Author: Justin Zhuang

You Can Touch Me: Visiting the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography

A mock-up of an advertisement Lubalin designed for U&lc magazine

It’s a dream playground for lovers of graphic design: rare periodicals like Massimo Vignelli’s brand manual for the New York City subway, drawers of catalogues and brochures that Lou Dorfsman art directed for CBS, and close to everything—from logo sketches to magazines like U&lc—that Herb Lubalin designed in his lifetime.

What’s even better than seeing these design classics in real life? At the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography, you get to touch them all. Located at the basement of The Cooper Union’s newest shiny stainless steel complex is this archive of some of the most significant pieces of mid-century graphic design from the United States and Europe.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design

Barbara Glauber’s Love for “Weird” Types

From discovering type on a Letraset poster to directing typefaces as a graphic designer, Barbara Glauber has had a long and deep love affair with typography. The principal of New York-based Heavy Meta has built up an impressive portfolio of designs defined by an expressive use of typography rooted in the CalArts tradition where she graduated from in 1990. We caught up with the design educator, mom, and also co-founder of celebrity dirt website The Smoking Gun (she designed the original website for her husband Bill Bastone) for a quick interview about her latest projects, type wish list, and her upcoming Typographics talk, “Crashing Vernaculars.”

➜ Read the rest at Typographics TypeLab

A Generations-old Bookbinder Gets a Modern Makeover

A bookbinder—a craftsman who hand-folds, hand-sews, and hand-cuts books—is a dream client for many graphic designers. It’s no wonder creative agency &Larry were excited to work on the rebranding for Bynd Artisan, a new atelier set up by stationery and leather craft goods manufacturer Grandluxe to promote the craft of bookbinding in Singapore.

Despite the client’s wealth of heritage and tradition (they go back three generations), &Larry was careful not to historicize the subject for the contemporary audience. Instead, creative director Larry Peh and his team went the modern and elegant aesthetic, a signature style of &Larry that has won the decade-old studio much acclaim, including most recently, Singapore’s President’s Design Award Designer of the Year in 2014.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design