Graphic Journey Blog

Things I like...

Image courstesy of Paula Snell

Unadulterated graphic design at its very best. The beautiful Canadian National Railway symbol designed in 1959 by Allan Fleming (1929 - 1977) while at Cooper Beatty.

Allan Fleming

Richard Hudson: King of the jungle

This is the theatre designer Richard Hudson. He is known for his stunning opera and ballet sets. 

The Pique Dame set for the Lyric Opera of Chicago

Set for the NY Met's production of Armida

But he is more widely known as the designer of the sets and costumes for The Lion King.

Above Hudson's striking sets for The Lion King

To date, The Lion King has been seen by over 65 million people around the world.

I recently recorded an interview with Richard about his life and work. You can listen to it here.

If you are interested in production design for film or theatre there are more of my interviews available below:

Ken Adam

Alex McDowell

Stuart Craig

Timothy O'Brien

Things I like...

On one of my resent second hand bookshop trawls I stumbled on these two delightful book jackets …

The above, from 1963, was designed and photographed by Larry Carter and featured in the very first D&AD annual. I love the fact that it uses just in one colour and utilitarian typogrphy. Carter makes the maximum from the production restrictions. The image, using macro photography, gives a wonderful graphic feel and reminds me of the opening titles of To Kill a Mockingbird released in 1962 and influenced many graphic designers at the time…

Above Stephen Frankfurt's ground breaking film titles.

The other cover is by Nicholas Thirkell, my one time business partner at CDT.
Designed in 1967 when he was at McMillan publishers as Art Director. Printed on coloured cartridge paper it created a facsimile of a railway ticket, complete with punched hole and print on the reverse side.

So few covers have this sort of inventiveness these days.

Fragmented vision

Kurt Schwitters. Mz.601,1923.

The use of collage along with cut and torn paper has long had its place in creative circles. Kurt Schwitters was just one of many artists whose principle elements were found items: photos, print, metal, fabric and wood. With this disparate array of ingredients he expressed himself in a highly individual way, as in the above piece. 
 
But how did it start? For that we need to wind back to 12th century Japan, where master calligraphers would prepare their paper backgrounds with fragments of patterns and textures to give depth and visual interest. Onto this they would add their expressive brush flourishes to make their poetic marks. 

12th century Japanese calligraphy on collaged paper

These collage techniques developed in other cultures during the 15th and 16th centuries with the proliferation of bookbinding. They became some of the many tools used by the Renaissance artists and craftsmen to embellish their work.

With the advancements in print and publishing techniques during the Industrial Revolution, a culture of hobbyists was born. Photo albums were often decorated with many mass-produced scraps, along with family photos, postcards and postage stamps. The age of the scrapbook had begun and was to become part of family and school life.

Victorian scrapbook

But it wasn’t until the 20th century that collage became a catalyst for artistic expression during the dawn of modernism. In 1912, Braque and Picasso, whose infant cubist paintings already expressed a fragmented quality, trail-blazed the use of collaged elements directly into their painted canvases.

Georges Braque 1912

Pablo Picasso 1912

Pablo Picasso 1912

Pablo Picasso 1912

Juan Gris 1914

From that moment, the technique was officially ordained as a bona fide element in the artist’s tool kit. There followed a stream of imitators and innovators across the creative spectrum. Here are some examples broken down into their disciplines:
 
Hannah Höch, the German Dadaist, produced this paper collage in 1919:

Hannah Höch 1919  Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic

Raoul Hausmann: ABCD, 1923 Acrylic Print By Granger 

The very nature of film editing (or ‘montage’ in French) requires the piecing together of visual elements to create or enhance the mood of a story. Sergei Eisenstein became an early master of cinematic collage, most notably in Battleship Potemkin (1925). 

And to greater shophistication in Ivan the Terrible, 1944:

 
Orson Welles was another film director who used the technique to great effect in Citizen Kane (1941).

And one of cinema’s most dramatic collaged sequences can be seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960 storyboarded and supervised by Saul Bass:

Above: Saul Bass's storyboard

And Bass also used a torn paper technique in a number of his film title sequences, like this one for Bunny Lake Is Missing, 1965:

The film Se7en, 1995, about a serial killer who took pleasure in collaging details of his perverted mind and vision, was also featured collage in the title sequence designed by Kyle Cooper:

The photographer William Klein experimented with fragmented block san serif type and recreated it in his painting experiments, inspiring many graphic designers.

Above: William Klein text paintings 1963

The American artist Cecil Touchon in his studio, Touchon's visual poetry work from 2006 (above) echos that of William  Klein from the 60's. Touchon  also founded  the International Society of Assemblage and Collage Artists

Comp0sites: Nude, negatives 1966, prints 1984 by photographer Ray K. Metzker

Photo-exposed montage by Francois Kollar Les Lumieres  dans la ville, Paris 1932

Eduardo Paolozzi, Real Gold, 1949

Richard Hamilton, 1956, Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Peter Blake, Girlie Door, 1959

Tom Wesselmann, Still Life # 20, 1962

Probably the most famous collage construction, Peter Blake's 1967, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover

Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive, 1964

David Hockney, Pearblossom Highway, 1986 made using Polaroid snapshots

The bedridden Henri Matisse at work in the mid-1940's

When Henri Matisse picked up his scissors late in his life and created his astonishing collages, with their vivid colours and graphic simplicity, the graphic world got excited.

Matisse created book Jazz, 1947

Blue Nude 1952

The Snail, 1952-3

Matisse became a major inspiration for many graphic designers working in the 1950s and 60s. Over the decades they have continued to embrace collage as their own to great effect.

Saul Bass, 1955

 

Saul Bass, 1959

Book cover for Psycho, design by Tony Palladino, 1959

Above: Paul Rand, 1970

Ivan Chermayeff posters, 1993

Alan Fletcher poster, 1982

Alan Fletcher paper collage, 2000

Alan Fletcher's last collage for Wallpaper cover, 2007

The late 1970s saw an anarchic reaction to an overblown, over-produced music industry in the shape of punk, the ultimate DIY. It was expressed in a very hand made way using the old faithful collage as its prime graphic vehicle...

Jamie Reid poster, 1976

Jamie Reid posters, 1977

Collage in the 21^st century shows no sign of abating. The work below is from Lisbon based designer Cristiana Couceiro, who puts a new twist on the genre by cannibalising familiar 20^th century graphics in her work, with lifts from Penguin book covers to Blue Note album sleeves and everything between.

In the 1980s the design collective Memphis produce a kind of collaged furniture.

^{Chair designed by Peter Shire in 1982 while with the Memphis group}

One could say that post-modernist architecture is a form of collage, with its myriad of eclectic details bolted together.

Post-Modern architecture in downtown Tehran  

Since the 1950s, experimenters in music and sound design have woven sonic fragments together by cutting and looping recording tape to create a new world in sound, and this has encroached upon almost every area of musical composition and the use of sound.
 
John Heartfield used photomontage to great effect to lampoon the Nazi regime. 

John Hartfield, 1932

And taking a more humorous approach, the playwright Joe Orton whiled away his non-writing days by defacing book jackets from the local library, for which he was later prosecuted.

Joe Orton 1962, in his Islington bedroom with a collaged wall backdrop, with images taken from books from his local library

Above: some examples of  book jackets defaced by Joe Orton

So if you ever get bored well, the local library seem like a good place to unleash that creative spirit. Actually, on second thoughts, I didn't say that.

Things I like...

I bought this book back in 1964. It is one in a terrific series published by the now long defunct publisher Studio Vista. Design writer and historian John Lewis edited the series. This one, on illustration, is principally a visual book featuring the many different approaches and styles of the subject. But what struck me is this last statement by Messrs Gill and Lewis - more a manifesto really – on how illustration should, or rather should not, be taught in schools...

Things I like...

Tipton Lakes Corporation: designed by Paul Rand 1980. Simple wit down to a T.

Happy, happy