merci no.1

just came back from a busy weekend in paris. some typographic images from a brand new concept store named 'merci' in the marais area. the store's interior design is really fun and full of imagination and good/shabby taste. ah, and the money goes to charity - so if you are in paris go and pay a visit.

bertolt brecht

i'm writing an essay on the influence of the 'performative turn' in art and theatre on contemporary intercation design, and i find the theorethical writings of bertolt brecht extremely inspiring and helpful. i'm especially impressed by his forseeing of the interactive and communal possibilties embodied in the radio as an Apparatus of Communication.

for this post i've chosen an image of a great cover design for one of his books: "Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic". the design of the cover is comprised of an hand written typographic collage, and seems appropriate to illustrate the brechtian easthtic language.

quote of the day

"[...] how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him."
[ The Radio as an Apparatus of Communicationby Bertolt Brecht; July 1932 ]

museum of letters

wonderful images from a collection of historical letters from all over Berlin. the letters and typographic icons are being collected and rescued by the Buchstabenmuseum (German: Museum of Letters) organization Since May 2005. the collection seems like a great source of inspiration for type designers and visual researchers. the collection can be visited by appointment only, more images at core77.

quote of the day

"beauty without depth is just decoration."

[metadesign]

another rainbow

roy oppenheim shot these cool rainbow doors at ghent. i love the contrast between the optimistic vertical graphic stripes and the strict horizontal bricks layout.

quote of the day

"in design sometimes one plus one equals three."

[josef albers german-born american artist, mathematician and educator]

rainbow yarmulke

this rainbow yarmulke was created by ron from a design student in shenkar college. the unique yarmulke was knitted as an answer to a design brief in a visual communication studio that i teach in the industrial design department for the last five years.

the brief asked the students to integrate a found graphic symbol (icon, logo, pictogram etc.) with a found object or environment in order to give both a new meaning (political, ironic, personal, humorist). in this case, the synthesis of the rainbow flag as a graphic symbol, and the jewish yarmulke as a found object, drew attention to the tension between sexual identity and conservative judaism.

quote of the day

"i don't think that design needs theory, but i think designers need theory."

[johanna drucker designer and theorist]

tokyo zoo

this is a great sign from tokyo zoo that kindly asks the visitors to refrain from feeding the animals. the busy and expressive illustration explains that the monkeys can get a severe stomach ache if they consume the visitors' food. the picture was sent to me by na'ama hofman, a young graduate from the industrial design department in shenkar. na'ama is

now in tokyo studying japanese, and i'm looking forward for more samples of local infographics, signs and pictograms. 

quote of the day

"all art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography."

[federico fellini italian film director]

quote of the day

"the poster starts where words end."
[peter pocs hungarian poster designer]

on the road cover gallery

while searching on jack kerouac and on the road i ran into this hidden treasure - a cover gallery that presents all of on the road covers. the site holds an updated collection of all the different editions' covers (including the cool eighties hebrew version). when put together, they seem like a great opportunity for a visual study, some kind of an international design etude on the rather narrow and predicted imagery associated with the topic - american roads and highways, road signs, open cars, neon motel signs, and the few remaining portraits of kerouac himself. the cover that was chosen to illustrate this post is one of my favourites, a german edition that was published by 'rowholt' in 1959.

quote of the day

"i consider myself responsible for a whole new school of pretensions."

[david bowie on the rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars]

on the road

i'm posting the end of the first chapter in jack kerouac's on the road to celebrate the begining of a new year. this autobiographical novel, chronicling the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across America, was published fifty years ago and established kerouac as the voice of the beat generation. i wish us all that somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to us:

''I was a young writer and I wanted to take off.
Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.''

graffiti heart from barcelona - fresh delivery!

here is another great graffiti heart from the gothic quarter in barcelona. thanks to omri perez for his contribution to my growing hearts-on-the-streets collection.

specialisation within the specialty

"The words graphic designer, architect, or industrial designer stick in my throat, giving me a sense of limitation, of specialisation within the specialty, of a relationship to society and form itself that is unsatisfactory and incomplete. This inadequate set of terms to describe an active life reveals only partially the still undefined nature of the designer."
[alvin lustig american graphic designer]

eighties chique

this is another great image that roy oppenheim shot in ghent. it really made me smile, as i have lived in brussels and saw those cool eighties numbers all over. they might look tacky and outdated in any other context, but in a city that the prominent design and architecture styles are art-nouveau and art-deco, this is quite an hilarious combination. you can see those eighties chubby 'barbapapa' letterings all over, usually they are offered for sale in basic bold colours such as red and yellow.

the appetite for mixing the old and the rather new can be found everywhere. i used to live in a great 'parisien chique' apartment from the twenties with original wood floor. however, when the landlord renovated some of the rooms, he choose vinyl carpets decorated with geometric patterns. every here and there, i found myself staring at the design combinations, admiring the freedom to mix styles and materials. this could only happen in a place that has such a design legacy that it is almost taken for granted.

in another place, some of those items would be exhibited in a design museum.

quote of the day

"i have no complaints, except for the world."

[barbara kruger american conceptual artist]

great graffitti from ghent

a very colorful contribution from my friend, roy oppenheim, who just came back from a week of work in ghent. i guess that the great color palette must be some kind of creative reaction to the poor grayish belguim weather. anyway, roy says that he had fries (frites) for lunch every day and although they are supposed to be a staple of local cuisine, he didn't find them any special. no complains on the beers, though.

quote of the day

"The age of the book is almost gone."
[george steiner French–born-U.S. critic, novelist]

tel aviv university - outdoor typography

vacation - if it feels good..

this blog is going on vacation! it will be back with all the schools at the 1st of september! in the meantime a really fun vintage budge for all of you - hope you see it in an internet cafe during your vacations and not in the office... 

underground library

i took these photos a while ago in my primary school in jerusalem. when i was a pupil the school's library was situated in a labirynth-like empty underground bomb shelter. if i close my eyes i can still smell the dump and feel the touch of the always-slightely-wet bean bags in the reading corner. as a child this impossible mixture seemed natural and reasonabe. this might be understood if i think of the shopping mall in my neighbourhood which included a black concrete

and steal memorial to the holocaust. this dark sculpture was the meeting point for all the girl scouts around - climbing and sliding on it while waiting for the activity to begin. i guess this all sounds quite depressing as a childhood landscape but it really did seem natural in the realm of the brutal concrete architecture of the time.

found typo-graffiti

in the spirit of neuromancer and cyberpunk - some graffiti fragments from barcelona.