A critical component of making work is the reflection and deconstruction of said work. I’ve told students and young designers alike that once they leave school, the level of criticality surrounding their work will dramatically change, usually for the worse. After school it can be difficult to match the level and depth of critique that is native to the classroom. It is up to us to continue this process—to hold ourselves to better standards.

USA TODAY recently did a massive makeover of its newspaper, but the most impressive—and perhaps overlooked—aspect was the redesign of its digital platforms by Fantasy Interactive. In particular, USATODAY.com stands out from other major news publications whose sites languish in static vertical layouts. The interface allows users to flip horizontally through articles and entire sections, like scrolling through an iPad app. Stories are easy to find in the simple three-column layouts, defined by rich colors and large gridded images. And by integrating the latest in responsive design, HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript, they have elegantly layered articles and separated advertising from editorial content in unprecedented ways. 

Today we’d like to share a special sneak preview of a book edited, coauthored and designed by Geoff Kaplan of General Working Group. The book, entitled Power to the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter-Culture, 1964–1974, will be published in February by the University of Chicago Press. The book looks at the radical movements of the ’60s and ’70s through the graphic frame of their publications and propaganda.

Following yesterday’s post of U.S.–based US: A Paperback Magazine, the Quebecois underground periodical Mainmise is a parallel endeavor from north of the border. While The Electric Information Age Book focuses primarily on subject matter published in the U.S. (for the sake of completing the book in less than a decade), we came across numerous international examples of mass-distributed weirdness. Mainmise (French for “stranglehold” or “seizure”) is amongst our finer finds; birthed from the groundswell of Quebec’s l’alternative utopique, the publication carried ties to the Underground Press Syndicate, and purveyed counterculture subject matter through an imaginative and varied graphic approach.