He went on: “I left professional practice after 30 years and became an ‘exit-level designer.’ I still continued to work but just to not take commercial jobs and compete with the next generation for the remuneration. And now I want to do the same thing with teaching. I’ll continue being around CalArts and in my studio, not as a faculty with a paid teaching position, but as a sort of free floating, available—but not mandatory—‘exit-level educator.’” And he sent me the above work as a visual reflection on his transition.

Ed’s Cal Arts retirement party is this Thursday evening, March 16th. And, just like his faculty room door, it’s open to everyone. You’ll find details at this Facebook page.

As for the future: “I have two practices,” he says. “One is my ‘counter-factual history’ art career: I pretend I went to art school in 1957 and became a painter instead of a graphic designer, and this is the work I would have done back then. I only make ‘drawings for paintings;’ no point in making the actual paintings, of course. And the other is my ongoing ‘Potential Avant Garde Graphic Design for Begone Eras,’ which is mainly collage and drawing lettering and almost always done in my sketch books.

“I also love taking digital photographs and blogging. I have two blogs and post almost every day.”

I just couldn’t let the occasion pass without asking Ed’s friends, former students, and other associates for their thoughts and feelings. Please feel free to add your own remarks in the comments section below.

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Rudy VanderLans
Designer; Photographer; Co-Founder, Emigre magazine and font foundry

“Ed’s formal explorations opened up so many new avenues within graphic design. He showed us that the boundaries of graphic design were just a figment of some other people’s narrow imaginations.”

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Lorraine Wild
Graphic Designer, Los Angeles

“This is from my introduction to Ed Fella’s last official CalArts lecture last month: ‘I cannot imagine my life as a designer without Ed. And I can’t imagine American graphic design in the late 20th century outside of the context of Ed. But most of all, I can’t really imagine the education of two generations of CalArts students without him.’”

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Michael Worthington
Co-Director, Graphic Design Program, CalArts

“Here’s the poster I made as one of a series for Ed’s last lecture.”

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Louise Sandhaus
Faculty, CalArts

“In so many ways Ed is the emblem of the CalArts Program, the energy, engagement, and devotion to making and talking about making. Or in the case of Ed: making, making, making and talking talking talking.

“As faculty we orbit with Ed, illuminated by his incessant visual and verbal chatter, sometimes feeling, perhaps, as if we’re walking in the giant shadow of his massive, exuberant production.

“Ed has a big ear and open door. Whether student or faculty, everyone is invited into his studio: a windowed haven overlooking and tucked into the grad work spaces, which seems all but constructed of books and boxes of his work and the work of others.

“‘What’s what’ is never in doubt when it comes to Ed, and he will never fail to tell you how it is. Working with him in the classroom is a wonder, as along with the multicolored pen he wields the sword of sharp criticism.

“Ed is the opposite of a man of few words: a verbosity that echoes in the hearts, heads, and hands of so, so many.”

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Katherine McCoy
AIGA Medalist; Alliance Graphique International elected member; Fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America

“The studio is Ed Fella’s natural environment. Ed takes the studio with him wherever he goes, continuously creating his own work and provoking design discussions. I suspect Ed’s official retirement from Cal Arts will be just a formality, because Ed can’t resist teaching art and design any more than he can resist making art and design; so he will likely remain a big presence at Cal Arts.

“My encounter with Ed’s design and teaching began in 1970 at Designers & Partners, a Detroit advertising design studio. There, Ed conducted a daily ‘symposium’ of vigorous – and often outrageous – discussions and debates at lunch, mid-afternoon breaks, and afterwork bar sessions. When I left Designers & Partners to co-chair Cranbrook’s Design Department with my husband Michael, Ed spent many hours in the design studios with our grad students and was a major influence on our work and thinking. Eventually Ed made it official and spent two years at Cranbrook earning his own MFA, and then joined the CalArts Graphic Design faculty.

“When I first came under Ed’s spell, I was working within a design framework based on Swiss Modernism and George Nelson’s industrial design functionalism. Ed’s interest in vernacular design went far deeper than the standard American graphic design eclecticism and became a major influence for me. This was circa 1971 and I was also reading Robert Venturi’s ideas about vernacular architecture and postmodernism. Both Ed and Venturi understood that American commercial vernacular embodied rich formal languages that resonated with the public and was readable by them. These ideas greatly enriched my own design, the design projects I assigned, and the output of our students.

“Congratulations, Ed on this next big career move!”

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Debbie Millman
President, Design, Sterling Brands

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Sean Adams
president, ex officio, AIGA; partner, AdamsMorioka, Inc.; faculty, Art Center College of Design

“I’d love to say that Ed was a wonderful mentor and guided my life as a designer. But Ed came to CalArts after I left. I was luckier: I spent a wonderful summer working in a small space with Ed, listening to his stories. And Ed has come defended Noreen’s and my honor multiple times over the last 20 years.

“In 1988, Ed, Lorraine Wild, and Jeff Keedy set up a loose collaborative studio downstairs from Jeff’s apartment. I worked with Lorraine on the first Morphosis book. Bruce Mau was staying in the guest room upstairs while he spent a term teaching at CalArts. Ed shared my knowledge of L.A. tragedies. Every day when Bruce wasn’t teaching, he’d sit on the steps and hang out with us. At lunch he’d walk to Bob’s Big Boy on Wilshire. We told Bruce that this was the ‘death’ Bob’s. Ed jumped in and knew the whole story about the late night hold-up, staff and customers being shoved into the freezer, and everyone murdered. I was amazed and thrilled that someone else shared my bizarre and useless knowledge about ‘death’ places in L.A.

“Years later, in 1995, when Noreen and I first began AdamsMorioka, Lucille Tenazas asked us to speak at a student conference in San Francisco. Ed was the other speaker. We did our lecture, which was met with silence. There was a palpable sense of hate in the room. When the Q&A began, we understood the problem. ‘Your work is very bright and colorful. Don’t you feel that you’re not showing the world as it is and addressing the dystopia we inhabit?’ Or, ‘Does it bother you to work with purveyors of American popular culture colonialism in the entertainment industry?’ and ‘How can you stand L.A.?’ Lucille suggested we be less funny in the future.

“If you don’t live on the west coast, you may not know that there are San Francisco people that think Los Angeles is a hell-hole of superficial people. Which it may be, but that’s the fun part.

“Ed started his lecture by saying, ‘Those guys are great. They’re taking critical thinking and multiple concepts and veneer them with seductive form. They make more with less.’ How can you not love someone who defends you in a room of hostile, serious, and humorless students?

“Postscript: a decade later I spoke in San Francisco again and had a great time. The students were smart, funny, inquisitive, and a true pleasure. Times change.”

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Kenneth FitzGerald
Educator; Writer; Artist

“I’ll always cherish the memory of chatting with Ed – well, he did most of the talking, and that was great – during a night drive around L.A. He gave me one of my most treasured design artifacts: a hand-drawn map on how to take the buses to the Getty; I still got lost, but it was on me. And years later, he spontaneously recalled and complimented my drawings. It’s pretty obvious why he’s beloved.

“Oh, and then there’s his great artwork, too.”

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Gunnar Swanson
Designer; Writer; Educator

“Ed is a lot like his work: complex, sometimes a bit twisted, not always clear, but generally a source of joy and inspiration.

“Ed and his work are, as Martha used to say, ‘good things.’ But perhaps more importantly, his work has inspired a generation or two toward formal exploration. The products of this exploration have not always been wonderful but the net result has been vital to the development of graphic design over the last decades.”

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Alissa Walker
A Walker in LA

“I’ve only met Ed in person once although I’ve written about him for years. But here’s one thing people who aren’t from CalArts might not know about him: he keeps fortunes on his office door at CalArts.”

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Jonathan Barnbrook
Graphic, Typeface, Industrial, and Motion Graphics Designer; Activist

“Ed Fella: simply the best example to everybody who is a designer or who wants to be a designer.

“He has been there, done everything, worked for years doing the toughest of commercial work, clients that I wouldn’t have the stamina to deal with, and yet come out of it with a truly unique, innovative, incredibly creative approach to typography and design, something which is truly authentic in its integration of his surroundings and experience. Many have copied him, but they lack the intellectual input and the craft that have gone into making his work what it is.

“Fine to be a genius, but for me being a nice person is almost as important. Every conference I have been to with Ed, he marks it with his own piece of work and gives it to people. When I lectured at CalArts he made sure to take time to take me out and just walk and talk about life. A great example of not only one the greatest innovators of typography of this era, but also of a kind generous, gracious, fantastic, humbling human being, too.”

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Ellen Lupton
Senior Curator / Contemporary Design, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

“Ed Fella showed designers a different way to work. He took what existed in the culture and turned it into his own strange thing. And then he shared it.

“Thank you, Ed!”

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Steven Heller
Art Director; Educator; Author; Editor

“One of my happiest memories as an art director was having Ed Fella’s lettering on – and overwhelm – the entire ‘New York Times Book Review.’ He redrew—or shall we say ‘undid’?—the ‘Book Review’ masthead and made a lettering concoction that was like nothing seen on its covers and interiors before.

“To this day, I am amazed we got away with so flagrant a flaunting of ‘Times’ style. And yet Fella’s contribution was within the ‘Times’ standard of excellence.

“The artifact remains. And I remain grateful to have it.”

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Ric Grefé
Executive Director, AIGA

“In nearly two decades and encounters with over 40,000 designers, I can say personally and on behalf of AIGA that Ed is uniquely inspirational to designers across the arc of their careers.

“He defies age—despite his retiring early—and has an impish insouciance that fits nicely with the jeans and t-shirts of open-minded, optimistic, excited young fetishists, while capturing the admiration of the elders, because he is always imaginative, loves designing, seems to have learned to pirouette around The Man, followed his heart, and still gets to play with crayons.

“Thank you, Ed, for all that you have done for generations of designers.”

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David Shields
Chair, Department of Graphic Design, Virginia Commonwealth University

“The first time I met Ed was at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the fall of 1992. Ed was visiting Detroit and part of his time in the city was scheduled to spend a few days with students. The three days on campus were a whirl of activity. Ed spent seemingly all hours with us in the studios, I’m inclined to remember that the students got more sleep than he did over those three days.

“The few days of work was all fueled by a simple prompt from Ed: ‘Do something you haven’t done before.’ It set off a nice little explosion of activity, and was great fun: working furiously through broad interpretations of the prompt, racing towards the deadline. Desk crits, group crits, chatting, and at least several meals in the Boy’s School Dining Hall. All of it amazing, and eye-opening and expanding. I remember thinking that someday when I grow up I wanted to have that level of energy, and provide that intensity of focus.

“All this buzz of activity and energy, all with the simple prompt of ‘Do something you haven’t done before.’ It’s a prompt I adopted, and use to this day with students, always with fresh results … if maybe not the energy Ed provided. Assigning it now always makes me think of Ed. I just hope that someday when I grow up I’ll be able to have that level of energy, and provide that intensity of focus.”

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Haven Lin-Kirk
Area Head of Design, USC Roski School of Fine Arts

“I remember first coming across an Ed Fella image back in the early 1990s.

“At the time, I was a young working designer, fresh out of grad school. I was struggling to pay back some hefty student loans, juggling freelance work at a publishing firm and working in-house for a large, very rigid and conservative corporation … trying to find relevance in theory and practice. I was judging my dual interest in both art and design and the thought that these worlds could merge was just starting to seem plausible to me. In my mind, Ed was a young creative, starting off just like me and exploring the boundaries of what design could be. The deconstructive way that he approached layout challenged everything that was happening in my professional and creative worlds. I had never seen typography approached in that manner. I knew from first sight this is where I lived!

“It was only much later that I learned that Ed was actually several decades older than I was and had already traveled down a similar professional path, completing an MFA from Cranbrook only four years before me. This only elevated him higher as my “design hero.”

“When I began teaching years later, I would pull out examples of Ed Fella layouts to challenge students’ ideas of what graphic design would be. I remember it was a litmus test: how open were they to the potential of design? And years later, when I finally had a chance to meet him through one of my former students, now his grad student, I have to admit that I was a little star-struck. Our conversation was about being in the “exit phase” of his career, an expression he used to describe being an influencer and not a competing force with his students. Amazing! Again he left me thinking not only of the role of a designer but of a design educator, lessons that I still carry to this day.

“My most recent encounter was this past semester. Ed was invited to come to the Roski School as a VIP guest speaker. Again it was through another one of his former students, now a USC professor, Andrew Kutchera. The room was filled with young designers and artists – or more accurately, packed to the four walls – all there to hear the iconoclastic designer speak.  He showed images of his prolific collection of work and talked about learning and breaking rules. And he charmed everyone.

“Several weeks later, I was incredibly touched when he sent me two little collage pieces in the mail. This came at the end of an incredibly difficult semester for me. Those beautiful little pieces now sit framed in my office and remind me every day how important design still is to me.

“As I move through the world these days I notice Ed Fella pieces and his influence everywhere. On a recent study tour with my students to New York I found his pieces at AIGA’s headquarters, in Ric Grefe’s office alongside Fredrick Goudy’s gavel, and behind Steven Heller’s desk at the School of Visual Arts. Much like the first time I encountered one of his works, I’m reminded how lucky I am to be in world with someone like Ed Fella.”

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Andrew Kutchera
Adjunct Faculty, University of Southern California

“Ed’s guidance during graduate school was invaluable. He was thoughtful in his critiques, as well as demanding and fun! He relished visual and conceptual surprises, and he vigorously defended work that took risks.

“Additionally, Ed has been an incredible role model regarding the joy of making work. His incredible production and experimentation continue to inspire me.”

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Stefan Bucher
Designer; Illustrator; Writer

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Jonathan Notaro
Creative Director and Director, Brand New School

“Ed was the first person to teach me the benefits of being culturally aware and how this knowledge could help shape a point of view. He once made a topical news reference, and could tell I had no clue. The following classes, he allocated a portion of his lecture time teaching me how to ‘speed read’ ‘The New York Times’ for things I should find relevant as a designer.

“He was absolutely one of the people who contributed to the general ‘where the hell is this all going’ sense we had in school, which has evolved into a working process most of us couldn’t have imagined obtaining otherwise.”

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Lucy Virginia Cook
Designer; Educator

“After graduating with my MFA from CalArts in 2010, I was packing up my books in the grad studio. I came across my treasured Edward Fella: Letters on America. It was a birthday gift from a few years earlier. I opened it up to find an inscription and a card that fell out. My friend had filled the title page with remarkable words about Ed, closing with, ‘And I hope this book inspires you for a lifetime.’ A startling moment, to look back at my life before personally knowing Ed Fella. How apparent and even dramatic that stars aligned in such a way, to see that this art book had transitioned into a reality for me personally: an endearing relationship with a design hero.

“To know now that I worked with Ed, and that he was a mentor to me for three years in the design program, leaves me overwhelmed. He gave me a new perspective on beauty in the everyday and has left me inspired for a lifetime, indeed.”

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David Cabianca
Associate Professor/Associate Chair, York University

“I have an image that I think suits Ed. It was supplied by Ed for a piece I wrote that never published. It is a photograph of Ed and Lucy [Bates]‘s living room wall. I like it because it encapsulates Ed’s respect for the uncelebrated artist and designer. Ed will often buy folk art at garage sales and add to the image before hanging them in his home. I think the innocence they exhibit is equal to Ed’s respect for the sense of craft they display.”

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Jason Tselentis
Designer; Writer; Educator

“When I rediscovered Ed Fella’s work in college, it reminded me about the exuberant and sculptural typography I made during my adolescent years. Like most youngsters, I rendered letters by hand: drawing, layering, bloating, painting, cutting, and carving them into heroic, intimidating, comical, or adventurous messages and phrases. They could be comic book mastheads, a movie’s opening title sequence, maybe my own name, or just my initials. That’s what I did as a child, and I now see my own children do the same.

“Ed’s work shows us that we can interpret our own typographic universe, with or without a computer’s operating system to tell us what’s available and what isn’t. In Ed’s design, letters are a playground, and play can have purpose. Today, I instill that outlook in the university classrooms where I teach, inspiring my beginning through advanced typography students to create playful, expressive, and meaningful designs.”

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April Greiman
Designer; Artist

“Embarrassed to say, but I barely know Ed. And, OMG, how could I not know Ed, with a nickname like ‘Big Daddy’? Maaaaaybe saw him for five minutes once in his CalArts office 25 years ago, and then again at his RedCat art opening. But, he’s a big talent. And his artwork that I saw at RedCat touched my heart.”

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Terry Lee Stone
Writer; Creative Strategist

“Ed Fella: the real deal.

“Generous, iconoclastic, sophisticatedly kooky.

“The greatest exit-level designer ever.

“Best wishes for new adventures, Ed.”

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Kali Nikitas
Chair, MFA Graphic Design Program, BFA, Communication Arts, Otis College of Art and Design

Dear Ed,

Many people will comment on your guidance and talent. In my case, it is more important to tell the world the following: that you sent me an special gift at a time when I really needed a friend.

And…

Since I have worked at Otis, you have attended every special event that I have hosted. Your support has meant the world to me and you have been more of a teacher since I graduated than during school. That is the best kind of teacher.

I wish you all the happiness in the world.

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Marian Bantjes
Designer; Typographer; Writer; Illustrator

“Ed does it better.”

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Warren Lehrer
Writer; Designer; Educator

The post Words – and Images – on Ed Fella appeared first on Print Magazine.

They’re also part of a 60-year retrospective currently at the South Pasadena Mercantile Co. It’s Parker’s first solo show in California in more than 50 years, with more than 150 original works on display. For SPMC, which typically spotlights emerging talent, it’s their first for a classic illustrator. Proprietor Scott Gandell, himself an illustrator, is delighted with the response and now plans to showcase Bob Peak in September. He’ll hold a closing reception for Parker on April 27th.

The German series, originally produced as monotypes in the mid-1980s, is part of Parker’s lifelong preoccupation with war. Born in 1927, he was already sketching combat scenes by the age of ten. And it was his pictures of imaginary battlefields, published in “Esquire” in 1960, that first brought him to national attention.

But even back in 1956 Parker had already shown his art at MoMA, the Met and the Whitney and had created copies of Van Gogh drawings and paintings that were used in the “Lust for Life” biopic. Over the decades his watercolors and acrylics have appeared in vast numbers of magazines and nearly 100 children’s books.

Parker’s loose, energetic approach achieves maximum effects with minimal amounts of detail. He was extremely innovative in his heyday, preceding other American expressionists like Alan E. Cober and Marshall Arisman. And at age 85 he can still pack a visual wallop.

“Robert Andrew Parker: A Retrospective” seemed like a good occasion to have him review his extensive career and offer a bit of advice for up-and-coming illustrators.

“German Humor”

The title was meant to be ironic. The general aim of the pictures was to go from the 1890s to a gradual, sickening decline into the Nazi horror. I admire George Grosz’s work, and Otto Dix and Max Beckmann.

When I visited Auschwitz there was a display of thousands of eyeglasses, another of hair, another of shoes, artificial limbs and so on. I had seen photos of these things, but it was quite another matter to stand and look into a glass case of these everyday objects belonging to the people who had lived and died there. I was looking at evil.

I re-did the monotypes as etchings a few years ago because I had sold the suite of monotypes and I missed having them. I added three or four new images as well. I like making etchings.

The 1940s U.S. Military

I was an airplane and engine mechanic on B-29s. The war had ended before I was of any use.

The army was an interesting experience. The draft made the army truly democratic. We all ate the same awful food. We all got 32 dollars a month. In our barracks, there was a group who, when idle, would play bridge while others could barely read. The army included everyone.

Early Art Career

After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952, I wanted to be in or near New York City. The only job that presented itself was teaching art at the New York School for the Deaf. The good fortune of having a successful show in New York in 1954 changed everything. And also: being hired to be Kirk Douglas’s hands in the movie “Lust For Life.” The 10 weeks on location—in Arles and Paris—was a great experience, as was being part of making a movie.

The years 1952 to 1955 were the last years I had a nine-to-five job.

Breaking Into Illustration

My first show at the Roko Gallery in New York was a great success. It was 1954. During the show, a woman came in who was the art director for “Seventeen”—Cipe Pineles—and asked me to do an illustration for her magazine. I instantly said yes.

I was lucky that what I was doing could be useful to magazines and books and record jackets.

Illustration vs. Fine Art

The only difference between illustration and what I do is that someone asks me to do something or I do what I want to do. So in one case, a magazine pays me, and in another instance, the gallery pays me. The methods, the techniques, etc., are exactly the same.

Magazine Commissions

I liked working for “Fortune” and for the Air Force. They both sent me on trips all over the world – places I could never have afforded: North Africa, South America, Central America, etc. I liked working for “Sports Illustrated,” shooting [for reference] in Ireland, South Dakota, Georgia, etc. Also for “Playboy” and “Time.” And I liked “The New Yorker” because it was always in a hurry.

Illustration Today

Most of it seems to be done on computers. I have no interest in it.

I admire Joe Ciardiello, Istvan Banyai, Guy Billout.

Advice for aspiring illustrators

Do your own work and hope art directors, museum directors, and collectors like what you do.

All images are from the South Pasadena Mercantile Co. exhibition and copyright © Robert Andrew Parker, 2013.

The post Robert Andrew Parker on Life and Illustration appeared first on Print Magazine.

Abner rapidly gained unprecedented popularity and ran for 40-plus years. My copy of a 1953 paperback collection has a foreword by Charlie Chaplin and an intro by John Steinbeck, who writes, “I think Capp may very possibly be the best writer in the world today. I am sure that he is the best satirist since Laurence Sterne.” Capp was at his peak through the 1940s and ’50s, entertaining tens of millions of newspaper readers. And with IDW’s new release of the fifth volume in its series of Abner dailies and color Sundays, this one featuring Fearless Fosdick, his work continues to delight fans of classic quality comics.

And now, both his dark and light sides are chronicled in Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary, a valuable, thorough, and sensitive 300-page biography of this contradictory and deeply troubled individual, written by Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen.

Steven Heller describes the book as “spicy,” a word that also applies to the strips themselves, always bursting with provocatively erotic females. It also details Capp’s many spoofs: of books (author Margaret Mitchell threatened him and his syndicate with a lawsuit for his lampoon of Gone with the Wind), plays, movies, T.V. shows, movie stars, and generations of pop singers from Sinatra to Elvis to the Beatles and, most notoriously, Joan Baez. His parodies of popular funnies—Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Steve Canyon, etc.—often prefigure Harvey Kurtzman’s iconic mid-1950s Mad comic book satires in both style and sensibility.

Capp’s mockery could target corporate injustices against comic book creators, as with DC Comics’ exploitation of Superman‘s Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. It could also be a calculated publicity hoax along the lines of the Jack Benny – Fred Allen radio feud: his “Mary Worm,” a battle-axe busybody, supposedly provoked Mary Worth writer Allen Saunders, who was actually his friend, to retaliate with a plotline about “Hal Rapp,” an egotistical cad. But all too often such attacks were driven by personal vindictiveness and bitter quests for revenge. He ruthlessly raged against fellow professionals, with real life maliciousness as well as in print, if he felt they had wronged him or that their popularity threatened to overshadow his own. The book describes his intense, 20 year feud with his former boss, Joe Palooka‘s Ham Fisher—who he caricatured as Happy Vermin, a fat, ruthless, mercenary cartoonist—in often chilling detail. Capp referred to Fisher in a 1950 Atlantic Monthly essay as a “monster,” and boasted that his death in 1955 was “a personal victory,” and “that driving Fisher to suicide was his greatest accomplishment.”

Denis Kitchen, the book’s co-author, good-humoredly refers to himself as “a very confused man who can’t seem to pick a career and stick with it.” He began as an underground cartoonist in the late 1960s and was a publisher for 30 years: back in the ’90s his Kitchen Sink Press released 27 volumes of Abner daily strips from 1934 to 1961. He founded the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and oversaw it for 18 years. Today he’s simultaneously an art, literary, and merchandising agent (he represents the estates of Capp, Kurtzman, Will Eisner, and others), a book packager, and a writer. Oh, and he still draws comics, and curates on the side.

Speaking of which, Denis’s latest exhibitions are “The Art of Harvey Kurtzman,” which opens this Friday, March 8th at the Museum of American Illustration in New York, and a show of underground comix art, opening next week in Lucerne, Switzerland. And he recently finished a comics style mini-bio of Dr. Seuss for an upcoming anthology about famous cartoonists. He’s also working on a screenplay based on Capp’s life.

In our conversation below Denis explores not only Capp’s malevolence and self-hatred but also his sympathetic side and artistic legacy, as well as the parts that were left out of A Life to the Contrary.

All images copyright © Capp Enterprises, Inc.

What first attracted you to Capp?

As a kid in the 1950s I eagerly grabbed our newspaper’s comics section and devoured every strip. But Li’l Abner was always my favorite. His clever cliffhangers were part of what kept me turning to his strip first, but it was also the style. I loved the way he drew: the bold but delicate brushstrokes, the distinctive lettering, the heavy use of blacks and silhouettes. And probably the moment puberty kicked in, it was Capp’s beautiful and voluptuous women. At the same time, the grotesque villains and inventive character names were a big appeal.

Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy is an obvious source for Fearless Fosdick; were there any other media that may have influenced Capp?

There was a hitherto unknown inspiration: a 1941 Columbia serial, Holt of the Secret Service. The protagonist Jack Holt has both the Fosdick hat and the mustache. He’s a human dead ringer for Capp’s character. So we’re pretty certain that Fosdick was initially an amalgam or simultaneous parody of both Holt and Tracy, but no one remembers Holt.

What shared sensibilities do you see between Capp and his fellow satirist Harvey Kurtzman?

Attacking injustice and hypocrisy and the foibles of the rich and powerful are the hallmarks of satirists. “Exposing the truth” was the way Kurtzman put it, and during their primes both he and Capp were among the best satirists ever. That was their commonality.

Do you also detect Jewish roots in their humor?

Their Jewish family upbringing and early neighborhood influences are undeniable. But neither was religious at all, neither practiced Jewish traditions in any meaningful way, and neither injected overt Jewish humor into their comics. With Harvey you do sometimes get Yiddish-sounding phrases in strips, but largely because they just sound funny.

Harvey worked for much of his career in comic books, an industry populated overwhelmingly by Jews during its early decades, and he collaborated with largely Jewish cartoonists, notably Wolf Eisenberg – Will Elder – who delighted in adding what he called “chicken fat” into their stories. But Capp quickly became a star in the syndicated newspaper strip world, and that was a distinctly more WASP-ish world. Capp moved to Boston, hung for a long time with rather patrician Harvard crowds. His co-workers were more often Italian than Jewish.

I’m sure some would argue this, but I don’t see much Jewish humor. When I’ve discussed this topic with Harvey’s widow, Adele, and Capp’s daughter, Julie, they seem to agree.

What was their relationship?

They didn’t have a relationship, per se. When Harvey’s “Hey Look!” sales to Stan Lee and Marvel trailed off in the late ’40s, Harvey began contributing similar filler pages and more developed stories like “Pot Shot Pete” to Toby Press, the publishing arm of the empire Al Capp had carved out with his brothers Elliot and Bence.

Harvey worked closely with Elliot and liked him. Elliot even let Harvey retain his copyright, and they later collaborated on a syndicated strip pitch that failed. But Harvey was a huge admirer of Al Capp’s work. He probably parodied Li’l Abner more than any other comic strip, not just in a full-blown parody treatment but in countless ongoing details in “Hey Look!,” Trump, Humbug, and “Little Annie Fanny.”

Did Kurtzman acknowledge Abner‘s influence on Mad?

Harvey acknowledged his deep debt to Capp, as well as Will Eisner, for their pre-Mad parody work.

But Capp was such a huge figure that by the time Harvey acquired some fame in his own right as editor of Mad, he was still too cowed to even ask Capp directly for a simple favor. When he was writing and laying out his graphic adaptation of “The Face Upon the Floor” for Mad #10, Harvey wanted the very last panel—the image that strikes the artist dead—to be Lena the Hyena, Basil Wolverton’s prize-winning entry in Capp’s famous 1946 contest judged by Frank Sinatra, Salvador Dali, and Boris Karloff. But instead of asking Al directly, or via Elliot, he wrote to Capp’s clueless and careless syndicate, which summarily rejected the request. So, for better or for worse, Harvey had Wolverton create a new hideous face for that Mad story.

It’s a small example of how Capp’s bigger than life persona intimidated Harvey.

Were there aspects of Capp’s life that his heirs would have preferred to be excluded from the book?

Hah! I’m afraid there were a good number of things that key members of his family resisted having us include. In some cases, out of genuine respect for their feelings, we truncated excerpts from letters—in particular a discarded suicide note —because Capp’s invective was so bitter and personal. We also agreed, for example, to eliminate a raunchy story that Frank Frazetta once related to me.

In some cases the evidence for certain alleged events was not enough for us to be comfortable stating as fact, so such elements didn’t make the cut for evidentiary reasons. But in most cases we included fact-based controversial material over their objection. I’ve known the family for many years and felt we had become friends. So when I started this biography with Mike Schumacher I assured them that we were very serious and that it would be a “warts and all” biography. To their credit, they cooperated fully and provided access to most of the surviving papers and correspondence. But I don’t think they realized what other people had on Capp.

When they finally read our draft manuscript they made it clear they were hoping we downplayed his dark side and portrayed the later years more sympathetically.

As Capp rose to fame in the late 1930s you note that he “couldn’t understand why [Ham] Fisher didn’t seem to realize that there were plenty of room for both strips in the comics universe…” Capp was a smart man; how could he remain unaware that he himself became the “monster” he saw in Fisher?

That’s a very good question. It’s apparent to you, myself, and some others that Capp evolved very much into a miserly egomaniac, one with the crude lusts for women, and the insatiable need for fame and attention that marked Ham Fisher. Capp deeply resented how Fisher had treated him as an assistant—with good reason—and Capp, by and large, treated his own assistants very well. But in his later years Capp turned on some of them with a vengeance. He even stoutly denied to an interviewer that Frank Frazetta, a decade long employee, had ever worked on Abner.

Capp was exceptionally smart, and an astute observer, so I suspect he had at least some awareness he was becoming a mirror image of his monstrous enemy. But if so, I don’t think he cared much. After his youth he didn’t seem eager to make close friends. He was misanthropic and self-loathing, so what did it really matter? That he had defeated or destroyed his enemies was the point.

Similarly, even though Capp ridiculed Charles Schulz’s commercialization of Peanuts in the 1960s, during his own heyday he’d likewise cashed in on the Abner “brand” with everything from Shmoo merchandise to ads for hair oil, underwear, and many other products.

Exactly. No one in the comic strip business had commercially exploited his property like Capp. And in his case, after 1947, his own family corporation controlled licensing, cutting out the middleman.

The 1968 Peanuts parody to me was a sign of Capp’s awareness that he was inexorably slipping from top of the heap. As Peanuts and other strips began to gain on and surpass Li’l Abner in popularity, he had a very difficult time coming to grips with his waning influence, not to mention his diminishing licensing revenue. That particular parody was not funny. It was downright mean, even suggesting that Schulz had no cartooning talent.

Schulz, in turn, had said that having Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae marry in 1952 was the biggest mistake any cartoonist had ever made.

Where might Capp have gotten the idea for his faux feuds?

I don’t know what specifically might have sparked the notion, but he was masterful at publicity stunts in general during his long career. He had learned to manipulate the media as masterfully as anyone of his period. And he didn’t rely on a paid press agent to generate ideas and pull things off.

Capp and his core assistants were notorious for their wild brainstorming bull sessions with loud guffawing. The fake feud concept could have easily come out of such back and forth or from Capp alone during his often solo all-nighters.

And as you know, he was also capable of arranging a fake cartoonist feud and then reneging on his end, as he did with Will Eisner. Eisner drew a wonderful parody in The Spirit called “Li’l Adam, the Stupid Mountain Boy,” on the premise that Capp would reciprocate. Not only did Capp fail to keep his end of the bargain, he also muscled in on the subsequent Newsweek feature story that was supposed to be on Eisner himself.

How have your views of Capp changed in the process of writing this book?

At the start of the commitment to the book I was already a longtime fan of his work. I thought Al Capp was a flat-out genius. That said, I had also known for many years that he had quite a dark side. I’d been collecting every article and scrap for years and interviewing any associate I could find, so I fully expected our biography to depict a deeply flawed and even tortured man. And we did. So in that sense, my views were largely pre-formed going into this biography with Mike. Certainly we learned a good many subtleties as the contrarian and complex man emerged.

The “monster” we discussed earlier was also a devoted son and father, an often generous man with assistants and strangers, a man capable of great charity, a man who wouldn’t tolerate a racist or homophobic joke. But I was surprised in one particular and unexpected area.

I was very cynical and even judgmental about his relationships with women. He certainly initially loved his wife Catherine but the humiliation she had to endure for many years was, I thought, a form of cruelty. She lived well into her nineties but consistently refused to be interviewed about Al. But in one 1974 diary entry we had accidental access to she called Al the “worst creature I ever could have spent my life with.”

I had heard and read so many distressing stories about Capp’s serial “womanizing”—to put it in polite terms—and later the kind of aggressive behavior that today we would call sexual predation or attempted rape that I had effectively concluded he was an irredeemable pig of a man. Then a few years ago a woman contacted me whose mother had died and left a pile of love letters wrapped in a blue ribbon. They dated from the early 1940s and were from Al Capp. They revealed a previously unknown relationship with a nightclub singer named Nina Luce, but most importantly, they revealed what had been a true and intense love affair. He wrote remarkably revealing and tender letters to her, punctuated, I should add, by sometimes crass and thoughtless statements as well.

Capp had long before destroyed her letters to him, of course, along with an entire storage unit full of potentially incriminating materials. But the surviving letters to Nina showed a side of him we never would have otherwise seen. Emotionally wrenched and torn between choosing Nina or staying with his two young daughters and then-adoring Catherine, Capp fatefully chose not to break up his family. That traumatic breakup possibly marked his last romantic love.

Afterward, with the exception of a lengthy affair with William Saroyan’s wife Carol, Capp’s “relationships” with woman were comprised of paid companions, countless one-night stands, and predatory behavior. But after carefully reading those 1940s love letters I can never again see Capp quite the same way. He was, for a while at least, a real, emotional, head-over-heels-in-love man. Before he became Ham Fisher.

How do you think he’ll be remembered?

Ultimately it’s usually the work that endures. I hope he is recognized for a long time as one of America’s great cartoonists and satirists.

He was without doubt the most famous cartoonist of his era. But as we see in so many high-profile areas of culture and politics, even the most famous of the once famous tend to fade quickly into oblivion. Dogpatch USA, not all that long ago a thriving amusement park in Arkansas, is already abandoned and decrepit.

Aesthetically, I think Li’l Abner will remain a great example of what makes the comics medium effective and appealing. However, I fear that Li’l Abner will have it tougher standing the test of time than some other great strips. Capp-coined terms like “double whammy” may permanently be fixed in the lexicon, but the occupants of Dogpatch and their hillbilly dialect seem increasingly bizarre and undecipherable to younger readers. A good deal of Capp’s humor and targets were topical, which will require considerable annotation for context and comprehension and patience from would-be future readers.

Sadie Hawkins Day was a liberating idea in its day, so much so that it spawned literally hundreds of annual campus dances for many years in which the girls could—gulp!—ask the boys for a date. How quaint. Now we watch Girls on HBO and anything goes. But assuming comics in some form continues as a popular medium, I think Al Capp was so prominent in his time and so fascinating and controversial a figure that he—and perhaps to a lesser degree his work—will continue to hold a good degree of fascination.

Of course it’d help a lot if the Capp movie [Will Eisner documentary director] Andy Cooke and I are planning gets made and is a big hit!

The post Li'l Abner's Al Capp: A Monstrous Creature, a Masterful Cartoonist appeared first on Print Magazine.

Question: You started Talking Covers in May 2012, using your memoir as the first example of how authors try to work with publishers’ cover designers. Was the experience of seeing the cover of your first book take shape the impetus for the site or did your interest in this intersection of writing and design exist beforehand? 

Manning: Publishing the memoir definitely made me more appreciative of and curious about cover design. But mainly, I started the blog in response to eBooks. I used to be really anti-eBook. I even edited an anthology in defense of print books. But I’ve come around — anything that gets people reading more. And I think the new format could change storytelling in a lot of really exciting ways.

But I do worry that if bookstores go extinct, so will the experience of picking up some random book just because of the cover. I’ve discovered so many of my favorite books and authors that way. That’s how I first got into Joan Didion. I was 21 and found a first edition of Play It As It Lays — hot pink and orange with a big, black snake. I didn’t know who Didion was, but that cover was so cool I had to read it. It’d be shitty to lose that. So I started the blog to help show how important book cover design is and how much work goes into it. These things aren’t just tossed off in five minutes. It’s truly an art. Getting comments from the authors was essential. There’ve been a few blogs that discussed covers with designers, like The New Yorker’s short-lived Under Cover. But getting the authors to weigh-in shows how important cover design is to them, too — how much they value the way their work is presented to the world. I will say, when it comes to eBooks, most designers I’ve talked to are excited about the challenge. They think having to come up with something eye-catching for an Amazon or iBookstore thumbnail will lead to a lot more experimentation and innovation.

Question: There’s no shortage of internet depositories for thoughts about books and design, but Talking Covers hits this sweet spot where authors share their experiences of participating in the cover design process. You’re lucky to have corresponded with many high-profile authors and designers. Do you think that publishers are more open to hearing out an author’s idea if that author has a notable track record?

Manning: I can’t speak for all designers, but the sense I get is that most are welcoming of feedback from authors, regardless of their track record. They appreciate how many years of hard work that the author has put into his or her book, and ideally they want the author to approve. But most of the time, the final cover isn’t up to the designer. The publisher and editor and creative director and marketing department all have some say. That’s one of the more fun and fascinating things about the blog — getting to see rejected comps. It’s pretty awesome to see the evolution of John Gall’s design for Jim Shepard’s story collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway. Even when Gall settles on the right image, there’s still the size and font type to figure out. It’s crazy that the subtlest change to a cover gives it an entirely different impression.

Question: Speaking of the Shephard book, in terms of the real nuts and bolts of book publishing design, that’s one of the most informative posts. First published by the Random House imprint Knopf, featuring an incredibly recognizable cover by Jason Booher, Gall had to follow-up with a new cover for the Vintage edition. His task was further complicated by the fact that this book was nominated for a National Book Award, meaning the cover design would have to accommodate a silver medallion to announce the prize nomination. Gall told you, “Award-winning books are the best thing that can happen to a book — for the writer, the publisher, the company — for everyone except the art department. That sweet medallion has messed up many wonderful designs.” What are some of the other real practical issues that arise when it comes to designing a book cover, both from the author’s perspective and the publisher’s?

Manning: I think blurbs are really interesting. Sometimes they don’t come in until after the cover is ready, and then the whole thing has to be changed to fit the blurb. That’s why I really love the cover of Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever Are Not Afraid. Almost always, a book by a debut author features a blurb on the cover, to help give it more credibility. But Boianjiu’s novel doesn’t have one and I think it makes the cover so much more intriguing.

Question: Heidi Julavits’s The Vanishers strikes me as an interesting case study in that both the author and designer, Doubleday’s Emily Mahon, were both a bit out of their comfort zones, but the end result, a striking floral collage, or, in Julavits’s words, “STD man on acid cover,” thrilled everyone. Mahon admitted to you that typically she doesn’t have lots of contact with an author, but Julavits had loads of ideas and even got Mahon to visit the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met.  ”It’s the first book cover I’ve had that made me proud of my book — I was honestly more proud of what I’d written BECAUSE of that cover. I was proud that my book had inspired such a talented designer to create this mesmerizing visual representation,” Julavits confessed. Have you found it to be true that the authors and designers get along well because ostensibly they both have the best interest of the book in mind? Or can authors be too close to it and lose sight of marketing concerns? 

Manning: Heidi’s and Emily’s working relationship is pretty rare. Most designers have limited communication — if any — with the authors. I was never in touch with my memoir‘s cover designer, Nupoor Gordon. My editor showed me a couple designs and I gave feedback to him and he passed it along. That’s one of the things I love most about the blog, that it gives designers a chance to hear what the authors have to say and vice versa. Just as I’ve found most designers welcoming of author feedback, I’ve found most authors willing to defer to the designer and publisher when it comes to the final cover. As Rick Moody wrote, “I see my role as being the guy who makes the interior of the books. Therefore, it is important for me to try to stay out the jacket discussion, unless I really love what is on there, or if I am so unhappy that I think I will not be able to let go of my feelings.”

Marke Your Calendar: LA-based The Lost Bookstore and Talking covers present Jonathan Lethem Talks Covers on Saturday, March 2. Don’t miss this opportunity!

Other Resources for Savvy Designers

“Identify: Basic Principles of Identity Design in the Iconic Trademarks of Chermayeff & Geismar” will take you inside the minds of some of the most recognizable brand identities in the world.

Connect with thousands of designers this June in San Francisco at HOW Design Live.

The post An Interview with Talking Covers Founder Sean Manning appeared first on Print Magazine.

Soady is an art director, type director, and designer. He began his career in his native Australia and has worked at Ogilvy Benson & Mather in London. He’s a fellow Art Center instructor and currently freelances on advertising and design projects while operating his own letterpress print shop.

Next Friday, February 15th, he’s giving a free talk—what he calls a “fireside chat”—at Loyola Marymount University, as a guest speaker in my History of Design class. It’s a journey through “Type Land”—a place where people who love type live—and “Mad Men Land.” “The world of Mad Men is the same world I grew up in, early ’60s advertising,” Soady says. “The Sydney advertising scene was a microcosm of it all. The series is a perfect replica of how it was back then, before AIDS and being politically correct, when you were able to have a beer with your lunch, or beer was your lunch.”

He’ll also discuss the research and production he’s done on his book, and put Perpetua in the context of typographic history. It’s one of several public programs hosted in conjunction with “Eric Gill: ICONographer,” an exhibition of over 100 works currently on display at LMU’s Laband Art Gallery. The show is also free and open to all after the presentation.

In our conversation below Soady covers his personal attachment to Gill and explains why today’s designers should pay attention to late 1920s type.

Exclusive Imprint illustration by Scott Gandell.

How did your relationship with Eric Gill begin?

A couple of key things got me interested in Eric. The first is that Australia back in the 1960s had not long before been a bloody colony, and all things English were considered as the best.

These were my formative years: going to school at night after working an eight-ten hour day as a messenger boy in an ad agency. I was 15. The first type job I had was to spec, mark up. I could use two type setters. One, Monotype: English fonts; second, Linotype: American fonts. And seeing that most of the art directors in advertising then were “Pommies,” it was an easy choice. Although Linotype had a great library, they were considered “inferior”! Just the way it was. And of course, the Monotype house had Gill and Perpetua. And Klang!

In the late ’60s, early ’70s it changed. More access to American advertising—Doyle Dane Bernbach and such—and international design really changed the whole graphic arts scene in Australia. This was a time when telegrams still ruled; we didn’t even have decent copy machines. Bit of a backwater. We didn’t get TV ’til the mid ’60s; weird seeing as Rupert Murdoch now owns the world!

About the age of 18, I happened to view Eric’s personal copies of the Fluerons. Seven volumes. They were—and probably still are in the English speaking world—considered the ultimate books on typography and fine printing to have in the ’20s and ’30s, with Gill, Stanley Morison, and Sir Francis Meynell being the big influences on their content. I could go on forever on how magic they are.

Art Center has a few, but not all. There was a condensed and edited version in one book! Worth buying for anyone interested the history of graphic design.

Why are you devoting an entire book to Perpetua?

Perpetua was Eric’s most used inscriptional style. He had many of course, but Perpetua probably was the most obvious of his early serifs that translated well into a complete family to be manufactured by Monotype.

While working in London in the early ’70s, I happened to buy my own Fluerons. And in the same book shop I found a gravestone rough done by Eric. And yes, it’s basically Perpetua. It’s just a fluke that I bought the drawing. But as you know, once you do a little research on an item produced by an artist of Eric’s stature you can’t help but stumble across a lot of information that gives you a insight to the person’s personality.

Perpetua has a great family: Italic, Titling, etc. Eric spent a lot of time with Stanley Morison of Monotype Corporation, perfecting the font for mass production. It sets so well in the hands of anyone who knows what they’re doing.

And as you know, most young designers only know a digital world, and there are millions of fonts out there. Becoming familiar with a few classic type designers like Gill and Goudy helps them understand the time and skill it took to get a font from pencil to stone, to metal. And understanding the person is a big help.

Speaking of personality, do you see any connection between Gill’s sexual transgressions and his graphic works?

It’s his art that interests me. I really don’t care about his personal life, except that he loved to find out how things worked, such as his penis, and where things went. And I guess this is why his type, and all of his different areas of art, were so worked out.

Inquisitive, he was! And eccentric to say the least, as many artists are.

You were at the Laband opening; what’s your take on the show?

I love the whole exhibit. I’ve never seen so much of his illustration work put together in one place. There are a few small, lightly inked, whimsical drawings—east wall, near the end—that really give you some insight to Eric’s personality. Wish I owned them.

•

Images from the forthcoming Two Men, One Type Face by Paul Soady and Simon Varey, above: copyright © The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA.

Wood engravings, below: copyright © The Albert Sperisen Collection of Eric Gill, University of San Francisco. These and over one hundred more works are on display at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery. Eric Gill: ICONographer closes March 24th.

Hand Holding a Book, 1916; bookplate for Everard Meynard.

The Lord’s Song, 1934; Golden Cockerel Press.

The Madonna and Child with an Angel: Madonna Knitting, from Mary Sat A-Working, 1916; a rhyme-sheet, St. Dominic’s Press.

Eve, 1926.

Jesus is Nailed to the Cross; illustration for The Way of the Cross, 1917; St. Dominic’s Press.

Thou Hast Made Me, from The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, 1938; J. M. Dent & Sons.

The Burial of Christ, for The Four Gospels of the Lord Jesus Christ, 1931; Golden Cockerel Press.

Comedy: Man Trying to Fly, from The New Temple Shakespeare, 1934, J. M. Dent & Sons.

Find more typography resources in MyDesignShop.
• Mastering Type by Denise Bosler
• 6 Steps to Better Web Typography On-Demand Design Tutorial

The post Eric Gill, Australian Mad Men, and the Ultimate Books on Typography and Printing appeared first on Print Magazine.

In the following interview, Janet shares her journey from design to music, her deep love of print ephemera, and how she creates her vintage graphics and came to sing with Crumb’s band. She also gives us an exclusive sneak preview of her brand new “Kleinette Firefly Flapper Banjolele.”

Art: Ashley Fisher

Why did you decide to become a singer?

For most of my life I thought of myself as a visual artist, with an inkling that I had a ham-bone streak. I dabbled with performance art and started to write poetry and to do recitations in the 1980s. In spite of the fact that I never expected anyone to listen to me singing, I had a vision of myself as a chanteuse and presented my poetry be-gowned and with candelabra, music stand, and hankie. The impression might have been somewhere incongruously between Andy Kaufman and Beatrice Lilly. Anyway, I started to incorporate musical elements into my readings with triangle and then ukulele, sharing some of the old tunes I had been collecting from the 1920s.

That’s when and where the singing came in: about 1996. By 1998 I made my first CD, singing and playing ukulele.

“Living in Sin” inside booklet photo by Rick Whitmore

And how did your Parlor Boys come together?

Somehow when I started to play the ukulele, musicians began to cross my path—extraordinarily, players who were entirely focused on 1920s and 1930s music. The first musician I met was John Reynolds, a wildly talented guitarist, banjoist, and whistler. It was at a party, and I was asked to “jam” with players there. I told them I only knew how to play alone, so I started in on a blues song called “If I Can’t Sell It I’ll Keep Sitting On It,” and halfway through the tune I realized that they were all accompanying me. From there it was a little like Dorothy on the yellow brick road. I kept tripping into curious characters.

Who’s your audience, here and abroad?

We attract people of all ages at our local venues in and around L.A.—film and music history buffs, animators, magicians, dance enthusiasts, and folks who appreciate a good time warp.

I would say we get a pretty loving reception most everywhere we go. We have been really well received in Japan many times now, and in Australia most recently. When we travel I like to investigate music of the 1920s and ’30s from the place we intend to visit. We’ve found amazing material that way and usually manage to surprise people abroad the same way we do here, by digging up great forgotten tunes from that era.

“Whoopee Hey Hey” inside booklet graphics by David Barlia

What are your most requested songs?

I think the requests started with two tunes I do solo: “Love Is A Boomerang” and “Banana In Your Fruit Basket.” The latter one was a risqué blues number originally recorded by Bo Carter that, when I did it, became something else: naughty, surreal, and maybe gender-bending; I’m still not sure what, but everyone likes it a lot.

With my band, I think I get the most requests for “Yiddish Hula Boy” and “Cohen Owes Me $97,” which are both extremely rare “Hebrew Vaudeville” numbers. Why, you ask? Why not!

Inside graphics for “Put a Flavor to Love”

What led to your print industry career?

I studied graphic design in college and worked for several art and music magazines and have always loved printed matter. I was offered a position with a commercial print house in 1990 and it made perfect sense for me. The combination of seeking out and collaborating with great designers and pulling together all the right physical materials, finessing color reproduction, and helping to make beautiful things—that has been the draw for me.

Paper company holiday promotion

And are you responsible for its nostalgia-themed promo material?

Yes, when I’ve put out promos for the companies I have worked for, I do incorporate reproductions of vintage ephemera from my collection. Partly because they are so texturally interesting and beautiful and tell you about the history of design and printing.

Also, a neat aspect of printing is that if you are clever, you can use every inch of the press sheet efficiently. So I have made alternate versions of every print promo with another intended use for my band.

Embossed, die-cut paper promotion and “Parlor Boys” promo with art by Ariel Bordeaux

When did you start your collection?

I started to pick things up in junk shops in the 1980s, and by the 1990s I had amassed a great deal of vintage photographic ephemera, miniature books, et cetera. Old printed paper items attract my eye. I am fascinated with the typography, the illustrations, early photography, the content of old manuals and brochures and magazines, the incidental notes scratched on the margins. All windows into the past!

From Janet Klein’s ephemera collection

What sorts of material?

Sheet music from 1917 to 1937. This is a rich era for song sheets: gorgeous printing and illustration, wonderful songs, and almost always with special arrangements for ukulele accompaniment!

Band- and vaudeville-related photographs, postcards, and promotional images from the 1890s to the 1930s give us visual clues to what the landscape of entertainment looked like, and flesh out a picture we can only otherwise imagine through 78 rpm recordings. Many, many of the acts from that time never made it to film. Promo photos from this period often have painted and hand-drawn border vignettes and white-out retouching prepared for publications. Often, press photos have newspaper clipping attached to the back to show their final usage.

I collect novel printed matter with moving parts, metamorphic designs, and “hold-to-light“ cards. These all play with illustration, photography, die-cutting, print effects, the translucence and opacity of paper in clever ways. I love to share these things with clients and designers for inspiration. I literally wallpapered my website with designs from my stash of 1920s wallpaper catalogs.

I am drawn to photographic “slice of life” images: of craftsman home interiors, photos showing rustic ways of life, paper moon photos, studio images with painted backdrops, candid photos with accidentally interesting cropping, and superimpositions and photographic evidence showing that women have always had attitude, even in the Victorian era.

Announcement design: Rick Whitmore

How do you work with designers to create your own promotions?

Almost everything that we’ve produced uses a vintage reference as a starting point. I usually stare down things in my collection searching for some textural aspect that I’d like to draw from. I usually make rough sketches and collages. My husband—and occasional Parlor Boy—Robert Loveless and the designer collaborate on our band photography. And then everything goes to the designer, usually with a box of things picked from my collection. It’s like Woody Allen superimposing the Zelig character into old film footage in a natural and seamless way—that is what I aim for.

I want to jump into these old things in every way I can. So part of the process is that I huddle with the designer and we pore over the minute details—like the patina of aging embossed tin or photographic emulsion; the neat things that happened when the ink registration in print was imprecise; the use of positive versus negative space in images where the designer was trying to get the most effect out of working with two ink colors; et cetera, et cetera.

After all that, then all kinds of things happen as the designer brings ideas, elbow grease, and typographical know-how to the process. Once I have stocked them up with as much source material as I can, I let go and have trust. And the final outcomes are always way beyond what I could have imagined. Over the last 14 years, I have only worked with three designers and I think everything has a richness and consistency that I am so proud of. At the same time, fans of our packaging can discern the work of Stephen Walker, Rick Whitmore, or David Barlia. I am very thankful for their amazing contributions.

How did you come to perform with R. Crumb?

Years ago, the only living people that I knew who were playing music from the 1920s were R. Crumb and the Cheap Suit Serenaders, which was the name of his band of underground artists: Robert Armstrong, Terry Zwigoff, Al Dodge, Tom Marion, and others. Also the Beau Hunks in Holland.

Well, in about 1997, the second musician I encountered in my path was Tom Marion. We started working together musically, and I think he told those fellows about me, probably sharing my first mostly solo CD, called Come Into My Parlor. And then we started to congregate at the Hayward Ukulele Festival in Northern California. Robert Armstrong and Tom both recorded on my next record—the first with my Parlor Boys—called Paradise Wobble. They brought a 1920s hot Hawaiian, as well as Ragtime-era, instrumental aspect to that record. Fans of the Cheap Suit Serenaders would immediately recognize their sound. I’ll always be over-the-moon happy about those recordings.

Anyway, Crumb was planning a yearly trip to California from France to play with “the Suits,” and they asked Tom and me to come up to Berkeley to play with them at the Freight and Salvage. That might have been the first time I tried out the “Yiddish Hula Boy” song.

Art: R. Crumb

And how did he come to draw “Borsht Belt Babies”?

We were doing a variety show, “Janet Klein & Her Borscht Belt Babies,” developed by Amit Itelman, the director of the Steve Allen Theater in Los Angeles. The concept was that we would do a Catskills-style revue, with grandbabies of vaudeville performers. There was me—my grandfather was a professional prestidigitator; his act was called “Ten Minutes with Ten Fingers”—and John Reynolds, grandson of the character actress Zasu Pitts, singing and jazzing. We had the granddaughter of Buster Keaton doing a hula hoop dance, and the grandson of dancer Rubber Legs Lou, who had a talking goose act that was hilarious. There were knife throwers, magicians, tap dancers, opera singers, stump speakers. I was the hostess, and I peppered the show with the Yiddish dialect numbers.

How the drawing came about is still a mystery to me. Tom Marion called Amit and me for a meeting; he wouldn’t say what it was about. Then he unveiled the drawing at an H. Salt Fish & Chips. I was flattered and slightly horrified by my “likeness.” But I appreciated it as a really nice drawing.

Art: Matt Groening

Tell me about some of the other artists who’ve done your portrait.

I remember being introduced to Matt Groening through a friend, probably in the 1980s when he was mostly known for the Binky cartoons, “Life In Hell.” When I was going through some old papers of mine recently, I found a drawing that he had given me in a card. I realized that he must have come to one of my poetry readings because he rendered me—in pre-Marge Simpson style—and quoted a quirky line that really was from one of my poems.

Rick Whitmore, who worked with me exclusively on all my graphics from about 2001 to 2005, was our most prolific illustrator/art man. He dedicated countless hours to extremely intricate drawings and designs for my website, as well as wonderful postcard announcements for our shows.

Other illustrations of me and the band came about by artists illustrating the Steve Allen Theater season brochures, which were chock-full of amazing drawings. I’ve become a big fan of these artists and went on to do some side projects with Joe Matt and Ariel Bordeaux, and hope to do more.

Art: Joe Matt

Finally, what can your fans expect in 2013?

We are working feverishly on CD number eight, which is due for release very soon.

We hope to make more musical film shorts. I’m hankering to make animated musical film shorts as well, like the vintage selections that historian Jerry Beck presents at our monthly shows at the Steve Allen Theater. We are currently in our ninth year there and foresee more of that in 2013.

The “banjolele”

The cartoon artist Thom Foolery and I have collaborated on a design for a novelty “banjolele” that we will be debuting this week. It is called the Kleinette Firefly Flapper Banjolele, and will be available to the public February 7th! With luck and a song, I am hoping to find a publisher to help me produce a Flapper Songbook, for aspiring ukulele-istes.

Most importantly, we will continue to dig up and dish out rare and wonderful early jazz and play it all over town and beyond.

Postcard design: Rick Whitmore

Janet’s upcoming shows include her regular gig at the Steve Allen Theater on Thursday, February 7. On Sunday, March 24, her classic 1930s outfits and vocals will fit right in with the glorious Deco surroundings at the historic 1928 Oviatt building when she returns to Maxwell DeMille’s Cicada Club. And you can sample her tunes at her website, here.

Art: Mookie

Art: Shin Ami

Design: Rick Whitmore

CD back cover for “Oh!”

The post Songbird Janet Klein's Hotsy-Totsy Music Designs appeared first on Print Magazine.

Established just five years ago, PM has already produced hundreds of radical-themed publications and other merchandise. They’ve done several graphic novel-ish books, the most stunning of which is Peter Kuper’s deluxe Diario de Oaxaca. And for richly illustrated perspectives of the ’60s countercultural press scene as seen by Paul Krassner, Trina Robbins, Emory Douglas, and other insiders, you can’t beat On the Ground. There’s also plenty to view and read in the first two issues of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics & Culture.

Clifford Harper

One new release that should be of particular interest to designers is the visually venturesome Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection, edited by Jay Kinney and with a foreword by Paul Buhle. It’s an anthology of all four issues of the now-legendary underground comic book Kinney started in 1978, at the height of the punk revolution. Its dozens of contributors hailed from Great Britain and Europe as well as the U.S. and Canada, with artists as diverse as Gilbert Shelton and Gary Panter. Regulars included Lost Girls‘ Melinda Gebbie, the recently deceased Spain Rodriguez, and Kinney himself. And as you’d expect, each had his or her own take on the topic, whether educational, agitational, satirical, or all three.

Kinney was part of the original underground comix movement in the late ’60s, and he cofounded, with Zippy‘s Bill Griffith, the romance-comic parody series Young Lust. Our discussion below touches on Kinney’s friendship with Rodriguez, how anyone can now access loads of free comics online, and why political labels have become meaningless.

Anarchy‘s first issue started out with a bang, from Kinney’s burning Boris Badenov-ian globe bomb on the cover to his anarchically assembled opening strip, “Too Real,” which is where our conversation begins.

Jay Kinney

How did you put together “Too Real”?

Writing and designing “Too Real” was largely an exercise in amassing a pile of clip art and old ads from ‘40s and ‘50s magazines and letting a story line emerge as I moved the images around like chess pieces or Tarot cards.

Initially—and you can see this in the splash panel—I had the notion of tracing and re-drawing clip art, but it rapidly became clear that that added a layer of unnecessary work to the whole process. So I just went with the clippings themselves for the rest of the story.

This was at a time when I’d scored old Life and Colliers magazines for 50 cents apiece at flea markets and from the back rooms of dusty used book stores. Someone had given me a stack of old clip art and that became the unifying glue, because so many of the advertising images of happy families or dads and moms looked like they were nearly the same identical, squeaky-clean people. So it was surprisingly easy to find different clips that moved the story along with very similar-looking people.

Jay Kinney

Have you ever heard from David Rees?

I do know that it influenced Tom Tomorrow at the beginning of his career, but I have no idea whether it influenced Rees. I’ve never heard a peep from him, though obviously he’s been barking up a similar—if not the same—tree.

I can’t claim that I originated this collage mash-up technique, as the Situationists had already pioneered it. Collage was also a stock punk style, thanks in part to Jamie Reid, whose name I was unaware of. If I invented anything new, it was in combining the two veins of collage, along with a lot of smart-ass humor.

Jay Kinney

Tell me about your design training and early career.

I attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn at a volatile time—’69 to ’72—with mixed results. Through happenstance and good fortune, I’d become involved with underground comix in ’68, when I was right out of high school, but my drawing teachers at Pratt definitely forced me to learn to draw. I also took illustration, design, and lettering classes, which I really benefited from. Unfortunately, the school was kind of a mess at the time—teachers wouldn’t show up on the first day of class and we’d be stuck with a substitute for the rest of the quarter. I dropped out in the middle of my junior year, as I was already making a meager living through freelance illustration and cartooning.

My real design training was from just being in New York and absorbing everything in the environment. My fellow students and I would ride the subway and for our own amusement identify the fonts used in the ads in the subway cars. Pushpin Studios was a big influence on me, but so were several professional cartoonists whom I met in New York and who shared tips about the craft of cartooning, such as Ralph Reese and Frank Mell.

Throughout the ‘70s I juggled comix work with illustration and paste-up jobs. But in the ‘80s I largely shifted into writing and editing for magazines. I was a graphics person at CoEvolution Quarterly—later Whole Earth Review—and then editor there before I founded my own magazine, Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, which I published for 15 years. As the art directors of those magazines will testify, I always had strong opinions about the publications’ look and design.

Jay Kinney and Paul Mavrides

What standards did you use when editing Anarchy, and how important was the visual factor?

Comics are a melding of the literary and the visual, so the visual element is always a big factor. One distinction of underground comix was that the editor—who was invariably a cartoonist—was in charge of delivering a fully-designed comic book to the publisher, with almost no inhibiting restrictions. This allowed great freedom in creating a comic’s design and style.

My own standards were pretty clear-cut: I only solicited artists whose work I enjoyed, who could come up with material that fit into the overall theme, and who I could count on to meet deadlines. Beyond that, I largely left them alone. There was a tradition of artistic autonomy in underground comix, so editors tended to only choose artists who they knew would turn in quality work. I was a traditionalist in that sense.

Probably the biggest chance I took on an artist was with Matt Feazell, who was relatively young and unproven. I allotted him four pages in Anarchy #3 and he came through with a wry, pointed, and well-crafted story that exceeded my expectations. Most everyone else, I had a good idea of what they’d probably do.

My concern has always been that the comic art that I create or edit communicates clearly. In my view, if you confuse the readers, you lose them and they’ll toss the book aside and move on to something else. So I tend to favor straightforward stories that read well, even if the reader is being challenged with sudden switches in art style or twists in the plotting.

Melinda Gebbie

Who do you consider Anarchy‘s most exceptional artists, graphically?

Since I consider most of Anarchy‘s artists to be friends, I’m reluctant to single one of them out as the most exceptional. I will note that I think the strips by Cliff Harper and by Melinda Gebbie were perhaps the most graphically striking, but every contribution had its own merits. Gary Panter probably pushed the envelope the most—no surprise there—but so did Peter Pontiac.

Spain Rodriguez

What was your relationship with Spain Rodriguez?

Considering that Spain was ten years my senior, he was simultaneously an older brother, a mentor, and, over time, my best friend. Still, there were periods over the last 43 years where we might only see each other twice a year, so our relationship was fluid, like many friendships.

Spain was a former biker, a visceral working-class Marxist, and an immensely talented artist. His drawing style could be called a mixture of Wally Wood and Chester Gould, but he made it utterly his own. He somehow managed to combine a penchant for drawing “hot babes” with a no-nonsense feminism that gave women their full due as autonomous, powerful beings. His instincts were always on the side of the underdog or the outcast, which I think sums up his underlying politics.

He supported the idea of Anarchy Comics from the very first time I brought it up. While he was a Marxist, he was not dogmatic about it, and we had many lively conversations about politics over the years. I think he especially appreciated the series because it allowed him to combine a certain EC war comics style with radical politics. While he would stick up for Stalin’s virtues well past the point that most of us would, it always seemed like his real heart was with the Anarchists during the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. We got along fine.

R. Diggs

Which of the strips in your book feel most relevant today?

Paul Mavrides’s and my story “Armageddon Outtahere!” could just as well have been written in 2013 as in 1987. The same could be said for Sharon Rudahl’s “The Treasure of Cabo Santiago,” which contrasts the rich and poor in a Latin American country. Matt Feazell’s “Pest Control” is pretty timeless, as is Paul’s and my “No Exit.” And I’d say the historical strips by Spain and by Épistolier and his collaborators remain solid for offering glimpses of liberatory moments in world history.

Épistolier and Trublin

Who among the new crop of comics artists do you admire?

To be perfectly honest, I’ve not kept up with most contemporary comics. When I’ve gone to the Alternative Press Expo in the recent past, the sheer amount of hopeful indie publishers and artists was overwhelming. I’d say the newest artist to catch my eye is Laura Park, but even she’s been around for a while. I do think she is fabulous. I admire Chris Ware and Dan Clowes; I think they are dazzling stylists, though their stories tend to trigger my own depressive tendencies, so I’ve not read all their work religiously. Los Bros. Hernandez are always good, but they’ve been at it 30 years already.

If you are talking newspaper funnies, my favorites are Dan Piraro’s “Bizarro,” Stephan Pastis’s “Pearls Before Swine,” Mark Tertulli’s “Lio,” and Patrick McDonnell’s “Mutts,” when it isn’t falling into sentimentality.

But my favorite “new” artists in recent years have been all the golden-age comic book artists whom I’ve been discovering, due to the scanning of public-domain comics at fan-run sites like Digital Comic Museum and Comic Book Plus. I’ve even helped out with some scans from my own collection of old comics. There were some terrific artists working for smaller publishers whose work has been previously obscure but who are beginning to find a new audience, such as Dick Briefer, Lily Renee, Mo Gollub, John Celardo, Harold Delay, Maurice Whitman, Rudy Palais, Fran Hopper, and the list just goes on and on. Great stuff.

Jay Kinney and Paul Mavrides

When you started publishing Anarchy in 1978 you had left libertarian leanings. What are your politics these days?

I’ve spent much of the last 25 years questioning whether the old designations of “left” and “right” are even useful anymore. Certainly at a time when we have pundits and Tea Party types calling Obama a “socialist,” it seems like such labels have become meaningless. Surely the label “conservative” that so many people apply to themselves has become a misnomer. They aren’t conservatives, they’re radical reactionaries.

I suppose I’d still call myself a left libertarian or libertarian leftist, in the sense that I prefer democracy over autocracy, cooperation over competition, people over corporations, and so on. But I long ago gave up on the notion that a revolution—of whatever variety—was the answer. Attempts to make over a society from top to bottom usually end up backfiring, at least when they’re done in the service of an ideology, whether its Marxist, Islamist, Zionist, or whatever. Even back when we were originally doing Anarchy Comics, much of my satire was aimed at the competing claims of different leftist sects and belief systems.

Of course, these days it’s hard to even point to a coherent left or right in American politics. We’re just living in a sci-fi future where everyone generates their own reality bubble to the point where we might as well be living in parallel universes. One could say that both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement represent two very different kinds of popularized anarchism, so it’s perhaps rather timely to have all the issues of Anarchy back in print again in the anthology.

Peter Pontiac (and Guy Colwell)

Clifford Harper

Gary Panter

Paul Mavrides

Spain Rodriguez

Melinda Gebbie

Jay Kinney, concept sketch

The post Complete Anarchy, Illustrated appeared first on Print Magazine.

To foster these self-directed projects, the Institute decided to commission posters that basically act as giant visual lesson plans. The idea is that teachers could hang up the posters, give a brief introduction, and then set the students loose to figure out the rest for themselves. For the posters, the Institute turned to the designer and illustrator Timothy Goodman; he and Lappin had previously worked together when Lappin was the creative director of Metropolis magazine. (Full disclosure: Lappin and I worked together at Metropolis, and Goodman is a regular Imprint contributor.) Goodman ultimately designed two Off the Wall posters. One instructs students to build their own water-filtration device from recycled materials, while the other asks them to explore their immediate surroundings and document what they find.

Above and below: Timothy Goodman’s two posters for the Off the Wall Learning series. (Click the images to view larger versions.)

Earlier this month, the water-filter poster was tested by a group of educators—all of them members of the Hive NYC Learning Network—at a workshop in New York. They had “very positive feedback,” according to Lappin, and both posters are now available for teachers to download and use in the classroom. But the project does not end there. The Institute has also designed a “process template” (PDF) for educators looking to create their own custom Off the Wall posters—in theory, they just need to fill out the form and hand it off to a designer.

Of course, packing a teenager-friendly lesson plan into one elegant, easy-to-understand poster is no easy feat. In the interview below, Goodman explains the thinking behind his two Off the Wall posters:

Can you tell me a bit about the brief you received from the Institute of Play?

The Institute of Play is a fantastic not-for-profit reshaping the way we learn and engage. Naturally, I was stoked to work on a lesson plan for them. After working on a Metropolis magazine cover for Criswell in the past, he and I have built a great working relationship that balances respect and deadpan sarcasm. So when we sat down to ideate together, there was no shortage of great ideas and insults. Early on, we decided that it was important that the posters feel DIY. The only direction was that I had to use all the copy you see, no matter what ideas I came up with.

You had to fit a lot of information into a relatively small space. Was it difficult to accommodate so many instructions into a poster? 

Yes, and admittedly I was being a bit of a pain in the ass, pushing back on Criswell to cut more copy. “Designer vs. Copywriter” is a fight I’m all too familiar with from my time in branding and at Apple. Compromise is important, but it’s our job as designers to offer viable solutions for editing and compartmentalizing dense information.

The posters act as a sort of mini lesson plan. Because of this, did you have to think about designing them differently than you would a “normal” poster? 

The posters had to be playful, informative, and engaging. However—since it is, in fact, a lesson plan—navigation was definitely paramount, and I certainly had to take into account the abundance of copy. Most posters don’t have to operate this way, so I really enjoyed the challenge.

For the water-filter poster: Did you try building one of the DIY water filters? And for the “Explore Your World” poster, did you walk around taking the photos seen in each frame?

Definitely. A designer must know a thing through and through. There are no shortcuts. I did indeed build the water filter and shoot it; and I did spend a day walking around New York City shooting all the images you see, with my very talented photographer friend Aaron Taylor.

Above: The “process template” is intended to help educators commission their own Off the Wall posters. Click the image to see a larger version, or view the PDF.

Below: Photos from a recent workshop where educators tested the posters, with help from a few student interns

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Holly DeWolf’s Breaking into Freelance Illustration: The Guide for Artists, Designers and Illustrators is now on sale at MyDesignShop.com.

The post Posters as Lesson Plans: Timothy Goodman Teams Up with the Institute of Play appeared first on Print Magazine.

Minnie Moo, photographed by Tom Burton, via The Orlando Sentinel

Modern Dog Design has been around since 1987, and counts among its clients Swatch, Coca-Cola, The New York Times, and Warner Bros. Records, as well as two other large companies that Robynne Raye and Michael Strassburger, Modern Dog’s cofounders, now find themselves preparing to face down in federal court. The dispute is over sketches of dogs that the Modern Dog team decided to use as the endpapers for a 20-year retrospective of its poster designs, published by Chronicle Books in 2008.

Modern Dog endpapers

The suit alleges that Disney and Target, in concert with certain of the two companies’ subsidiaries and vendors, used 26 of the dog illustrations from the endpapers, without permission, on apparel sold and distributed as part of a marketing campaign for the movie Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure. Seattle Copyright Watch has a thorough rundown of the initial complaint filed on October 31, 2011.

Last Monday, December 10, I e-mailed with Raye and we spoke on the phone. She told me that, thanks to Friends of Modern Dog, the studio has been able to raise over $40,000 to go toward its growing legal fees (donations are still being accepted). But this money will in no way cover all of its expenses, even though Modern Dog went so far as to sell a house in the name of waging this battle. Of course, the great irony of this story is that not so long ago, Disney worked to change the law in the name of protecting its own copyrights.

This is a pending case, so nothing is certain—and, as we spoke, Raye grew frustrated over the many details of the case that she is not allowed to divulge. But her conviction is undeniable, though at this point she has little choice since cutting out now would leave her and Strassburger bankrupt. Plenty of people accuse Modern Dog of being out of line, or just plain stupid to go after these companies. Raye concedes, “The burden of proof is on us.”

As future motions attempt to bury much of the public record, it is well worth the creative community’s time to keep track of what goes down over the coming months.

Is this the first time that you or any of the Modern Dog designers felt that one of your designs was misappropriated or ripped off by an outside party?

This is not the first time we’ve seen our work show up in an unexpected place, but it is the first time we’ve seen it done to this degree (i.e., distribution, promoting a movie, et cetera). We found out about it when another designer working at local studio called to ask if we had sold our illustrations. We hadn’t. And so we began a journey that we still find ourselves in today—a full 15 months later.

What is the grounding motivation behind pursuing this battle? In this era of Etsy and the general designer boom, there seem to be more and more claims floating around of larger companies ripping off the work of individuals. Did your situation inspire you to take a stand for everyone who has been in the same position?

We know a lot of artists and designers can relate to our situation. Initially we wanted to set the record straight, as we naively thought our case would be settled in a few weeks. But copyright enforcement doesn’t work like that; in fact, it is very difficult for an individual or small company to litigate, due to the costs and time associated with a lawsuit. Unfortunately, what happens is that most creators just let it go, and I can understand why. In the end, it seems that the only entities that benefit by copyright are the large corporations that can afford to litigate.

If we have become the poster child for copyright enforcement for the little guy, that was not our intention. We just want the same rights granted to anyone else holding a copyright. We realize that speaking up about how to protect yourself could help encourage and pave the way for others to do the same.

Now that you’ve raised funds for the lawsuit through selling your studio, and through the Friends of Modern Dog campaign, what are the next steps? You continue to accept donations, correct?

Selling the studio has enabled us to reduce our overhead and establish a safety net for our lawsuit. Though the FOMD fundraiser exceeded our expectations in terms of funds raised, it is still short of what we expect we will need if this case goes to trial, which right now is set for September 2013. Mike Strassburger and I did not want to keep asking people for donations, so we set a deadline. The site is still live and will accept donations until about March or so.

Obviously, the lawsuit is all consuming. Has the situation brought in new clients, scared off clients?

This was one of our biggest concerns early on, as an IP attorney immediately started blogging about our case. We were concerned that if someone didn’t know us and Googled first, which is what most potential clients do now, they might be scared off. There’s no way to measure the negative effect of the lawsuit, but we do have new clients. We don’t talk about it with them initially, but as they get to know us they start asking questions. All of them have been extremely supportive and no doors have closed that we know of.

Have you been able to work as a designer of late?

Half my time is spent teaching, which has been a great distraction from the lawsuit. The other hours in the day are divided between dealing with the construction of our new space, running a business (designing, writing, et cetera), and the building of our copyright case. So, yes, I am still designing. Luckily, I am healthy, relatively young, and have no children, so I have the time and energy to devote to everything going on in my life. I work directly with our attorney on a weekly basis, which means I work late into the evening. For the short term, I am okay with this lifestyle, but I do look forward to putting this behind me.

Have you established new in-house procedures at Modern Dog to protect yourself from, or try to prevent, this sort of infringement?

There is no way to prevent infringement. It’s going to keep happening. I think the way copyright is enforced can be changed, though, and it’s long overdue. We need to make sure that individual artists and small companies can protect themselves when they find themselves in a similar situation. That means moving some copyright cases into state courts and even small-claim courts, where it’s faster and less costly to litigate. As an industry that makes a living from selling creative work, we need to demand these changes happen sooner than later.

The post Modern Dog, Copyright, and the Burden of Proof appeared first on Print Magazine.

Much has already been written about “Graphic Design: Now in Production.” Here at Imprint, Steven Heller noted its debut last year at the Walker Art Center. Tom Vanderbilt reviewed the Cooper-Hewett National Design Museum’s installation in Print‘s August issue, calling it “a big, sweeping, categorical, world-historical-moment-defining graphic design show.” You can read the text in full here. And for further information, I highly recommend the exhibition catalogue‘s richly stimulating essays.

The show, which does include some local designers, is on view at the Hammer until January 6. Event speakers have included Chip Kidd and Michael Bierut from New York, and the Cooper-Hewett’s senior curator of contemporary design, Ellen Lupton, who co-curated “GD:NiP” with Andrew Blauvelt. And then there was the aforementioned presentation by the three Angelenos.

Design by Willem Henri Lucas

In addition to showing her own projects as an independent designer, Swanlund generously shared her influences, including Emigre, the Art Strike zine Yawn, and Ed Fella, who inspired her “to do something that maybe doesn’t work as it should.” (Both Emigre, from the Bay Area, and Fella, from CalArts, are represented in “GD:NiP.”) Lucas explained how he prefers to support himself through teaching rather than commissions, and presented his work for UCLA, where he is the Design Media Arts department chair. Roettinger demonstrated his recent sound experiments and, in response to an audience question, discussed the benefits of inexperience: “When I didn’t know so much I was fearless.”

Each showed material they’d created that was dependent on its physicality, then invited the audience to join in the hands-on experience. This was meant to contrast what Roettinger described as the “preciousness” of publications that resembled sculptures when placed in the Hammer’s vitrines.

I asked Swanlund and Lucas to share their thoughts on how they might have approached “GD:NiP.” Here are their responses, along with samples of their work. Consider this an online version of the panel’s version of the Hammer’s version of contemporary graphic design.

“Three of a Kind” lecture photos by Michael Dooley

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Gail Swanlund

There haven’t yet been many large graphic design exhibitions, so this one has had to stand up under the impossible weight of extraordinary expectations. Also, I think curating is phenomenally difficult and my hat is off to Andrew and Ellen for a fantastic exhibition and an important catalogue. Their impressive curatorial reach is evident in the show, and the exhibition fulfills their vision. But further expansion into other cultural areas would be edifying.

Even with increased and easy access to work via the web, any selection is always going to be limited and quickly dated. We ask our friends to ask for leads and hope that those may take us to more and unusual prompts. Where do you draw the line? And how can you show really new work—and alternative practices—when we all look at the same stuff online?

There’s probably no way around the limitations of what we personally know and like and give preferential treatment to. Actively cultivating a community and network of designers that begins to reach into other realms and places is something that can only happen over time, and deadlines loom.

With many students from other countries enrolled in U.S. schools, and alums working around the globe, these designers may be one key to: one,  discovering work that hasn’t been seen in US; and two, being able to discover practices that don’t follow the familiar or typical model.

I want to emphasize that I am no way critical of the curation of the “GD:NiP” exhibition, which is fabulous. I’m just adding a selfish wish to see more! I was very excited to see work from the Iran’s Dabireh Collective included in the exhibition. I’m a fan of Homa Delvaray‘s work.

Swanlund discussing Emigre and Yawn. Photo by Michael Dooley

Cover of Emigre 28, edited and designed by Gail Swanlund

Spread from Emigre 32. Click to enlarge.

Emigre‘s “Culprits” issue issue definitely created a huge impression for me and my future practice. I had never seen anything so strange and marvelous. Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko brought me to Emigre, where I wrote and designed the Broadcast issue, featuring four women designers. Working with Rudy and Zuzana was an amazing opportunity.

The collaborative experience of working at Emigre—which so strongly reflects Rudy and Zuzana’s politics, convictions, and intellectual inquiry—had a profound effect on my practice. My practice began with self-publishing, and to that, Emigre‘s exuberant risk-taking/creative experimentation and generous collaboration are qualities that I very much admired and work hard to integrate and keep expanding in my own creative and teaching practices.

In terms of the essays in the catalogue and the show, I found the conversation about graphic design “invisibility” and/or authorship fascinating. It seems like “GD:NiP” really demonstrated that it isn’t an either/or choice. Instead, the show enthusiastically embraces a wide range of every kind of design activity, from thought to reproduction to the practice being the practice; in other words, the activity and thinking and making are all that matters, and client, audience, specific form or result, and geographic location/presence are secondary, or even arbitrary, components of the design process.

And, in terms of “the practice being the practice,” the activity of making and putting Emigre out into the world sits happily in that historical continuum (and is an activity specifically about design)—alongside Yawn (not about design, but instead, actively shifting authorship and community activism), a self-published fanzine, by/for/with the community, no hierarchies, lots of dialogue, divergent voices and making, always surprising.

Lucas’s design, “one of the infographics I did for UCLA public policy. This one got the most attention. It’s a simple bar graph, but by turning it upside down and choosing the color red it looks like the pages of the book are bleeding.” Click to enlarge.

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Willem Henri Lucas

First of all, I am glad that the exhibition is there. It’s difficult to put on graphic design shows.

However, the minute you literally put distance between the viewer and the work, you strip design from its most important task. After all, books and magazines need to be flipped through, things need to be touched, since design needs to aim for all the sensorial aspects. I don’t want to just focus on the “object,” but would like to have people explore and experience.

Exhibit photo by Joan Dooley

From a conservatorial standpoint, I do understand these works need to be protected from damage. But what if staff with white gloves would flip through books for you and the showroom becomes a temporary library? Or what if the audience needs to wear gloves before flipping through material? Of course, we also live in an age where we have to consider things being stolen, and that in itself is sad.

As for posters being framed like art, the great thing about graphic design is that it is made in production. There are many copies. I don’t think there is need for contemporary posters to be treated as one-offs like art.

Lucas’s “Activist Poster” exhibition. Click images to enlarge.

When I had a show on a huge number of art-and-activism posters, I thought for a long while about how to hang them, and ended up making wooden slats that were attached to the top and bottom with big screws and bolts. This fitted the content of the posters and stayed closer to their actual function. Surely, this is not the only solution and there are many more ways.

In short, while curating a design show, I would emphasize audience usage and participation, and underline its dynamic role.

One other thing I would try—and I use the word try deliberately—is to inform the audience on why things look a certain way in relation to the information content. I have no clue as of yet how to do that in a smart and engaging way. But there could be so much “meaning-giving” in the designers’ choices of the final form. One would have to go into semiotics, and the reverential as described by Charles Saunders Peirce.

Above: Lucas’s posters celebrating the centennial of Alan Turing’s birth

Turing was a scientist who was hugely important for the development of the computer. He was arrested for being gay in Great Britain. I was asked to do this poster because of my social-activism work and probably because I am gay.

Researching him, I came across the information of his suicide. Turing re-enacted the scene in Snow White by poisoning an apple an eating it. Steve Jobs got asked many times if the Apple logo somehow was an ode to Turing and his smart answer was: It is not but I wish it was.

I found very few images of Turing. There is this whole series of passport photos he had taken. I made a customized noise filter and used that on the images and combined the images to create some motion.

It relates to the computer screen, but the noise filter also shows disturbance.

Above: Lucas’s John Cage posters, “using stills from his great performance of ‘Water Walk’” on I’ve Got a Secret in 1960

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Above: installation photos by Todd Cheney/courtesy the Hammer Museum

Above: Hammer exhibition opening-night photos by Joan Dooley

Below: selected works from the exhibition

Forsman & Bodenfors, with Evelina Bratell (stylist) and Carl Kleiner (photographer). Homemade is Best, 2010. Courtesy and © Forsman & Bodenfors.

Justin Manor, John Rothenberg, and Eric Gunther. “Set Top Box,” 2010. Courtesy and © SoSoLimited.

David Bennewith. “Churchward International Typefaces,” 2009. Photo by Franz Vos, Jan Van Eyck Academie. Courtesy and © David Bennewith.

Laurenz Brunner. Akkurat, 2005. Courtesy and © Lineto.

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