A polymath designer

 Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) was one of those rare individuals who could work in various creative disciplines like graphic design, typography, photography, exhibitions, architecture, landscape design and painting. This little book reveals five decades of his work from his time at the Bauhaus to his final years at the Aspen Institute. The printed examples in the first two chapters covering his Bauhaus years show that he had absorbed the constructivist design ideas and the New Typography which dominated central European creativity in the first three decades of the last century. He obviously took these with him when he emigrated to America in 1938.

Other chapters look at photomontage, advertising, propaganda, theory, environment, information and identity, each is illustrated with work examples. I thought the eighteen designs in the advertising chapter quite intriguing because Bayer cleverly combines some Bauhaus design ideas in ads for everyday products like men's jackets, ties and ladies' beauty products. The Theory chapter considers exhibition design and typography. Throughout his life, Bayer thought capital letters redundant (pages twenty-six and seven has two 1926 letterheads for the Bauhaus with all the type in lowercase) and his article: towards a universal type is reproduced from a 1939 edition of PM magazine, entirely set in lowercase. It required a double space between the end of a sentence and the start of the next one. In the article is the complete alphabet of Bayer's lowercase universal type, based on a Bauhaus principles and it does look quite ugly.

The Information chapter has various covers and pages of early info-graphics for books and magazines that Bayer was an expert in designing. Oddly there are no pages shown from his masterpiece the  368 pages World geo-graphic atlas published by the Container Corporation of America in 1953 and given away free. It combined maps and two thousand graphics in a beautifully minimalist design (some enterprising publisher should issue a facsimile)

Ellen Lupton's book, with 140 illustrations, is a useful introduction to a remarkable designer. It's part of the 'Inspiration and process' titles from Moleskine publishers. 

A fresh look at poster art

With more than three hundred illustrations by Laurent Durieux this is an impressive celebration of his work. The first few pages show posters and screen prints revealing how he was influenced by the cover art of American popular science magazines of the thirties and forties and in particular the remarkable airbrush art of Arthur Radebaugh, whose speciality was creating the look of future transport. He airbrushed a series of ads for Bohn Aluminium and on page forty-nine there is a poster showing French comedian Jacques Tati riding a streamline motorbike that Durieux copied exactly from a 1946 Bohn ad. Another influence was artist Antonio Petruccelli who illustrated many covers for the monthly Fortune and weekly Time magazines

Film posters are a favourite theme of the artist and there are plenty of them but not posters that were used to advertise the films. I think Hollywood would find them too dark and with subdued coloured titles but they work because Durieux picks on something in the film that he feels expresses the films meaning. His poster for Frank Capra's 1946 classic 'It's a wonderful life' shows the angel Clarence looking at the entrance to Potter's bank and his angel's wings are just showing underneath his raincoat. The one for 'Pulp fiction' has the film's title as the name of a diner and in the parking lot is a car with a trail of blood dripping from the boot. 'The birds' show Tippi Hedren, from the back, walking along a short jetty carrying a birdcage with a large, dark shadow of a bird over her and part of the jetty.

It was a nice surprise to find that a lot of the posters have huge enlargements of a section so it's possible to see the amount of detail Durieux puts into his work and how he uses cross-hatching to create texture and depth. Also, there are alternate versions that keep the same composition but the colours change. 

If Durieux continues to create superb Photoshop poster art there will be a second book in the near future.

 

The king of Franklin Gothic Heavy

David King (1943-2016) was a unique designer because he refused to compromise with his design outlook. This excellent monograph reveals the strong influence of Soviet constructivism reflected in publications designed by Lissitzky, Mayakovsky and Rodchenko. The design of King's books in the '70s and '80s, shown in the 'Visual history' chapter, could have come straight out of book publishing during the constructivist years in the USSR.

King was only twenty-two when the 'Sunday Times' art director Michael Rand offered him a job on the newspaper's supplement and after two years he became the art editor, remaining for ten years. The Russian influence was apparent with the use of large graphics, powerful photo montages and Franklin Gothic Heavy for the headlines, mostly in capitals (Franklin was his favourite type throughout his career). It was King who obviously contributed several articles over years in the magazine on the visual look of communism and its leading political personalities. After the 'Sunday Times' supplement, he was a consultant for the alternative listing weekly 'City Limits' and freelance designer of 'Crafts' magazine. The author points out that the 'Crafts' readership was not quite ready for the radical look of different column widths for the copy, thick rules in black and red and angled headlines. The 'Visual activism' chapter probably has some of King's best work with some quite stunning posters for left-wing causes.

Apart from being a remarkable designer, King had a fascination with communism and its visual history and he built up a significant collection of photos, posters and books. This material enabled him to write (and obviously design) two of his best-known books: 'The Commissar vanishes'  and 'Red Star over Russia'. Both books contribute to an understanding of the corrupting influence of life in the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign of terror.

The book is well-produced (thanks to designer Simon Esterson) with 260 colour pictures and some in mono. Rick Poynor has written an excellent book celebrating the life of a unique publication and poster designer and in later life a historian.