Blog: Design history
21 February 2013
Lubbock’s brilliance
During his lifetime, the prickly, uproarious brilliance of Tom Lubbock’s writing on art was a…
25 January 2013
Back when the future looked bright
A printed guide to the 1951 Festival of Britain prompted Nigel Ball to consider the value placed on design by governments – then and now
Not seeing the value of investment in design is a folly of the current British…
17 January 2013
A dentist’s unerring eye
Dr Hans Sachs was the poster aficionado who launched Das Plakat. By Graham Twemlow
Graham Twemlow writes: A large part of the Hans Sachs poster collection is about to…
13 January 2013
Back on the market
Prewar posters from the legendary collection of Dr Hans Sachs will soon go on sale at a New York auction house
A sale of 1250 prewar posters from Dr Hans Sachs’s legendary collection will take place…
7 January 2013
The power of chess
Chess – the gymnasium of the mind – is a perennial source of inspiration for designers, film-makers and artists, says Jim Sutherland
It’s no wonder chess holds such a fascination for artists, film-makers and designers, writes Jim…
10 December 2012
Sun-cheese wheel-ode
Dom Sylvester Houédard’s 1968 concrete poetry tribute to fellow poet Ken Cox is a double spiral of hand-set type, mysteriously linked by the sport of cheese rolling. Fraser Muggeridge explains.
The letterpress printed concrete poem designed by Dom Sylvester Houédard first caught my interest because…
13 November 2012
Type in Wapping
Pencil to Pixel opens up Monotype’s archive of typographic history, from artwork to artefacts
The ‘Pencil to Pixel’ exhibition, which opens this Friday at Metropolitan Wharf in London, gives…
7 November 2012
Something to say
The current vogue for letterpress is more than mere retro-nostalgia, writes Catherine Dixon in the run-up to Friday’s St Bride conference.
Letterpress is everywhere, writes Catherine Dixon (co-organiser of ‘Letterpress: Something to Say’). Once a boutique…
2 November 2012
Graphic design history to boot
Everything must go when Ian Anderson sells off the contents of The Designers Republic (TDR) archive in its Car Booty Affair in Sheffield.
At what point does the ephemera that is graphic design become collectable? When does a…
31 October 2012
The men with a movie poster
Eighteen works by the Stenberg Brothers (Vladimir & Georgii), including five original designs for posters, go under the auctioneer’s hammer on 1 November 2012.
In the wake of the Christie’s sale of London Transport posters (see ‘The purpose of…