Tag: Graphic Design

Quietly Beautiful Work by the Illustrator Who Drew The Four Seasons Logo

Various covers of exhibition catalogues Antonucci designed for then Museum of Contemporary Crafts between 1965 to 1972. Courtesy American Craft Council

The Four Seasons Restaurant in New York is celebrated by many as a temple of modern design. Housed in a restrained interior designed by architect Philip Johnson are the elegant furniture of his collaborator Mies van der Rohe, elemental tableware by architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable and her industrial designer husband Garth, artist Richard Lippold’s abstract ceiling sculpture, and the shimmering aluminum curtains of textile artist Marie Nichols.

But much less talked about is the landmark restaurant’s logo, a design of the late Emil Antonucci—a mid-century American illustrator who has been forgotten with time.

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Graphic Means Documentary Recalls the Days When Design was Made by Hand

Getting fingers burnt by hot wax was once all in a day’s work for a graphic designer. Before the computer came along, designers used a tool known as a waxer to coat a paper with the hot adhesive before sticking it on a page layout in a manual process known as the paste-up. No doubt designers are only too happy to leave this and other labor-intensive production methods in the past, but for those who still get misty-eyed over rapidographs and Diatype machines, the new documentary, Graphic Means, promises to take you back to the days before desktop publishing and the digital revolution of the late ’80s.

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Singapore’s Anonymous Design Studio on How to Survive in Business: Realllly Try

Instant noodles are a key ingredient in the decade-long story of communication design studio Anonymous. It kept founders Felix Ng and Germaine Chong alive for a week while they waited for clients to pay their bills. But even before that low point in their early design days, instant noodles imparted a key lesson in design for the fledgling Singapore studio.

On their first-ever trip to Tokyo, Ng and Chong were astonished by the packaging design for some dry instant noodles they saw at a convenience store. Typically these bowls have just one opening for pouring hot water both in and out to cook the noodles, requiring an awkward balance to keep the noodles in. But the Japanese package had a separate perforated opening just for draining out the water.

It seems simple enough, but this was a revelation for Ng. “Very often, what we create as designers is invisible. It’s there. It helps make my life easier, but you don’t even realize it’s there,” he said in a Skype interview. “I want to do work that, in a way, is slightly invisible but has a point to it.” (Inspiration for their studio name, perhaps?)

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design