The Best Recent Releases On Design

Buckminster Fuller A Berlin Building in Flux Loris Gréaud Midwest Mixer The Quick and the Dead A Guarded Buying Spree at DesignArt London Spin City New York Fall Shows: Round Two

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Mies Hora has been the world’s leading (and I mean this with great respect) graphic-doodad maven for more than a dozen years. He has made and chronicled “design elements,” including signs and symbols, dingbats and fleurons, icons and pictographs, the world over. Many have been drawn from the glorious history of commercial printing and typography, others are entirely new, but all serve to illuminate, highlight, and underscore graphic compositions, be they editorial or advertising, corporate or alternative. His books and CDs—which include icons, symbols, and signs of various eras and styles—are a boon to all graphic artists. In Design Elements 5, another in his series of mammoth collections, accessibly organized for easy reference, Hora has arranged “elements,” or what are commonly referred to as “printer’s cuts” from a variety of vintage sources, including type specimen books and printers’ swatches, all of which reveal that the language of information design elements is richly varied.

Magic Books & Paper Toys: Flip Books, E-Z Pop-Ups & Other Paper Playthings to Amaze & Delight
by Esther K. Smith
(Crown Publishing; NY) 

Esther K. Smith is one half of the experimental letterpress studio called Purgatory Pie Press in New York, and the author of last year’s How to Make Books. With husband Dikko Faust, she is the grand poobah of paper toys and book-objects. Although she owns a computer, her toys are constructed out of physical, not virtual, materials; accordingly, they take time and effort, and they even fall apart in the old-fashioned way, not from viruses. From the storied “cootie catchers” of school-yard fame to woven heart bracelets and the crisscross wallet, this delightful book is a how-to that even an anti-DIY-er can love. In addition to photos of “finished” work, Magic Books & Paper Toys is full of very, very easy to follow diagrams (all hand-drawn) with simple instructions. I can’t say someone like me could make this stuff, but I’m sure most folks with opposable thumbs have a good chance of success.

Willard Clark: Printer & Printmaker
by David Farmer
(Museum of New Mexico Press; Santa Fe) 

I’d never heard of Willard Clark until recently—and I have been told I’m supposed to know every graphic artist and designer who ever lived. Born in Somerville, Massachusetts, Clark was raised in Buenos Aires, and in 1928 sought his future as an artist in California, which was not exactly a hotbed of graphic design during that era. Instead he landed in Santa Fe, an even more obscure locale for national recognition, and set to making woodcuts and illustrations for commercial printing, including designing the graphics for the catalogue of the Taos School of Art. Much of the printed work—alluringly reproduced here in color on uncoated paper—fits into the “moderne” or Deco style of the day, but with a twist. That twist is Clark’s imagery, which draws inspiration from south of the border. Suggestive of the prints of Diego Rivera and Jean Charlot, Clark’s images did not simply copy those artists’ native approach but interpreted it. This new biography is a solid sweep of his life and career, and while Clark won’t enter the design canon anytime soon, the example of this comparative unknown proves the canon needs busting.

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe
Edited by K. Michael Hays and Dana A. Miller
(Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Press; New York and New Haven, CT) 

The name Bucky Fuller sounds so wonderfully cartoony. The title page of Starting with the Universe, the catalogue to his mega-exhibition at the Whitney in New York, is a close-cropped grid of one of Bucky’s geodesic domes, which also looks rather cartoony. In fact, what I like about this book is the wealth of sketches for the designer’s futuristic gadgets and practical spaces (like the 1929 Romany Marie’s tavern) that evoke the feeling of a comic book—see the fanciful Tower Garage proposal of the 1933 World’s Fair. In addition to a number of excellent scholarly essays, you can admire the man’s prescient genius by flipping through page after page of sketches, proposals, blueprints, and other ephemera that became such things as the Dymaxion car. This book also reminds me that Fuller planned a clear dome over Manhattan in 1960 that failed to materialize. Now, what kind of poor city planning is that?