Category: {design}

Design

Czech book covers

czech.jpg

Some nice jacket designs from the Twenties and Thirties at the Smithsonian. I’ve been looking at a lot of Constructivist and Suprematist design recently and some of these come out of those styles. The Shaw jacket above was part of a series. Some of the companion designs can be seen in the excellent A2Z and More Signs by Julian Rothenstein and Mel Gooding.

Via Design Observer.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Vintage magazine art II

vogue.jpg

In the days before colour photography most magazine covers were created by illustrators (as the New Yorker still is), a situation that’s left behind a rich legacy of wonderful artwork often far more stimulating than any of the magazine contents. This site has a great collection of early Vogue covers that show an amazing amount of variety and originality at play. Some of these early issues even break with the understandable stricture for a fashion magazine of having a female figure as the focus.

Looking over this selection, it’s impossible not to compare the rich designs of the 1920s with today’s bland uniformity. Vogue now looks like any other magazine for women, with an overly made-up (often celebrity) face filling the cover and the whole picture crowded with sub-headings and a general clutter of typography. UK Vogue‘s own cover archive pages show the gradual degeneration of a stylish flagship to a condition of cultural muzak over the passage of ninety years.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vintage magazine art I
• View: The Modern Magazine