Loose Leaf: Manual

Curator: Eric Heiman
date: May 21, 2013
Categories: Design for Entertaining, Editorial Design, Environmental Graphic Design
Tags: Loose Leaf, Manual, publication

I’m instantly jealous of any designer who manages to launch a publication. Where does he or she find the time? The jealousy is only compounded when that designer manages to get more than one issue out the door. What distinguishes San Francisco-based Manual’s Loose Leaf project (now on its second issue) is that it’s actually a revolving art exhibition you hang on your wall. 

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Paper Forms: Li Hongbo

Curator: Caleb Bennett
date: May 17, 2013
Categories: Environmental Graphic Design, Experience Design
Tags:
This post is reserved for one of those things that simply blew my mind upon seeing it. Li Hongbo has created various human forms from thousands of pieces of paper for his exhibition “Pure White Paper,” which was held last December at Dominik Mersch Gallery in Australia. As the video indicates, each piece is glued together manually—one by one—to create the entire form. Untouched, they feel quiet and familar. However, as Hongbo demonstrates the flexibility in their craft, they come alive in a completely unexpected and bizarre way.
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Reinventing Healthcare: Novant Health

Curator: Rachel Martin
date: May 10, 2013
Categories: Brand & Identity Systems Design, Corporate Communications Design, Environmental Graphic Design, Experience Design, Information Design
Tags: collaboration, Communication Design, community, culture, Design, Design Thinking, Environmental Design, experience design, graphic design, health branding, healthcare, hospital design, marketing, Service Design, social design, social responsibility, systems thinking, The Living Principles
Novant Health is a network of physician clinics, outpatient centers and hospitals that serves the states of North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia. They have a vision to reinvent healthcare and transform the patient experience. Novant Health worked with New York–based firm Prophet to help develop a new strategy and brand that reflect their series of transformations in the healthcare field.
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Cash for Your Warhol: Hargo

Curator: Josh Silverman
date: April 24, 2013
Categories: Environmental Graphic Design, Promotional Design & Advertising
Tags: signage, silkscreen, street, vernacular

I love the visual vernacular of street signage. From graffiti and propaganda to murals and installations, it’s these corners of communication that catch my eye with their authenticity. Whether one-off and site specific or characterized by an “Obey Giant”–like ubiquity, they are the detritus of design. I also collect tattered scraps of paper—incomplete homework assignments, shopping lists left behind in shopping baskets, urgent napkin poems. My heart goes out to these authentic artifacts, produced without a marketing department, created by the creator with a singular purpose. And I always try to envision the context in which each of these were created, the people who made them and their lives. 

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Bewogen Beweging poster: Dieter Roth

Curator: Julia Zeltser
date: April 17, 2013
Categories: Environmental Graphic Design, Promotional Design & Advertising
Tags: Dieter Roth, MoMA, Poster

I recently visited MoMA with my husband and kids. Pushing a stroller, I rushed through most of the exhibition “Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth.” (A Swiss artist, known to me for his unusual geometric books). Untouched by his cold graphic work, I paused in front of a high contrast poster for Bewogen Beweging (“Moving movement”), a traveling exhibition of kinetic art in 1961. Roth participated in and designed the poster for the exhibition. 


The poster has a black background with silkscreened white and die cut circles. The bottom of the composition is set in sans-serif typeface, similar to Interstate. Since the artwork was hanging sandwiched between two glass panels on the white museum wall, the die-cut holes revealed the white wall beneath, and together the printed and cut shapes visually overlapped. Imagine copies of this black-and-white poster pasted on walls previously containing advertising, or paint, or brick. These circular “windows” revealed glimpses of life underneath. The poster intended to be viewed differently depending on its environment. The museum’s white walls didn’t do justice to the artist’s original intention!

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