Anyone who knows me is double-
checking the author slug on this piece (a
typo perhaps?), because Stephen Doyle
is definitely not a car guy. It’s true, but get
this: The book is interspersed with vel-
lum sheets, printed in red and black with
things like heavily bordered title pages to
fourteenth-century title pages of treatises
on geometry, in blackletter Latin, which
hits both my graphic design G-spot as
well as the Jesuit-education one. Another
vellum sheet overlays a drawing of a
horseshoe crab on an Arabian diagram
Did I tell you about page 13? A black-
and-white page of text, headlined with
an awful (okay, retro and fun) font, but
wait—someone has pressed a pansy blos-
som in this old magazine. And you reach
for it, to lift it. Bingo! It’s printed!
I think that graphic design itself is a language—a
language everybody speaks fluently but doesn’t know
they speak it at all. We all know what red means,
what a circle means, what a ratty line or a smooth
curve means, and we know what a happy face means.
Through all of its scattered lives and constant
“rebranding,” its basic underlying meaning remains
intact. So, who was the author? We’ll never know,
like we’ll never really know who did the Coke bottle
or the Oreo cookie. It’s lost to a time when we didn’t
value authorship in graphic design; indeed, did
not value graphic design.
So who actually did the first one? Some high school
cheerleader? The Dadaists? The Roman Empire? The
earliest advertising use of the happy face that I’ve
found is the logo for a small (but popular) store in
Beulah, Michigan (cherry capital of the world), called
The Cherry Hut. Founded in 1922, it uses not the clas-
sic yellow Mr. Smiley of 1960. However, I doubt the
happy face was invented by The Cherry Hut.
As much as it is a beacon, especially for designers such as myself who came
of age in the twenty-first century, it is also, in its own way, a barrier. The
CBS eye was created just when modernism was entering the mainstream
of corporate design culture. Like my partner Tom Geismar’s logo design
for Chase Bank a few years later, the CBS eye was one of the very first. But
there are, by definition, a finite number of simple forms. In the decades
since 1951, modernism swept graphic design, resulting in countless mod-
ernist-inspired marks and a crowded visual field. Simplicity has always
been hard enough to achieve, but today originality is perhaps even harder.
Sagi Haviv is a partner and designer
at Chermayeff & Geismar. Among
his projects for the firm are the logo
designs and identity systems for the
Library of Congress, National Parks
of New York Harbor, Radio Free
Europe, the John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Foundation, and the
fashion brand Armani Exchange. Haviv
designed the award-winning animation
Logomotion, a ten-minute tribute to
the firm’s famous trademarks. Haviv’s
other motion graphics work includes
the opening sequence for the celebrated
PBS documentary series Carrier.
Geoff McFetridge is a graphic design-
er, visual artist, and design entrepre-
neur based in Los Angeles. He was born
in Calgary, Canada, and received his
BFA from the local Alberta College of
Design. He continued his education at
California Institute of the Arts in Los
Angeles, receiving his MFA in 1995. In
1996, McFetridge established Champion
Graphics in Atwater, California.
Looking back, I see a seamless evolution from being a kid and absorbing
the things around me to being a grownup and reflecting all these influ-
ences and images back to the world in my own work.
REE ee a aE EE ee a ae ae SEE
Masterpieces of Political Art: The Middle Ages and the Third Reich
In the middle ages, prisoners were broken on wheels. Now, the
Nazi victim is broken on the swastika.
(Vienna Secession Building): Christine Bastin et Jacques Evrard
Plotting to abduct Lughman the Sage
As a child of eight, I was a devoted patron of
Lilliput from its launching. The monthly ritual of un-
veiling the array of doubles is a keenly remembered
delight to this very day; and I was surely not the only
Lorant left the United Kingdom in 1940, dismayec
at being treated as a hostile alien, and settled in the
United States for the rest of his long life (he died ir
1997). Though he wrote many fine books—twenty ir
all—and enjoyed a vigorous working life to the end
it is as the founder and editor of Lilliput and Picture
Post that he deserves to be best remembered.
Ken Garland was art editor of Design magazine from 1956 to 1962,
when he left to establish his own graphic design studio as Ken Gar-
land and Associates. Among his many clients were Galt Toys, Race
Furniture, Barbour Index, the Butterley Group, William Heinemann,
Paramount Pictures, Harper & Row, Otto Maier Verlag, the Science
Museum, Cambridge University Press, the Ministry of Technology,
Jonathan Cape, the Arts Council, the Royal Parks Agency, and the
Barbican Gallery. He has contributed many articles to design period-
icals in the United Kingdom, United States, Europe, and Japan. His
own publications include First Things First: A Manifesto (self-pub-
lished, London, 1964), Graphics Handbook (Studio Vista, London/
Reinhold Publishing, New York, 1966), and more. He was a visiting
lecturer at the University of Reading (1971-1999), the Royal College
of Art (1977-1987), Central School of Art and Design (1986-1991),
and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (1982-1992). He
has lectured widely in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada,
Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Germany, and Bangladesh.
The original design which is gouache on paper, (23.5 x
25.8 cm) was printed on the cover of the Association of
Jewish Commercial Artists in Palestine catalog issued in
1938. This publication was a landmark in the history of
Israeli graphic design.
Another reason for choosing this image is anec-
dotal: The photograph of the kids—one dressed like
a “billboard,” and the other one as a poster hanger—
was taken over fifty years ago. The kid inside the bill-
board is me. The headline on the upper poster says
“Learn a Trade!,” which I did.
David Tartakover has operated his own studio in Tel Aviv since
1975, specializing in culture and politics. He is known for his self-
produced posters dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His
work has won numerous prizes in Israel and abroad. Among them
are Gold Medal, 8th Lathi Poster Biennial, Finland (1989) and Grand
Prix, Moscow International Poster Biennial (2004). He collects and
researches history of Israeli design and is also the curator of design
exhibitions in Israel and abroad. Among the books he has published
is a lexicon of the 1950s in Israel, Where We Were, And What We Did.
For his contribution to Israeli design and culture, he was awarded
the Israel Prize (2002).
This picture is in the American Academy in Rome’s Library, no.
10376F (published in Edward M. Catich, The Origin of the Serif:
Brush Writing and Roman Letters, The Catfish Press, 1968).
American Academy in Rome’s Library, no. 2525
The Pompeii inscription as it is now.
