International

In the 60s two foreign design magazines were passed around America as though they were underground or samizdat publications. One was Graphis from Switzerland, the other was Projekt from Poland. Let's focus on the latter. It was a revelation to learn about the artistic intelligence of the Polish poster artists, illustrators and designers. They led [...]

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Lavish graphic design histories are emerging all over the world. The latest to crop up is Linha do tempo do design gráfico no Brasil, written by Chico Homem de Melo and edited and designed by Elaine Ramos, the art director of Editora Cosacnaify, (with a preface by me). This is an ambitious in depth history [...]

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Core77 2012 Design Awards celebrates the richness of the design profession and its practitioners, expanding categories, leveraging online scale, increasing transparency and decreasing plane fuel in the process. "For our second year, we present 17 categories of entry, providing designers, researchers and writers a unique opportunity to communicate the intent, rigor and passion behind their [...]

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You cannot help but love the obsession of designer Mike Joyce. Every chance he gets, he designs a new punk band poster in the Swiss style. Could two aesthetics be so at odds? Apparently not. His website Swissted (go here) is one of the most engaging homages I have ever seen. Though I'm not exactly [...]

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(This piece is a much expanded version of an article co-written with photographer/writer John Gruber for Print Magazine and the British trade mag Ads International in 1998.) The thought of Chicago in the 1920’s usually conjures up images of gangsters, Prohibition, and other Roaring 20’s clichés, but there was another movement in the Chicago area [...]

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Prostate cancer can be caught early. All it takes is a finger in the right direction. But saying so and showing where to go are two different things. So, the Prostate Cancer Foundation in the Czech Republic asked Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners New York, USA to do their digital wizardry to make people get [...]

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The Adventures of Werner Holt, A revealing story of young soldiers in Nazi Germany, directed by Joachim Kunert and co-written with Claus Küchenmeister (from the novel by Dieter Noll), was filmed in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Unlike Hollywood, which was much slower to portray Nazi horrors, this is a complex drama of the average German [...]

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The Bruce Lee craze of the 1970s produced an endless array of merchandise in the hopes of cashing in on the world-renowned martial artist’s popularity – especially after his untimely death in 1973 at the age of 32. I'd been a fan of his since he'd played "Kato" in the old "Green Hornet" TV series, [...]

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A new campaign encouraging women to check for breast cancer (and for men to be aware of this method) was recently created by DDB, Maputo, Mozambique. It is brilliant in taking the Super Hero genre to a new level. The campaign, which features beautifully airbrushed, generic super women reads: Nobody's immune to breast cancer. When [...]

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Miralux was a Viennese advertising firm, known for its outdoor signs of varying shapes and sizes. The era of beautiful outdoor signs has never died, but the materials are quite different today. This catalog of possibilities was produced in the 1920s before turmoil hit Europe and the Nazis annexed Austria. Here are generic samples and [...]

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