Don't judge a book by it's cover...

...unless you're a graphic designer.

I was looking through AIGA's Design Archives book covers and found some that illustrate the design style we're learning about in Graphic Design History. The one on the left looks like the classic Swiss style to me: use of the grid, simple, straightforward communication. Le Corbusier book cover is interesting because he was a designer during the time period we're looking at so, no doubt, the book cover designer took concepts from that time period and modernized them somewhat.





These other two just caught my eye so I'm including them. The Beat the Reaper cover just seems really intense to me -- I like that. I'm not sure if this would follow the Swiss style because it's so jarring -- bright colors, jagged edges. Seems too energetic for the Swiss style. The L is for Lollygag is just a fun little cover that made me laugh. Apparently, this silliness continues throughout the book. I hope you enjoy it too!

Alvin Lustig

As I was preparing for my part of the presentation on the Late Modern period, I came across some of the designs of Alvin Lustig. The link here takes you to a great site about him. There was something about them I really liked so I thought I'd share. He was overshadowed by some of the bigger designers of the time and died very young. I especially like his book covers.


















I was surprised about how much I enjoyed learning about this time period in design history. I liked more of the artwork than I thought I would. Lustig's designs seem very clean to me. It looks like a lot of his pieces have either a strong vertical emphasis or a strong horizontal emphasis. I like his work because it seems very precise and visually interesting.

The more things change...

I was reading my history text last night (can't figure out why I keep leaving it for the last minute -- dumb, dumb, dumb)...Anyway, I was really interested to realize that when I was reading the section about Futurism, the way Futurists arranged type on the page looked very, very similar to a book I'd just found at the bookstore.

The book is called The Art of Reading Sideways by Alan Fletcher. I've scanned some pages here to show how it's similar to the examples in Megg's text. Interesting to think that we don't see this kind of layout as all that unusual but during the early modern era, it was revolutionary -- sometimes literally.

It's 533 pages of all kinds of stuff arranged in a variety of ways on the pages. I love it! Another snowy day book.