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Articles by Simon Esterson
Eye Magazine | Blog |
Eye’s Type Tuesday heads north for an early evening event at the David Crow Lecture Theatre*, Lowry Building, Manchester School of Art, Manchester Met. Doors open 5pm. Buy tickets here. We have asked design and visual culture experts Marianne Ashton-Booth, Stanley Chow, Yas Banks and Malcolm Garrett (first row, left to right) plus Craig Oldham, Jessica Lee, James Wrigley and Katy Cowan (second row) to each chose a favourite logo, and to give a brief presentation to explain their choice.
Eye Magazine | Review |
For journalist and magazine editor James Brown, his archive was a series of boxes in a lock-up garage. Zine Age Kicks (designed by Matthew Sankey, self-published via @jamesjamesbrown, £19.95) is that archive unpacked, spread on the floor and photographed in the ‘so-chaotic-it’s-good’ style that characterised his most famous creation, the original and best lad’s mag Loaded.
Eye Magazine | Review |
Phillip Pennington has made a fascinating contribution to graphic design history with his book Red Square: Mary de Saulles and the 1960s BEA corporate identity (The Modernist, £30). BEA was British European Airways, one of two Union Jack-flying, state-supported postwar British airlines.
Eye Magazine | Opinion | Bound for modernity
Michael Wolff (b.1933), was the co-founder of pioneering London branding agency Wolff Olins, but there has never been a book of his work and life. For fifteen years, while working on projects together, Wolff and NB Studio partner Alan Dye have talked about making a book. ‘He’d come in with an envelope of stuff and we would have a cup of tea and talk,’ says Dye of their working method.
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 | Review |
Here at Eye towers we are big fans of Cath Caldwell’s book Editorial Design (Laurence King, £30, designed by TwoSheds) and that is not just because we are featured in it writes Simon Esterson. The third edition has just appeared with new chapters (on independent magazines and the relationship between a publication’s print and digital content) and it continues to provide a contemporary perspective on the shifting landscape of design for magazines and newspapers.
Eye Magazine | Review | Full of typos
Fraser Muggeridge is a busy guy: exhibitions about book spines, visiting lecturer almost everywhere, but also heading a studio that designs for Tate and Jeremy Deller (see Eye 100). So his idea of a one-day conference examining typography as theory and practice is a mirror of his own preoccupations.
Peace, love and double-page spreads
Full disclosure: I’m a long-standing and fully paid up member of the Willy Fleckhaus (1925-83) fan club, writes Simon Esterson. Ever since I saw my first physical copies of his West German youth magazine Twen (see Eye 3) in my early days as a designer, I have held it up as one of the great examples of modern magazine design. Of course I couldn’t actually read German ….
Eye Magazine | Review |
Please don’t be misled by the title of David Jury’s book Mid-Century Type. It is not really just about type design in the 1950s, but rather a wide-ranging attempt to chart the graphic design landscape between the end of the Second World War in 1945 until the late 1960s, largely through the perspective of type and typography.
Eye Magazine | Feature |
Lucas Sharp and Chantra Malee started Sharp Type in 2015, in what they now call ‘Season One’ of their digital type foundry. Just over eight years later, they announced ‘Season Two’. Sharp, born in 1986 in Marin County near San Francisco, studied at Parsons and interned with Joshua Darden. Malee, born in 1989 in Newport, Rhode Island, studied Design and Management at Parsons, which is where the couple met and became partners in life and type.
Liberté, égalité, typography
Autumn 2018 Liberté, égalité, typography Serge Ricco, creative director of l’Obs, has shown this word-driven, left-wing French weekly the power of expressive type and images It is a hot morning at the end of July in Paris. Not the picture-perfect Paris of tourists, but business Paris, in the buildings around the neo-Classical stock exchange, the Bourse. Except that nobody is around.
When the pen was mighty
These two volumes (Custom Lettering of the 40s & 50s, Custom Lettering of the 60s & 70s, Fiell, £24.95 each) are a labour of loving typographic archaeology by the type designer and illustrator Rian Hughes.
Eye Magazine | Review |
How do you tell the story of the way graphic design actually gets done? Two books, both centred around infographics, take totally opposite approaches. R. Roger Remington and Sheila Pontis’s Communicating Knowledge Visually: Will Burtin’s Scientific Approach to Information Design takes a very scientific approach to a very scientific designer.
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.
Eye Magazine | Feature | Printing.com
Three little acronyms dominate the way that designers and printers now work together: PDF (portable document format), FTP (file transfer protocol) and CTP (computer to plate). As colour reproduction became digitally based, the specialised craft skills of the repro house largely disappeared.
You can judge by the cover
Designer Andrew Howard’s catalogue of his exhibition Gateways: An International Exhibition of Book Covers, Portugal is a fascinating snapshot of contemporary book cover approaches, with more than 400 examples from 53 designers in fourteen countries (price €25, plus postage, from studioandrewhoward.com, or fnac.pt).
Pictures on a page
This Eye special issue about Monotype focuses on the technology of putting words on the printed page. But there’s a parallel history of how the pictures get there, too. In many ways the constantly improving techniques of colour picture reproduction explain why lithography superseded letterpress in commercial printing in the 1950s. Ruth Artmonsky’s Do You Want It Good or Do You Want It Tuesday? (Artmonsky Arts, £12, design: Webb & Webb) tells the story of the ‘halcyon days’ of printer W. S.
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.
Eye 58 contents page
Editorial by John L. Walters 01 Visual contents 02 Picture Paris métro Remembrance of things past. The renovation of a métro line reveals traces of a century of billboard advertising. By Jessica Jenkins 04 Critique Newspaper design The big picture. The Guardian’s new Eyewitness page uses single images on a central spread for maximum impact. By Rick Poynor 18 Essay Contemporary design The decriminalisation of ornament.
Could this be the death of the dot?
How can you make a picture look its best on the printed page? In recent years the printers’ answer has been to increase the screen ruling applied to the scanned image: 200 dpi became standard in high-quality sheet-fed colour, work, and some printers are regularly printing at 300 dpi and higher. In conventional screen generation, the image is produced by dots of varying sizes in each of the four process colours in a fixed relationship to one another.
Glimpses of a graphic reality
Admit it. What graphic designers really want is to see work by other graphic designers, to read what other designers have to say about doing a project. Sure, we want to read other types of book (even books not actually about design), but the design publishing industry has grown on a combination of books that teach and show current trends, even try to give a glimpse of reality.
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 |
In recent years, spiral binding has been unloved and ignored. Millions of A4 reports with wire spirals and plastic covers, produced in-house on office machines, have done little for its aesthetic reputation. But when spiral and comb binding was first introduced in the 1930s it was all the rage. Like the all-white buildings of Le Corbusier, it had the aura of modern materials and industrial production. A. M.
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.
Ten projects by Jim Sutherland
Summer 2021 Ten projects by Jim Sutherland Simon Esterson Jim Sutherland Feature A graphic designer downsizes to spend more time thinking, studying and designing without commercial studio pressures. What could possibly go right? By Simon Esterson. Portrait by Philip Sayer [EXTRACT] For Jim Sutherland, design projects are all about ideas. There is no signature style applied across his work; no obsession with a group of typefaces.
Ten projects by Jim Sutherland
For Jim Sutherland, design projects are all about ideas. There is no signature style applied across his work; no obsession with a group of typefaces. Instead, each project has at its core an idea that determines its visual direction. The identity for the Kings Place music centre is based on the sound waves generated by different pieces of music; the stamps celebrating crime writer Agatha Christie are full of clues to be discovered; in his marque for Start-rite the ‘R’ letters sport pairs of shoes.
Well fed in the West End
Spring 2014 Well fed in the West End Ardizzone’s menus evoked a mid-century world of food-loving Londoners The illustrator Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979) is best remembered for his ‘Tim’ series of children’s books and his drawings for the Penguin edition of Stig of the Dump. He drew a certain kind of Englishness, a comforting world of absorbed lovers, afternoon drinkers and naughty schoolboys (see Eye 85). His small-scale dramas featured everyday people with rotund bodies and receding hairlines.
Putting the graph in graphic
Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design (Die Gestalten Verlag, £40, $78, €49.90) is publisher DGV’s latest Zeitgeist-surfing compilation volume. Here the theme is information graphics, and among talk of new online tools and expanded datasets, the beautiful and the rigorous share pages with the dangerously decorative in a way that might make that guru of information presentation Edward Tufte shake his head.
Eye Magazine | Review | Off the shelf
Winter 2011 Off the shelf Own Label By Jonny Trunk<br>Designed & published by Fuel, £16.95 Jonny Trunk is obsessed by the childhood memory of a cornflake box seen on family shopping trips: ‘It was white with orange circles on the front.
Sans serifs in suburbia
The concept of the supermarket came to Britain in the 1960s from the United States. Shoppers could now roam the aisles picking products by themselves. Before long, the shelves became a battleground between food manufacturers’ heavily promoted brands – with their easily recognisable packaging and vernacular graphic identities – and the supermarkets’ ‘own-brand’ versions of the same foods: less familiar, but sold more cheaply. Sainsbury’s positioned themselves as the Modernist retailer.
Eye Magazine | Opinion | Inspiration
With their Swiss-influenced austerity, the programmes designed by Ken Briggs and Sue Chennells for Britain’s National Theatre were some of the first printed objects that I remember noticing from the late 1960s when I became interested in design and printing.
The book of Michael
It is a pleasure to read a book that is honest, accessible and direct about life as a designer and working with clients. It is a bonus that Michael Bierut’s projects, featured in How to (Thames & Hudson £29.95), are some of the best graphics in the world.
Union of Soviet socialist images
In 1970 David King was in Moscow, researching a feature on Lenin for the Sunday Times Magazine, where he was art editor. ‘I opened the door to my room and interrupted somebody leafing through my notebooks. It didn’t matter. I had nothing to hide and in a way was rather expecting it. He said sorry in English and left, empty-handed.
Eye Magazine | Blog | Every Eye ever
On Thursday 18 June 2020, Jeremy Leslie was keen to celebrate customers being able to browse magazines in his shop magCulture again, writes Eye’s art director Simon Esterson. Jeremy is the happy curator of the shop’s big, long, back wall which proudly displays the best of independent magazine publishing. Where better to assemble all 100 issues of Eye and where suitably briefed customers (free gloves, timed entry and social distancing) could come and browse Eye’s take on graphic design?
Notes from the American North-West
With a notebook and pencil poking out of the top pocket of his denim work jacket and wearing an American seed cap, Aaron James Draplin looks out from this book every inch the man who is a distinctive voice in US graphic design. He has spent his life between the Midwest and Oregon; and there is an inspirational honesty and authenticity to his design approach and the way he tells his story (Draplin Design Co. Pretty Much Everything, Abrams, $40, £25).
A note on the type
The Eye reviews desk bends under the weight of new books on type, from the detailed investigation of a single face to the beautifully realised object that is The Visual History of Type. But for me, Revival Type: Digital Typefaces Inspired by the Past (Paul Shaw, Thames & Hudson, £19.95, $40) is simply the best recent publication about type. This is the work of authority to which I will turn again and again. The book’s aim is to survey and evaluate digital typefaces derived and inspired by the past.
Eye Magazine | Feature | Head Trip
In the hand, the Nobrium book has dramatic qualities as a physical object: the black slip-case with its white logo slides off to reveal a stark square-backed white cover with the logo in reverse. Its pages are printed with vivid special colours and an overall varnish so that even the unprinted paper is super-glossy. It is bold and colourful and the diagrams do all the work.
An Atlas of Typeforms
When I was twelve years old, writes Simon Esterson, my parents bought me an Adana handpress and I began setting type and printing little jobs by desktop letterpress. I became intrigued by type and typography. Just how different was Univers from Helvetica? The book that taught me about these things was An Atlas of Typeforms, by Alan Bartram and James Sutton. My 1968 first edition, with its little book label from Foyles in London’s Charing Cross Road, is by the desk as I write this.
Book of the mag of the moment
Winter 2017 Book of the mag of the moment Simon Esterson Francesco Franchi Graphic design Illustration Information design Magazines Reviews The Intelligent Lifestyle Magazine By Francesco Franchi and Christian Rocca<br> Gestalten, €49.90, £45<br> IL is the monthly supplement of the Italian business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. Since its launch in September 2008 the title has established itself as one of the best designed magazines in the world.
Interview with Photographer Iwan Baan
Iwan Baan is the most sought after architectural photographer on earth. Living entirely from suitcases and hotel rooms, he is courted by architectural royalty the world over.
Reputations: Commercial Type
Commercial Type was born in 2007, to formalise a transatlantic partnership that began when type designers Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz first worked together on Egyptian, their award-winning custom typeface for the Guardian. Schwartz and Barnes have collaborated on most of their projects since 2004, including typefaces for the Empire State Building and Condé Nast’s Portfolio.
All the news in theory and in action
Summer 2014 All the news in theory and in action Simon Esterson Francesco Franchi Graphic design Magazines Reviews Typography Visual culture Designing News By Francesco Franchi. Edited by Franchi, Robert Klanten and Sven Ehmann<br>Designed by Francesco Franchi and Davide Mottes<br> Gestalten, €49.90, £45, $78, hardback<br> Everybody is publishing books about small independent magazines these days (or planning to, from what we hear), but books about newspaper and news magazine design are rare.
Interview with Photographer Iwan Baan
‘For me it’s very important to look at a full spectrum, from working with people like Zaha Hadid or Rem Koolhaas or Herzog & de Meuron, to how people build for themselves out of pure necessity’ Iwan Baan is the most sought after architectural photographer on earth. Living entirely from suitcases and hotel rooms, he is courted by architectural royalty the world over.
Taking care of business
Summer 2011 Taking care of business The pages of Bloomberg Businessweek explode with infographics, illustration and design experiment. Interview with creative director Richard Turley Economic cycles breed new kinds of business publications. The rise of US capitalism in the twentieth century gave birth to Fortune, with its pioneering use of illustration, information graphics and photography, while the Dot-com boom brought Fast Company.
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