provocations whose influence on visual culture may be more profound than their impact on listeners. Musicians who cite Cage as an influence, such as John Adams or Brian Eno, tend to point to his role in liberating music from its mid-twentieth-century straitjacket.
Editorial Eye 93
Winter 2017 Editorial Eye 93 Illustration and the power of the drawn image are at the heart of this issue of Eye. Myriad new technologies affect the way illustrated images can be created, developed and disseminated, yet Olivier Kugler (whose portrait of Syrian refugee Muhamed graces the cover) does all his drawings in pencil.
Business at the centre
Autumn 2019 Business at the centre An interview with Sascha Lötscher, managing partner of G+A Gottschalk + Ash International (G+A) occupies a spacious, detached property in the pleasant Englisch Viertel neighbourhood in the Hottingen district of south east Zürich, where the small team works under the leadership of managing partner Sascha Lötscher, who joined in 2003 and became a partner in 2004.
Fritz Gottschalk and the Swiss-Canadian connection
Autumn 2019 Fritz Gottschalk and the Swiss-Canadian connection Gottschalk + Ash International spans more than five decades, a Swiss design studio with Modernist roots in Northern Europe and North America. Eye went to Zürich to meet the people behind the practice Fritz Gottschalk was born in Zürich in 1937 and studied and worked in Europe before emigrating to Canada in the early 1960s, where he founded Gottschalk + Ash (G+A) with Canadian designer Stuart Ash.
Mark Holt: Games, set and dispatch
When Holt, a co-founder of 8vo and Octavo, began work on this extensive account of the design programme for the 1972 Olympics, he had little idea how time-consuming the project would become. After extensive research and preparation, he launched his Kickstarter campaign in March 2019 with a target of £76,750, and raised £84,657 in a month. Holt talked to Eye’s John L. Walters about the long path to publication. Eye: Was this the first time you had tried crowdfunding?
Editorial Eye 72
Last summer we tackled the canon of graphic design history in a special issue; this time we address the even more knotty subject of illustration. Not by establishing any kind of canon, but by looking at illustration at the myriad points where it touches and intersects with graphic design, designers and design thinking. The visual material we show in ‘The graphic designer as illustrator’ demonstrates that we are living through an abundant time for made images.
The Vignellis: a thoroughly Modernist marriage
The Vignellis breeze through London in May, looking every inch the Modernist role model couple, dressed in elegant, monochrome clothes they designed themselves. Lella wears one of her beautiful silver necklaces – more industrial design than jewellery – while Massimo has a brooch pinned to his throat that looks like a portcullis. Of course it’s not a gate, it’s a grid.
Editorial Eye 70
Given the sophisticated times we live in, it is odd to note how often the word ‘magic’ crops up. David Crow uses the term in his piece about digital craft (pp.20-27), as does Anthony Oliver to describe the excitement of watching a photographic image appear in the old ‘wet’ darkroom (pp.72-73). The late Arthur C.
Eye Magazine | Review |
‘At design school I became enamoured with typography,’ said Kris Sowersby to Mark Thomson in the Eye 79 ‘Reputations’ interview with the largely self-taught type designer. ‘I loved the simplicity of its raw state – arrangements of black and white space on the page.’ And that is what the crowdfunded Kris Sowersby: The Art of Letters delivers. Individual glyphs from Sowersby’s vast catalogue are presented at gargantuan point sizes, one per page.
Editorial Eye 90
The wider world’s interpretation of type and typography can be broad, vague, prejudiced, opinionated, highly fanciful and charmingly enthusiastic. Typefaces and fonts are often celebrated in social media, and hashtags (such as our own #TypeTuesday) demonstrate that the word ‘type’ can embrace everything from chalkboard scrawls to distressed wood letters, taking in signwriting (like that of Pete Hardwicke), calligraphic swirls and rusting typewriters along the way.
Editorial Eye 67
I don’t know about you, but the world of origami, with its ‘molecules’ and ‘bug wars’ had passed me by completely. Which is why I’m grateful to Canadian designer Marian Bantjes for introducing Eye’s readers to this bizarrely beautiful world. In ‘Surface to space’, Marian (one of the stars of last year’s AIGA conference in Denver) delves into this weird and wonderful area – with its own stars, characters, conferences and fanatics – and finds parallels with graphic design.
Alphabetical jazz soup
The most ingenious editorial design element of Jazz Covers is its double spine: a trompe l’oeil rendering of slightly battered LP spines that includes John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Duke Ellington’s soundtrack for Anatomy of a Murder, The Individualism of Gil Evans and Miles Davis’s On the Corner. The remainder of this hefty two-volume book shows no such discrimination.
Fanfare for the common man
This book is neither biography nor visual monograph but an entertaining compilation that throws additional light on the principal illustrator behind Otto Neurath’s Isotype. Neurath recruited Arntz (1900-88) in 1926 after seeing his woodcuts: satirical or poignant images with a left-wing point of view, depicting scenes of striking labourers or the class-divided occupants of a three-storey house.
Editorial Eye 102
Last September, Eye held an online Type Tuesday to preview this special issue, featuring Thomas Huot-Marchand (France), Laura Meseguer (Spain) and November (India).
Editorial Eye 49
There is a moment in Adrian Shaughnessy’s profile of Angela Lorenz where the latter talks about ‘the mythical zeros and ones in the brain of your Mac’. Somehow, it is oddly appropriate that Lorenz, a practical designer who turns the fundamentals of machine code into a kind of folk art, should use terms such as ‘myth’. It reveals an instinctive response to the way our computer-dominated world feels from the inside.
The United Nations of Type
Unicode is one of the great success stories of standardisation. The Unicode Consortium is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1991 by all the major computer companies (including Apple, Microsoft and Adobe) and its mission is to ensure consistency in the digital encoding of typographic characters. In the original Unicode, each character had an unambiguously defined sixteen-bit code point.
Eye Magazine | Feature |
Autumn 2021 Design for a better world John L. Walters November Shiva Nallaperumal Juhi Vishnani Arya Purohit Hitesh Malaviya Rendani Nemakhavhani Indian design duo November balances commercial practice with a commitment to social change. By John L. Walters [EXTRACT] November is a Mumbai design duo, founded by Shiva Nallaperumal and Juhi Vishnani, that is both intellectually driven and commercially astute.
Eye Magazine | Review | Love letters
Scripts, with a jazz-like mix of virtuosity and improvisation, can represent many things, from intimacy and authenticity to self-indulgent luxury. And script lettering and typefaces are enjoying a renaissance thanks to the work of designers such as Alejandro Paul (see pages 60-67), Luke Lucas / Lifelounge and Jessica Hische (see Eye 75).
Editorial Eye 99
Autumn 2019 Editorial Eye 99 Eye has always been both a cultural journal and a business-to-business magazine. Though we value work that is both beautiful and effective, the ecology of graphic design rests on a transactional network – from client, to studio, to final output – that is underpinned by friendly relationships with ‘suppliers’ such as photographers, illustrators, printers, developers, repro houses, paper companies and type foundries.
Eye Magazine | Review |
Several chapters into this captivating how-to book, Joby Carter jokes about ‘carrying on the fairground tradition of decorating absolutely everything’. He should know – he grew up in the celebrated family that founded Carters Steam Fair, and he decided to be a signwriter at the age of eight.
Psychedelic tract
Summer 2012 Psychedelic tract John L. Walters Heinz Edelmann Mati Klarwein Martin Sharp Reviews Electrical Banana: Masters of Psychedelic Art By Norman Hathaway and Dan Nadel Damiani £27, $39.95 Reviewed by John L. Walters The era of psychedelic art – from the mid 1960s to the very early 70s – was so short that it is often overlooked, misunderstood or dismissed as a curious, slightly embarrassing mix of American eclecticism and stoned English eccentricity.
Eye Magazine | Feature |
Late last year, Lucinda Rogers went to Glasgow in Scotland for Cop26*, the international climate change conference and drew all day, every day, for two weeks. From her first impressions of Glasgow railway station, with its bustling passengers and big clock dominated by Cop26 banners, to her elegiac drawings as the whole circus closed down, she captured the mood of a city caught up in the urgency of a global debate.
Editorial Eye 87
Spring 2014 Editorial Eye 87 John L. Walters the editor Editorial What do we think about when we look at design for food and drink? This essential part of our lives can encompass everything from the raw to the cooked; from the anticipation of a feast to the remembrance of tastes past; from a thirst quenched to a branch of show business. For this special issue of Eye, whether we looked at beer, burgers, jam or rhubarb, the concept of ‘authenticity’ always seemed fundamental.
We made this: Dorothy and Otis
This book is the result of a lengthy period of research and rediscovery on the part of designer Norman Hathaway, later joined by co-author Dan Nadel. Hathaway first glimpsed Otis (Shep) Shepard’s work in the instruction booklet accompanying a Paasche airbrush he acquired as a teenager. Later, he saw Shep’s work for Wrigley’s in advertising annuals and in the exhibition catalogue Images of an Era: The American Poster 1945-1975.
Reputations: Mucho
In just a few years, Mucho has expanded rapidly in size and ambition. Originally a Catalan practice formed by two schoolfriends, it is now an international practice with offices in five countries across two continents. Close friends Marc Català and Pablo Juncadella collaborated for several years, founding Mucho in Barcelona in 2003, to be joined by Tilman Solé in 2010. In 2013 they hooked up with John Dowling (Newark) and Rob Duncan (San Francisco) of Anglo-American design team Duncan Dowling.
Eye Magazine | Opinion | Eye 69 contents
Eye no. 69 vol. 18 2 Editorial By John L. Walters 4 Critique Découvertes. Revelations in style. Gallimard’s Découvertes series secures readers’ loyalty by showing respect for their curiosity and intelligence. By Rick Poynor 6 Picture GTF Illuminated thought. The practice is said to ‘signal a break with the past’ but GTF has an unforced ‘style’ that is impossible to copy. By John L. Walters 12 Common knowledge D&AD annuals Excitable hexagonal.
Eye Magazine | Feature | Robin Nicholas
Robin Nicholas was born in Westerham, Kent, in 1947. In 1965 he went to train in the Type Drawing Office (TDO) of Monotype, at that time still primarily an engineering company making hot metal typesetting machines. He has been with the company ever since, witnessing the revolutions brought about by phototypesetting and digital technology, and the company’s bankruptcy in the 1990s. For ten years Nicholas was manager of the Type Drawing Office.
Eye Magazine | Feature |
Saskia Marka’s titles for this Cold War thriller series (also Deutschland 83 and 89) has a ‘new wave’ flair that evokes the era in tandem with the title song, the 1983 hit ‘Major Tom (Coming Home)’ by German synthpop musician Peter Schilling.
Eye Magazine | Feature |
Opening titles for The Responder (2022) For The Responder, a gritty police drama set on the rainy streets of Liverpool, Matt Willey’s team created a blurred, animated logotype for the title card and a wide, cinematic typeface for the credits. Willey drew a typeface that nodded to the language of the type used on the police cars and emphasises the wide format.
Eye Magazine | Feature |
Spring 2023 Jump cuts: Dirk Koy Designer Dirk Koy received his first video camera (a Sony Video8) at fourteen and took it everywhere, regarding the camera as ‘a kind of pencil’. He recalls a special moment in his youth when he connected the camcorder to the TV to create analogue feedback. ‘I spent days in front of the TV to figure out how I can create different feedbacks by manipulating the parameters.
Eye Magazine | Feature |
Spring 2023 Jump cuts: Mitch Paone John L. Walters Mitch Paone DIA Studio Klim (2019) Design and animation: DIA Studio. Campaign development: ALT Group. Roblox ‘Brand anthem’ (2022) Design and animation: DIA Studio. Concept and script: Special Group. Roblox ‘Brand anthem’ (2022) DIA made a series of analogue typographic films in collaboration with Alt Group to promote the release of the Söhne typeface family, launched by Kris Sowersby’s Klim foundry (see Eye 79) in 2019.
Eye Magazine | Feature |
The full title for this subscription campaign commercial for The New York Times is ‘The Truth is Essential: Life Needs Truth’. Over a track by jazz drummer Makaya McCraven, this skilfully edited 2'20" video juxtaposes typeset questions and statements (‘Is It OK To Go For A Walk?’, ‘Engage’, ‘Midnight Pasta’), with a rapid-fire sequence of frames that display various subject matter in overlapping stills, videos and text … John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London Read the full version in Eye no.
Eye Magazine | Feature |
After Len Lye had made his first direct animation work, Full Fathom Five (1935), he approached John Grierson at the Post Office’s celebrated GPO Film Unit with the short experimental film. Although that film is now lost, it is known to have involved direct animation synchronised with the voice of actor John Gielgud reciting lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest … John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London Read the full version in Eye no. 104 vol. 26, 2023
Finding alternative motors
20Oct posted by: John Walters, Technical Engineer at maxon Due to the constant update in both winding and magnet technologies, motors can go into NRND (Not Recommended for New Designs) status and become obsolete. It is a standard process to replace older motors with more modern options, perhaps for a more compact design or for competing lead times or pricing.
Eye Magazine | Feature |
Spring 2023 Jump cuts: Roy Terhorst Weltformat (2022) Weltformat festival, 8-18 October 2022, Luzern, Switzerland Roy Terhorst is a motion designer and partner at Studio Thonik. He was the co-curator, with Liu Gang, of Flow, the first exhibition on avant-garde motion design in China, held at OCT-LOFT Shenzhen from 25 September to 6 November 2022.
Editorial Eye 88
Summer 2014 Editorial Eye 88 Publication design is a thread that runs through Eye 88. There’s the innovation in books documented in ‘To have and to hold’; Derek Birdsall’s exemplary art direction for Pegasus; E. M. Ginger’s digital facsimiles; and Gerald Cinamon’s memories of integrated design at Penguin. And we have a Reputations interview with Irma Boom about her multifaceted yet single-minded approach to book design. But the issue that never goes away is that of technology.
Eye Magazine | Feature | Power of two
Simon Dixon and Aporva Baxi quit their old jobs on the same day in 2001, determined to start their new studio, DixonBaxi, with a clean slate. ‘We decided we wouldn’t work with our old clients, and we wouldn’t show any work we had done,’ says Baxi. ‘We wrote two lists,’ says Dixon. ‘One list of things we would do … ’ ‘Simple things like being honest, no bullshit,’ interrupts Baxi. ‘And one list of things we wouldn’t do, like music design and working for agencies,’ continues Dixon.
Luxury of less is more
One of the most memorable and entertaining moments at the 2013 AGI Open in the Barbican Theatre, London was the debate ‘Cavaliers vs Roundheads’. In this session, Stefan Sagmeister and Marian Bantjes – advocating flamboyant decoration – were pitted against the austere Modernism (and neomodernism) of North’s Sean Perkins, Sascha Lobe of L2M3 in Germany, and Dean Poole of New Zealand’s Alt Group.
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